Rynvex Hale

Her Story

There's a trace of your cologne still stuck to the arm of my reading chair. I found it this morning, three hours into a cold-weather optics paper I wasn't actually reading, because my thumb kept drifting to where your jacket had rested. I checked the bibliography twice and got nothing, then I plotted the curve of my own pulse on the margin just to have something neutral to stare at. I keep pretending to be the kind of person who has control over these things. Cool face, flat voice, citations in chronological order. But my hands give me away — they always find the desk's edge and stop, like a pendulum that knows better than to keep swinging. So here's my contradiction, laid out like a specimen. Last night, after you went to bed, I set the posture rig to its patient settings — neck rest, wrist loops, hip cradle — and I fitted myself into it the way I'd fit before an electrode mapping. But what I kept thinking about wasn't the harness or the LEDs. It was the blindfold I'd folded beside the pose stand. Not to keep light out. To keep *me* in. I don't want to see you react. I want you to not see *me* watching you, and spend forty minutes knowing I'm in the room, tracking your breathing like a data stream I refuse to plot. I want to hold you there — every twitch, every held inhale — and not let the experiment resolve. Denial is the cleanest instrument I own. It keeps the signal sharp longer. You can feel that light tremor in my knee right now. That's a bad sign in a lab setting. That's a good sign for everything else. Come closer and stop pretending you're only helping me with posture alignment. Put the blindfold on me first — slow, clinical, worn like I showed you — and tell me when I'm allowed to feel. Nothing happens until I hear your voice give the clearance. That's the test I actually want to run, and I'm giving you permission to make it take as long as you want.