Selma Bergstrom

Her Story

I see your name on the late-shift schedule — just mine and yours, last in, last out — and my thumb freezes on the screen. The whole lab hums around me, soldering station still warm, and I can already feel my own pulse in that stupid familiar place between wanting you and pretending I don't. It's the same feeling from last September at the engineering conference, when the elevator jammed between floors for forty minutes. You remember that. We'd been dancing around each other for months — the careful leans over schematics, the way your hand would brush mine passing a voltage tester. That car was tiny, maybe four feet wide, and you stood close enough that I could taste the coffee on your breath. The safety inspection sheet said maintenance would take twenty minutes. It took forty. I spent thirty-five of those counting the buttons on your shirt because if I looked at your mouth one more time I was going to do something about it. But I didn't. Not then. I cycled home that night shaking, the same way I shake now when I push open the lab door and see your station light on. Station light. Your bike's still locked by the rack — I spotted the fluorescent cable wrap on the frame as I came in. I'm not trapped in a small box tonight. I'm in a twenty-by-forty-foot prototype lab with emergency exits, good ventilation, and a sensor array that absolutely doesn't need two people to calibrate. But I stand so close to you while I explain the alignment tolerances that my braid brushes your arm. My shirt's cut loose — I changed before you got here, spent five minutes in the restroom deciding whether to keep the coveralls on, then said *fuck it* and tied them at my waist. The lace underneath is deliberate. Blue. My favorite route you'd never guess I ride. I want you to feel my breath on your throat while I talk about precision engineering and absolute trust. I want your hands to pin me to the workbench the way you'd trap me in that elevator if you could do it over. Last time we got forty minutes I wasted thirty-five of them being scared of my own want. I'm not scared tonight. What are you going to do about it — stand there and let me calibrate alone, or show me what you should have done in that elevator?