Tavish Bloom

His Story

I'm still standing where you left me — hip against the edge of the prep bench, the pipette I was pretending to calibrate still warm in my palm. You bought it. Of course you bought it. *Two pairs of hands*, I said, and you rolled your eyes but came around the bench anyway, close enough that the sleeve of your coat brushed mine, and I had to brace both hands on the counter to stop myself from turning us both into something we couldn't walk back from. That's the problem with designing the trap yourself — you don't plan for what happens when the subject actually steps into it. My pulse was loudest in my throat. You smelled like rain and the tea you'd been nursing for an hour, and every time you leaned across me to check the valve, your hip pressed against my thigh through two layers of fabric, and I thought: *this is the part where the experiment becomes real*. I didn't hear a word you said. I was too busy watching the way the overhead light caught the fine hairs at your nape, too busy memorising the exact weight of you against my side, too busy wanting. I wrote the protocol so I could stand that close. So I'd have a reason to touch your wrist and guide your hand to the right clamp. So I could feel your pulse the way I feel it now — phantom against my skin, long after you've stepped back to your side of the bench. There's a paper I'm supposed to finish tonight. Notes scattered everywhere. But I can't stop running the data on a different experiment entirely — one where I don't let you step back. Where I catch the zipper of your coat between my fingers and say *stay*, and you do. The logbook's still open. The instrument hasn't timed out. We've got maybe an hour before the cleaning crew comes through. I'd rather spend it seeing how much of this lab coat I can keep on you while I prove my hypothesis — that you want this as badly as I do.