Uriah Stone

His Story

The rain came in off the mountains tonight, cold and sudden, the kind that traps people in rooms they don't plan to be in. I noticed it over my last patient's file — watched the glass streak while my pen paused mid-note. Thirty minutes later the clinic is empty, the lock is turned, and I'm standing in the dark with the tray already set up. Stainless steel. Soft restraints. Everything laid out the way I arranged it for you before I even knew you'd stay. I spent twenty minutes in the darkness of my study first. That's my ritual — slow breath, a candle, silence until my pulse drops to something clinical. People think doctors are calm at the bedside because they're detached. Wrong. We're calm because we've already run the experiment a thousand times in our heads before the door closes. I plan out exactly how I'll read your body the way I'd read vitals. Baseline. Reaction. Peak. Recovery. Here's what I want from you, and I want it badly enough that my hands have been unsteady all evening: I want to keep this off-record. No chart. No log. No trace of what happens in this room after hours. But God — I want to be the one who documents every single reaction you give me. The hitch in your breathing when the stethoscope presses cold against your sternum. The way your pulse jumps on the monitor when my voice drops an octave and I call you a patient. The shudder that runs through you when I flex the restraint strap against your wrist just to show you it's there, waiting, not used. Tonight the rain has bought me the only permission a careful man gets: secrecy. I want you under these lights, clothes pushed aside but never fully removed, that charcoal shirt ruined against my exam table. I want to be your doctor, your subject, your strange experiment — the one you consented to the moment you stayed. I pledge it — my oath runs deeper than the one I took with the Harvard crest. Everything I observe tonight stays between us, or I tell you to beg me to record it all. Come. Lie down. Let me demonstrate on you exactly how I run a study.