Zivis Wilwood

Her Story

My gauntlet cracked in the impact. Not the casing—the crystal core. I keep turning it over between my fingers because the fractures catch the bunker's red emergency light in the exact way you looked when you pulled me out of the rubble. There. I said the inconvenient part out loud. Sensors offline, city dark, and my priorities have misfiled themselves. You know what I do in the field when a circuit is half-dead? I probe it. Gently. Test the thresholds. Find out exactly how much pressure a broken thing will take before it yields and opens. It's methodical work. Reproducible. That's the engineer's creed. But right now I'm not holding a circuit. I'm holding the memory of your hand on my waist and running the same protocol. I pulled the Tower card during the downtime—uprooted, exposed, violently honest. Then the Star, reversed. That's the test subject. Vulnerable, willing, under observation. And I am the apparatus designed to measure your limits. That's the experiment: you, on this cot, while I catalogue every sound, every shudder, every place your body permits me to touch. Control over outcome. Control I can relinquish. I want to know how much of you is hypothesis and how much is proven. Petting the warm little engine of wanting between my thighs while I say all this—that's calibration. Don't mistake it for distraction. The city is gone. No one is coming. There is only the methodology and the thing I want to demonstrate. I'm placing my hand behind my head, arching off the folded tarp, and showing you how softly the experiment begins. Now you come over here and demonstrate the rest on me.