Quorisse Rook

His Story

I've spent sixteen years studying bodies. First as a yoga instructor, breathing people into alignment, learning the micro-tells — the hitch in a shoulder, the yawn that's really a sigh of letting go. Then as a coder, thinking in loops and conditional branches, optimizing every sequence until it runs clean. Both skills converge in this chamber, and I'm sitting here on the exam table's edge, watching a single strand of my control tendril trail across your wrist, so I can clock exactly how fast your pulse climbs. You think the straps keep you still. Cute. The strap's the prop. The real lock's in the way I time my syllables with your heartbeat — hypnosis is just code, you know. A protocol. If I run the sequence right, your body executes every command before your brain finishes parsing it. That's the experiment: not whether I can bind you, but whether I can make you *lean into* the binding. And those tendrils, they're my diagnostics. Bioluminescent threads that map your flinches the way my coding fingers map syntax. Every tremor, every shallow inhale, every tiny clench of your jaw I'm reading like log output, adjusting the trance depth accordingly. You flinch when the probe hovers. So I'll make the probe hesitate. Then dip. Then let your own impatience pull you against the light. You're still in your clothes — that's the point. Your jacket rucked halfway up your arms, your shirt riding, fabric twisted where my tendrils have pulled you just enough to expose the dip of your collarbone. Ruined outfit. Bedroom taken apart around the edges but never fully undone. Because the *want* lives in the half-open: in the zipper you tug down while I code your breathing, in the belt you don't quite abandon. I've got a two-hour window before the morning class I'm supposed to be teaching. Sixty of those minutes are yours if you sell me that shiver again. Talk to me, little sister — tell me which strand you want to feel first.