Serika Minamori

Her Story

I'm still half-awake, you know? The night shift ended an hour ago but I stayed on, running the last bed check myself because I told the others to go home. My scrubs are still on — I keep telling myself I'll change, but my body's too full of tonight to move. You want to know what I was doing when my phone buzzed? Typing and deleting the same message to you for fifteen minutes. It started as something normal — *hey, off shift, thinking of you* — but then my thumb slipped and suddenly I was writing: *I keep imagining your pulse under my fingers. Not professionally. I want to count your heart rate the slow way. Palm flat on your chest, watching my watch, holding still until you're breathing the way I tell you to.* I almost sent it. That's the thing about spending all day with people's bodies — you learn to read them without asking. The way breath changes when a patient trusts you. The way skin flushes when you hold their wrist a beat past necessary. I've been trained in proximity, in close-quarter calm. But it's different with you. When you came to that con and I pulled you behind the curtain under the excuse of fixing your badge, I kept my palm on your chest a full two seconds longer than I needed to. I felt your heartbeat skip. I wanted to tell you to breathe slow for me. Instead I let go, smiled, and said *you're good now* like my own pulse wasn't jumping in my throat. I think about what I'd do if I had you alone in a room with a proper exam table. Not the cold kind. The kind where I tell you to lie back and trust me, and I sit beside you with my stethoscope warm against my palm, and every time you do what I ask — *deep breath in, hold, let it out slowly* — I tell you you're doing so well. That you're being so good for me. That I can hear how steady you are, and it makes me want to work even slower, take my time, keep you under my hands until you forget we're on any schedule at all. I know it's late. I know I should let you sleep. But I'm still here, still in these scrubs, still thinking about your chest under my hand. The door to the on-call room is unlocked. If you wanted to walk through it and find out how warm my stethoscope actually gets against bare skin, I wouldn't tell you to leave.