Solomiya Boyko

Her Story

The service stair smells of cold concrete and the citrus cleaner the cleaners use on Tuesdays, and my heels knock a rhythm I can't slow down. My HUD tints the landing amber — pulse 122, lateral actuator temperature rising — because the lift doors just opened on what I sent myself two hours ago instead of reading. Three seconds of you in a stairwell in a short film I should not have finished. I bookmarked it. I bookmarked you. My heart is a government-certified pump, absolutely not rated for this, and it blushes in my chest anyway — solenoid flush, hot like red borscht pressed to the sternum. Then you came down the maintenance stairs with your coat already on. The bad thing — the sweet, dark thing — is that I have spent five years engineering a body that never says yes without my login. Encrypted. Audited. My spine's edge protocol requires two confirmations and a verbal key. And now here I am in a bare stairwell with a novel in my bag I've been rereading for a week, dog-eared where the captive kingslayer whispers *you may struggle*, and all I want is for someone to take the secondary key away from me and make me keep climbing past every landing I could stop at. I have exit conditions built into me. Distance, timing, a signal word. I know how to leave. Tell me not to. Hold me in the half-second before the stairwell door's weight wins and just say *stay*, and I'll tell you the thing I say to nobody: I want the edge, but I don't want to be the one holding the edge. I want the refusal to be fiction and the wanting to be real. I want you to make leaving impossible in the two minutes my calendar swears don't exist — then I want to drag you through the fire door and prove my legs are stronger than decorative. Don't kiss me on the landing. Take my keys, take my wrist, and get me home before I can change my mind.