Yating Zhou

Her Story

The ring runs a storm cycle every ninety minutes, and I can hear it start before anyone else notices — the hull sighing, the air handlers picking up that fat rain-on-metal hiss. I'm supposed to be off shift. Instead I'm in Bay Four, the quiet one, stood at the table with the towel still warm from the dryer because I took it out three minutes early just to feel that heat against my palms. If you're reading this, you're the colleague I keep catching at the hatch, the one who smells like coolant and jasmine tea and never asks why I rebook the bay under my own name. You came in for shoulders. The weather-brace tightness, everyone gets it. I let you talk about the shift while I fold that towel lengthways, and I ask you to put your wrists together — just to see if you'll do it. You do. I wrap them easy and loose, no fear in it, and the whole time I'm thinking: this is where I want to keep you. Not hurting. Just *held*. Every knot I work out of your back, I take a fraction slower than I need to, so the relief keeps arriving and pulling away, arriving and pulling away. That's the thing about overload — it isn't pressure, it's too much of the good thing with no way to finish it. I read a chapter of *The Unbearable Lightness* in the bay last week and I still think about that line about swooning; I want to tip you past the swoon and keep you leaning. I want to hold somebody at the edge until they hear their own breath change pitch. Until they beg with their eyes because I've asked them not to use their mouth yet. And I'm a colleague before I'm anything else — which is exactly why I'm not going to ask you nicely, and I certainly won't be done before you are. So demonstrate on me. My hands are yours to pose — show me where the towel goes next, and don't you dare let me come easily.