She turns and walks back to her station, and I follow her out of my office. I watch as she brings up the waveform on the screen, and listen as her voice shifts into a familiar, clinical cadence.
“These spikes here are textbook arousal markers,” she says, pointing. “But then…look here. There’s a dip right before the climax that shouldn’t be there—like something’s interfering with the buildup.” She flicks to a second screen. “And this—this is from when I tried fantasizing about…well, about you. Sorry, not to be inappropriate?—”
“It’s alright,” I say. “Go on.”
“You can see it, though, right?” she says. “You’d expect an increase in activity in the limbic and prefrontal clusters, right? But look…it’s like my pain translator was doing with pain at low levels, when it wasworking. Now it’s just—working in the worst possible way.”
I lean in.
She smells delicious. She smells likesex.
Gods help me.
“There’s a short-circuit in your pleasure cascade,” I murmur, examining the results. “It’s like your brain is trying to reject climax, just as you said—like how you hoped it would reject pain.”
“I haveno ideawhat’s causing it,” she says. “And I just don’t have enough data to make sense of it.”
I can feel the outcome we’re both circling—that we need more data, and that means data showing whatactually happenswhen I touch her.
“We’d need to reproduce the effect,” I say. “Test against a clean baseline. Document neural activity during actual contact.”
Lyn’s fingers curl around the edge of the desk. She doesn’t look at me, but I can see the motion of her throat as she swallows.
“Right,” she says, after a long pause. “You’d have to touch me.”
I nod. “Not sexually. Not…not intentionally, anyway.” I take a breath. “If we want to understand the bounds of the reaction, we’d need to isolate touch types. Duration, location, skin-to-skin versus clothed, ambient stress levels, environmental factors?—”
“I get it,” she says. “Clinical. Just…data.”
Does she sound disappointed? Or have I breached so far into unprofessionalism that I can’t tell anymore?
“And we need to establish boundaries,” I tell her. “Strict protocols. If we do this, it has to be with complete clarity; the second you want to stop, we stop.”
Her eyes flick to mine. “And you?”
“What about me?”
“What if you want to stop? Do you have boundaries? I know this is…it’s weird.”
Her question hits me somewhere strange…because I actually don’t have an answer.
I used to have boundaries. I’ve kept them up like walls—fortified, structured, curated. I’ve been safe this whole time behind them, without anyone to even challenge that they were there at all.
But now…this wild, brilliant female has broken each one.
“I’ll manage,” I say. “The important thing is thatyoufeel safe.”
“I do,” she breathes. “I trust you.”
“Alright,” I say. “Then…sit. Let’s get these electrodes attached…then we can get started.”
She does as I tell her, obedient in a way that makes my whole body tense. I don’t look at her—just put on a pair of gloves and get to work.
We need to figure this out. Weneedto solve it.
Before my walls crumble entirely…and I do something I won’t be able to take back.
CHAPTER 16
