And now she’s treating me like a colleague she tolerates.
“The FDA’s main concern is the encryption strength during high-density transmission,” I continue, pulling up a graph. My voice sounds robotic to my own ears. “When multiple devices are operating in close proximity, the signal interference creates vulnerabilities in the?—”
“I know what the concern is.” Flat. Clinical. “I read the CRL. What I need to know is what you’ve tried so far and why it hasn’t worked.”
I flinch internally. Externally, I keep my expression neutral.
“We’ve attempted three different approaches to the encryption protocol.” I click through the slides. “The first was a frequency-hopping pattern that reduced interference by 34%, but introduced latency issues that affected real-time neural feedback. The second was a shielded transmission buffer, which solved the latency problem but reduced the effective range by 60%. The third?—”
“Show me the data on the frequency-hopping approach.”
I pull it up. She leans forward to look at the screen, and the movement brings her closer—close enough that I can see the soft skin at the base of her throat, the gentle rise and fall of her chest as she breathes. I catch a hint of something floral. Unfamiliar. She used to smell like vanilla and coffee, and I knew that scent so well I could have identified her blindfolded.
This new perfume is like everything else about her now. A wall I can’t get past.
But underneath the changes, she’s stillher. Still the woman whose body I’ve memorized without ever touching. I know the exact spot where her neck meets her shoulder—I’ve imagined pressing my mouth there more times than I can count. I know the way her hips sway when she’s pacing through a problem. Iknow that her hands are small and soft because once, just once, she grabbed my wrist to look at my watch, and I felt that touch for days afterward.
I want her so badly it’s a physical ache. I always have. I just never knew what to do about it.
I still don’t.
“The latency spike occurs here.” I point to the graph, forcing myself to focus. “At approximately 3.7 milliseconds, which is outside the acceptable threshold for real-time neural interface applications.”
She studies the data, her brow furrowed in concentration. I know this expression. I’ve seen it a thousand times—in the lab, in meetings, across the table at late-night debugging sessions when it was just the two of us against some impossible problem.
I miss those nights. I missher. The way I imagine people miss a limb—phantom pain in the space where she used to be, my brain still reaching for something that’s no longer there.
I miss the specific geography of her. The way she’d tuck her legs up on her chair when she was deep in thought, all soft curves folded into the smallest possible space. The way she’d stretch after hours at her desk, arms above her head, back arching in a way that made me forget how to breathe. The way she fit against my side the one time she fell asleep on my shoulder during an all-nighter—warm and heavy andright, and I sat perfectly still for two hours because I didn’t want it to end.
I never told her any of that. Never told her that my body recognized hers as home long before my brain caught up.
“What if we staggered the frequency hops?” she says, half to herself. “Instead of a random pattern, we could implement a predictive algorithm based on neural signal priority. High-priority transmissions get first access to clean frequencies, lower-priority data queues until bandwidth opens up.”
“That... could work.” I’m already running the numbers in my head. “The latency would still be an issue for the queued data, but if we weight the priority algorithm correctly?—”
“The brain doesn’t process all neural signals equally, anyway.” She’s warming to the idea now, her voice losing some of its careful coldness. “Sensory input takes priority over motor feedback in most processing hierarchies. If we mirror that in the transmission protocol...”
“We’d be working with the brain’s natural architecture instead of against it.”
“Exactly.”
For a brief moment it feels like before. Our minds clicking into synchronization, finishing each other’s thoughts, that effortless rhythm I’ve never found with anyone else. My pulse is doing something it shouldn’t. I’m leaning toward her without meaning to, drawn into her orbit the way I always was.
This is the cruelest part. My brain can match hers perfectly—can dance with her intellect like it was designed for exactly this. But my body is a foreign language I never learned. I can think in perfect tandem with her, but I can’t close the six inches between us. Can’t reach over and touch the soft curve of her cheek the way I’ve imagined. Can’t pull her into my lap and bury my face in her neck and finally,finallyfind out what she tastes like.
I want to. God, I want to. The wanting is so loud it’s a wonder she can’t hear it.
And for that same moment, I’m terrified. Because if this works—if she lets me back in, if we find our way back to what we had—eventually I’ll have to explain. Eventually she’ll want to know why I blocked her kiss, why I froze, why I’m like this. And I’ll have to tell her the truth. And then she’ll look at me differently, and I’ll lose her all over again.
But then the moment passes and the warmth disappears. The wall slams back into place.
Maybe it’s better this way. Maybe the wall is protecting both of us.
“Can you model that by tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
It doesn’t feel better.
