But I know what my voice sounds like before it’s calibrated.
Wet. Subterranean. The sound of something that lives in caves.
Which is exactly what I am, and exactly what will send her swinging that crowbar.
So I wait.
She stares at me.
I stare back with eyes I’m building in real time, pulling gold from my deeper layers, letting it pool and swirl where pupils might be.
I want her to see something she can recognize.
A face.
An intention.
Anything that reads as safe.
The packing slip helps.
I can feel her processing it, the way her breathing changes as she reads each line. The little spike of adrenalineatsustained skin contactgiving way to a longer, slower exhale atyour unit learns.
She’s translating me into categories she can manage.
High-end product.
Technology.
Silicone.
I let her.
Whatever scaffolding she needs to stay in the room, I will hold still inside it.
Then she touches me.
Her fingertips land on my forearm, and the universe contracts to five points of contact.
Warm. Calloused.
The pad of her index finger carries a tiny scar, old, the kind you get from a craft knife slipping.
I feel the topography of her hand in the same instant I feel everything else: the knot between her shoulder blades that has been tightening for weeks, pulling her spine a quarter inch to the right.
The clicking left shoulder where the rotator cuff is compensating for repetitive motion.
Sleep deprivation so profound her stress levels read like a seismograph during an earthquake.
Touch starvation so deep and so total it has reshaped her like water reshapes stone, written into every system, every signal, every starving nerve ending in her skin.
All of this in two seconds.
By the third second, my surface is already responding, warmth flooding upward to meet her fingers, and I can feel the iridescence rippling out from her touch before I can stop it.
I should be more careful.
I should be dormant and inert and smooth.
