We only do it to confirm the signal still reads, which is why I can't explain why I count the seconds before Dao's wrist hovers over mine.
This is the ritual. End of shift, the vault gone quiet except for the cooling drone, the cold-storage drawers ticking as their contents settle. We pull a restored profile—tonight it's a tenderness loop from the forties, somebody's grandmother's archive of being held. Dao slots it into the dead reader. I rest my forearm on the steel, palm up, the way you do. The way I do. And Dao brings their wrist down toward mine, close, a centimeter of refrigerated air between skin, and we wait for the equipment to tell us the old pleasure still carries.
I feel their pulse-heat first. Always. Blood-temperature, the back-of-the-neck warmth of a desk lamp but moving, alive. Dao's breath fogs across my knuckles. The comma-scar at their throat catches the blue light when they swallow.
"Reading's good," I say.
"Reading's good," Dao agrees, and lifts away, and the cold rushes back into the space they leave.
That's the first loop. That's how I tell it to myself.
---
Here is what I left out: the jack is gone.
You had it taken out years ago, the interface port at the inside of your wrist, after the legislation made it disreputable to feel through someone else's nerves. You remember the procedure room, the cedar smell that wasn't cedar yet, the way you pressed two fingers to the empty site for weeks afterward like checking a tooth that had been pulled. You. Past-you. The one who could still receive a signal.
So when I lay my bare wrist on the steel and tell Dao the reading's good—there is nothing there to read with. The scar tissue has no port. The profile in the reader has nowhere to land. I have been confirming a signal into a wrist that cannot hear it.
I knew this. I knew this and I did it anyway, four nights a week, for the warmth.
---
Third loop. I notice the thing I keep not-noticing: Dao's instruments are dark.
Their intake meter hasn't been switched on in weeks. The needle sits dead at zero. Dao stopped pretending to measure long before I stopped pretending to be measured, and never said. We have both been standing over this drawer holding our pulses a hair apart, two people performing an archive of a thing neither of us is doing.
Frost ferns climb the inside of the drawer glass. My ink-stained thumb leaves a print on the cold steel that fogs and fades, fogs and fades.
"Wren," Dao says tonight, and doesn't lower their wrist.
I keep my arm on the steel. Palm up.
"You know the jack's gone." Their voice is so quiet it undoes something at the base of my throat. "You took it out. So—what are we actually checking?"
The cooling system drones. My exhale clouds and hangs.
Here is the truth I have been keeping in cold storage: there was a version of me who hadn't wanted this yet. Who could put a wrist beside Dao's and call the heat a malfunction, a ghost-signal, anything but the plain fact of it. I have been running the ritual to verify him—the one with the jack, the one for whom this was still deniable. The reading I keep confirming as good is only ever: not yet, not yet, you don't have to know yet.
But he's decommissioned. He's behind the frosted glass with the rest of the obsolete cores.
---
Fourth loop. No reader. No instruments. Dao reaches past the dead machine and switches off the intake meter that was already off—a small mercy, removing the last alibi from the room.
I leave my wrist on the steel.
Dao brings theirs down. Slowly. The warmth arrives the way it always does, blood-temperature, the radiant nearness of a hand not yet placed. Their breath crosses my knuckles. The lamp pools its dry heat between us and the air in that single centimeter goes faintly, impossibly warm—the warmest thing in the whole refrigerated dark.
"Tell me what we're checking," Dao says.
I press two fingers to the place where the jack used to be. Nothing there. Everything here.
I turn my hand over.
I let their wrist come down toward my open palm, and I stop counting seconds, and I choose—
