His heartbeat is the only signal in the room I can't access, and that is why I keep my ear pressed to it.
It is slowing. Sixty-one, sixty, fifty-nine — I count without meaning to, the old reflex, the catalog. Theo's chest rises under my cheek and the salt of him is everywhere, unprocessed, unmonitored, a smell no readout has ever rendered because the lab strips skin to clean baseline before it lets me near. I have spent eleven years tuning other people's pleasure. I have watched dopamine bloom in two hundred undergraduate brains as their cuffs married their nervous systems into one shared, broadcasting animal. I know the shape of joy as a waveform. I have never once owned mine.
Outside, the dorm towers are still lit with them — paired students glowing soft at the temples, their joined sensations winking like fireflies who have agreed to flash in time.
Half an hour ago he undressed me slower than either of us planned.
I remember the buttons. How analog they were, how stubborn. The cold of the lab finding my spine before he did. Goosebumps rising along my arms — and the strange grief of feeling them happen to *me*, unannounced, no graph predicting the prickle a half-second early. He watched my skin pebble and something broke open in his face.
"No cuffs," he'd said. Not a question. His hands, too careful, hovering. "I want to know it's real. Just skin."
"Just skin," I'd agreed, and meant it, and we left the cuffs dark in their drawer like two people leaving their phones in another room.
I had stopped tracing him at some point. I'm a tracer by trade; my fingers map, they survey, they take. But I stopped, and pressed my whole palm flat over his heart, and felt the catch of his breath snag on nothing — on me, on the simple weight of a hand that wanted nothing back. He made a sound I have no instrument for.
Now he sleeps, and I lie in the wreckage of the narrow cot, the steel frame cold against my hip, his arm heavy across my waist.
I turn my head.
The cuff on the drawer is glowing.
Faintly. The amber of a thing that has been working. My stomach drops before my mind catches up, and then the knowledge arrives whole and cold: the safety baseline. The passive log. *The lab's safety baseline always records.* We never disabled it because we never use the cot for this; it runs ambient, capturing the room the way a thermostat captures a fever. It has been listening to him. All of him. The unguarded waveform of a man who spent his whole life refusing to be digitized, taken at the exact moment he begged to exist only as flesh.
I have it now. His profile. The one unrepeatable thing.
I could delete it. Three taps. The purge is muscle memory.
I sit up slowly so I don't wake him and reach across his sleeping body and lift the warm cuff, and it fits my hand like a guilty thing.
Theo stirs. His eyes find me in the bruise-blue light, and for a moment he is entirely undefended — the band on his finger catching the dawn, the analog ghost of a marriage he also could not quite delete.
"Was it real?" he asks. Rough. Hopeful in a way that costs him.
"Yes," I say. And it is true. That's the cruelty of it — completely, precisely true.
My other hand rests over the cuff, hiding the glow.
He smiles, believing me, and closes his eyes, and I sit there holding the proof that analog ends too. That the unmediated thing he wanted has already curdled into data in my palm. The only way I have ever learned to keep anything is to make it into this. To take it. I know the shape of his joy now as a waveform. I will be able to feel it again whenever I want, which means I will never feel *this* again — the not-knowing, the pebbled skin, the breath catching on nothing.
My finger hovers over the purge.
In the towers, one by one, the fireflies go dark as dawn outshines them. I watch the students wink out. I do not move my finger.
Not yet.
