Chapter 11 Quality Assurance #2
“Response to direct, to bare contact,” she narrated, her voice holding even by visible effort, “elevated. Logged.” She tightened her grip, twisted at the swollen head with a move she’d clearly studied and rehearsed, watched my cock kick and a fresh drop well up, and watched my face for the effect, and got it.
“Approaching threshold. I’m going to, to ease off, for data range.
We need a sustained curve, not a single point. ”
She backed off the second I got close, took her hand almost away, and held me at the edge with just her fingertips circling the head while the timer ran, and did it twice, edging me with clinical patience, her even voice the only steady thing in the room while the rest of her unraveled like her own shorthand on the clipboard, the neat characters going loose, then illegible.
Her ears had gone pink, then her throat.
A single strand had escaped the precise clip and hung against her cheek.
Her thighs were pressed tight together on the stool, pressing and releasing, and I could see what it was costing her to keep counting, to keep the data-voice running while her body filed its objections.
“You can stop charting,” I said.
“The chart is the point.” Her wrist worked, her breath going shallow. “Latency at, at four minutes, response, response sustained.” A strand more came loose. “Adam.”
“Yes.”
“Your hand. On my, my readings would be more complete with.” She stopped, and started again, the protocol scaffolding she was clinging to. “Reciprocal data would improve the sample’s, the.” The tiny nod. “Please.”
I put my hand up the leg of her scrubs, slow, sliding along the smooth inside of her thigh, and she gave the tiny nod again, and parted her knees a precise few centimeters to let me, and I pushed her soaked underwear aside and found her bare, slick and swollen and burning hot, and she gasped, once, the first sound she’d made that wasn’t a measurement.
I dragged a finger through her, parting her small tight folds, and she was drenched, her thighs trembling.
“Recording,” she breathed, fighting for the data-voice as I worked her, two fingers easing up into her tight little cunt while my thumb found and circled her clit, “subject response. Strong.” Her hips rocked against my hand despite her, riding my fingers in tiny helpless jerks.
“Onset rapid. Wetness, ah, significant. Adam.” She’d stopped writing.
The pencil had rolled off the clipboard and onto the floor and she didn’t look at it.
“Adam, I’m, the count is, the count is at, I can’t, I can’t keep the… ”
And then the count went. Not the language, the count: the latencies and the thresholds and the careful running tally she steered herself by, all of it sliding off the page at once, leaving her with nothing certain to hold and no number to stand behind, just gasps and a few soft syllables that measured nothing, her small body shaking on the stool, one hand still working me in a rhythm that had lost all its science and found something better.
“Off the stool,” I said, low. “Up here.”
She climbed onto the edge of the exam table at my direction, no protest, scrubs pushed half off her shoulders, her small pert breasts bare now, the pink nipples drawn tight, the clip finally surrendering and her black hair coming loose around her flushed face.
I stood between her parted knees and fucked her on my fingers, two of them deep and curling while my thumb rolled her clit, and she gripped my forearm and wrapped her free hand around my cock and stroked me in time with my hand on her, and she rode my fingers in shaking jerks, chasing it, her even voice in ruins.
“Now,” she breathed, fisting me faster, “now, together, I want the, I want…” and her pocket timer chimed in her pocket, the small bright electronic note she’d set for God knew what, and she came on that exact sound, as if she’d timed it, as if she’d timed everything, her tight cunt clamping hard around my fingers and her thighs locking around my hand and her eyes rolling back and the last number she’d been holding gone clean out of her, and the grip of her and the sound and the sight of her undid me and I came in the same few seconds, my cock jerking in her hand, and she pulled me in against her so I spilled over her fingers and across the bare skin of her stomach, warm and unmeasured, no plastic, nothing caught for any assay, the two of us synchronized and charted by nothing at all, the cold clean lab light falling on her flushed fair skin and the mess she’d chosen over the measurement.
“Adam,” she said, through it, “Adam. See?” Like she’d proven a hypothesis. Like the data had finally returned the result she’d been afraid to want.
She put herself back together with origami precision afterward, the scrubs straightened, the clip going back in, though one strand wouldn’t be tamed and she gave up on it.
The data sheet was still on the tray, the columns she’d ruled so carefully that afternoon, latency, recovery, interval, every cell of it blank.
She’d come to measure the one number she refused to keep guessing at, and she had not written a single figure.
She looked at the empty sheet, and I watched her decide what it was.
She did not turn away to the counter. She turned and looked at me instead, which was the harder thing, and which I understood was the braver one.
“I have no usable data,” she said.
“No.”
“The interval is unmeasured.” She picked up the sheet and the two dead timers and held them against her chest the way Poppy held folders.
“It will stay unmeasured. I find I don’t want the number.
” A pause, the deadpan arriving two seconds late and lethal.
“I’ll keep scheduling around Falk’s averages and tell Marlene the calibration was inconclusive. ”
“Was it.”
“No,” she said. “It was extremely conclusive.” And something moved at the corner of her mouth, the nearest thing to a smile I’d seen on her, surfacing and smoothed away before it finished forming. “It simply returned a result I’m not going to file.”
I left her setting her tray to rights, the strand of hair against her cheek, the blank sheet folded once and slid into the chaos pocket instead of the cabinet, the calmest person on the staff reassembled around a thing she’d finally let herself want and decided, on purpose, never to chart.
She didn’t look up as I went, and let the loose strand stay where it was, the one reading she’d chosen to keep off the record.
On my way down the dark corridor I passed the master board, lit and faultless, every soul in the house accounted for in its colored square.
Every soul but one. Low in the directress’s own column hung a single blank white magnet, no name beside it, no reason, and I stopped the way you stop at a gauge reading something it has no business reading.
Poppy materialized at my shoulder out of the dark, the way she always turned up somewhere she technically shouldn’t be, and followed my eye to it.
“Eight months that’s been there,” she said, quiet for once. “Eight months, Keller. And nobody in this building knows what it’s waiting for.” She tipped her head, studying me studying it. “Including, I’m fairly sure, her.”