Page 21 of Dose

“I smell everything two floors down. Answer the question.”

“Answer mine first.” He rises and moves to his bench, glancing back in an unmistakable invitation. I swing my legs off the cot and follow, barefoot on a heated floor. The warmth beneath my feet catches me off guard. “The tracers you hid in the reserve stocks. Your design?”

“Mine.”

“They cut my working time in half. How?”

I tell him. He counters, and I counter his counter. Within seconds, we’re arguing over formulas, temperatures, and the specific stupidity of Korte’s rushed cooling. He laughs at that—a short, startled sound—and then looks almost surprised he did.

I catch a scent from his bench. Faint. Familiar, like a word on the tip of my tongue. I close my eyes and pull the air apart the way I was taught before I could read.

“A reversal agent,” I say. “The antidote to your sedative. And it’s failing. There’s a burned-sugar note underneath, which means the compound is coming apart somewhere just above body temperature.”

I open my eyes. He has gone completely still.

No one has ever looked at me this way—not as an instrument or an asset, but as a result he didn’t expect.

“Forty-one degrees,” he says. “It fails at forty-one degrees. I’ve lost three batches.”

“Slow your cooling phase. Trust the compound less and the temperature more.”

“Come here.”

He says it quietly, without force. I choose to go.

He gestures me toward the failed batch under the hood. As I lean over his notes, his hand rises toward my back and stops short.

“May I?” he asks.

I nod.

His palm settles against the small of my back. I feel its heat through the jumpsuit, and my body leans into it before I can analyze the response away.

Dopamine, oxytocin, norepinephrine. I can name the chemistry, but naming it doesn’t lessen it. That has always worked before.

I thought desire had been trained out of me. It hadn’t. It was dormant, and now it is awake.

“Your cooling curve,” I say, and my voice is lower than I expect. “It’s still too steep.”

“I know.” He hasn’t moved his hand. “I rush the ending. Old habit. Someone taught me the compound would forgive it.”

“Compounds don’t forgive anything. That’s what I like about them.”

“What else do you like?”

I turn my head. He’s closer than I expected, close enough for me to see the thin scar disappearing beneath the long fall of his hair. His pupils widen. His gaze drops to my mouth, brief but unmistakable.

His breathing is measured. Four counts in, four counts out. The most controlled man I have ever met is regulating his breath because of me. The realization steadies something in me: I’m not the only one affected.

“Heated floors,” I whisper. “Apparently.”

His hand flexes once against my back.

“I’ll move it,” he says, “the moment you want it gone.”

“I know.”

Neither of us moves. The fume hood hums beside us, and the distance between his face and mine holds.