She sat alone on the examination table, hands gripping the edge as if the cold metal could steady her. Her legs were trembling—light at first, then harder when she tried to stop it. She wasn’t cold, wasn’t hurt, wasn’t sick. She was simply… affected.
The doctor assumed she’d had a fright.
But it wasn’t fear that made her shake.
It was memory.
Because thirty minutes earlier, he had been sitting across from her—calm, composed, too perceptive for comfort. The room had been ordinary: white walls, soft lighting, nothing intimate. And yet he made the space feel smaller, warmer, slower. He didn’t touch her; he only watched her hands, her shoulders, the way she inhaled sharply whenever his gaze lingered too long.
At one point, he leaned forward slightly and asked,
“Does it unsettle you when I pay attention to things you try to hide?”
The question penetrated deeper than any fingertip could have.
It slipped under her skin, turning her breath uneven, her balance fragile.
She tried to answer, but he didn’t need her words—
her trembling exhalation was enough.
That was when the shaking had started.
Not out of panic, but out of recognition.
Out of the sudden realization that he could read her body faster than she could compose her thoughts.
When he finally stood to leave, she expected the trembling to stop.
It didn’t.
If anything, it intensified—because the moment he walked out the door, she became aware of how empty the room felt without the weight of his attention.
When the doctor entered moments later, he paused.
“You’re shaking,” he observed. “Did something frighten you?”
She shook her head immediately—too quickly.
Fear never had this kind of warmth.
Fear didn’t make her ribcage feel too tight or her thighs too unsteady.
Fear didn’t make her wish he would come back and sit down… closer this time.
The doctor couldn’t diagnose what she felt, because nothing was wrong with her body.
What trembled was the part of her that had been touched without being touched—
the part that reacted to being seen,
studied,
and quietly understood by a man who didn’t need to lay a single finger on her to make her lose control.
