They have rules. A safeword (pineapple) that has never once been needed but is sacred anyway. A night every other week when she texts “green” and he replies with a time and an address (never his place, never hers, always a neutral hotel suite he books under a fake name).

There is a small leather bag he brings that contains the exact instruments that once terrified her: a set of graduated speculums, a slender sigmoidoscope (never the full-length one), nitrile gloves, real medical lube, a blood-pressure cuff, a pulse-ox clip. Everything is sterile, everything is hers to touch first, to approve or reject.

He never pretends to be her doctor. He never calls her “patient.” He calls her Alex, or sweetheart when she’s shaking, and he asks, every single time, “Color?” the way other people ask “How are you?”

She has not had a single panic attack in a medical setting since they started this. She had her first completely calm Pap smear last month and laughed out loud in the stirrups because it felt so ordinary.

She is still Alex (sweet, typical, twenty-four, soon twenty-five). She still blushes when her friends talk about sex. She still has a normal job, normal friends, a normal life.

And every other Thursday night she texts “green,” and for three hours she is the most powerful version of herself she has ever been: the girl who finally gets to rewrite the ending, one slow, deliberate, consensual breath at a time.