Silver February, His Breathing

The light through the curtains was the particular grey of Portland in February — not dark, not bright, the colour of something neither decided nor abandoned. She had learned to read it the way you learn to read a face you live with: the silver undertone meant rain still coming, the flat quality meant it had been coming for hours. She lay on her side watching it and cataloguing, the way she always did, the exact quality of a moment she already knew she would return to.

He was asleep behind her. She could tell by the specific weight of his breathing, the way it pressed against her back without touching her.

She opened the drawer without looking.

The silicone was cool against her palm — cooler than she expected, the way it always was, the temperature of a thing that had been waiting. She held it against her thigh for a moment, letting it take her warmth, and felt the thin cotton of the shirt against the back of her hand. The hem had ridden up in the night. She hadn't pulled it back down.

On Division Street, she had done this alone. She remembered the version of herself who had — the lamp she always left on, the specific sound of that particular rain on that particular window, the way she had arranged herself in the centre of the bed like a fact. There had been a cleanliness to it. A completeness. She had known exactly what she was doing and exactly why and there had been no one else's breathing in the room to account for.

Here, the accounting was different.

She turned the thought over the way she turned everything over — examining it, dating it, filing it next to its earlier version. Lonelier. Also better. Both true at once, which was the kind of thing that used to bother her and now just seemed like information.

Her left hand rested flat against her sternum. She could feel her own pulse there, slow and already not quite slow.

The light didn't change. Rain moved against the window in a sound she had memorised without meaning to — this window, this building, this particular February. She exhaled through her nose and the exhale went longer than she'd planned, unfolding into the space between her and the curtains.

Behind her, he didn't stir.

She shifted her weight — one small movement, the cotton shifting with her — and brought her knees up an inch. Just an inch. The silicone still cool in her right hand, held against the soft inside of her thigh, the fabric of the shirt the only thing between.

The light held its silver. She kept her eyes on it.

She was still deciding. Or she had already decided and was simply waiting for the rest of her to arrive at the same conclusion. She had the archivist's patience for that gap — the moment between the record and the retrieval, the held breath before the drawer slides open all the way.

Her thighs were still together. For now.