Four A.M., His Breathing Steady

His breath comes in and goes out. In and out. The sound of it is so familiar I have stopped hearing it the way you stop hearing the refrigerator hum — and then, like this, at four in the morning, I hear it again. Every exhale a small proof that he is still asleep. Every inhale a half-second in which I hold myself completely still.

February has made the condo cold at the edges. The window on my side carries it — a faint seam of outside air along the frame, the city fourteen floors down doing whatever Toronto does at this hour, which is mostly nothing. The duvet is on him. I have the sheet, and the sheet is not enough, and I have not pulled the duvet back because I am not cold in the way that requires covering.

I am warm in a specific place. Have been since I woke.

I don't know what I was dreaming. I know what I woke wanting.

The sleep shorts are thin — cotton gone soft from too many washes, the waistband already ridden up past my hip on the left side. I am on my back. The fabric across my thighs is almost nothing, which means the decision forming in me is almost nothing, which is a kind of lie I am willing to tell myself at four in the morning in February in this bed.

I think of him. Not the him beside me — the him I carry. The one who has watched me across a room and known exactly what I was thinking. The one who does not exist in quite this form but who I have built carefully, detail by detail, from everything the real him has ever given me without knowing he was giving it.

His breath goes out. Comes back. Even. Unhurried.

My left hand is flat against my sternum. I can feel my own pulse there, which surprises me a little — how fast it already is, how far ahead of me my body has gotten while I was still deciding.

My right hand moves to my stomach. Rests there. The cotton is warm from where I have been lying on it, and underneath the cotton I am warmer still, and I am aware of the distance between my palm and the waistband as a thing with weight, a small gravity pulling downward.

I breathe in.

The exhale comes out longer than I meant it to — unfolding quietly into the dark, the sound of it absorbed before it reaches him.

I stay still for a moment that stretches. My right hand on my stomach. His breath going in, going out. The cold at the window. The version of him I carry, watching.

Then my hand slides under the waistband, and my knees — held together until now, the sheet between them — begin, slowly, to part.