Eleven Days, His Pocket

The window is just black. Snow against it, occasionally, a soft percussion she has stopped hearing, and then the dark again. She has been watching it for twenty minutes the way you watch something you know will not move. The fire has burned down to coals.

She has not fed it. The room has cooled to the temperature where the flannel shirt matters — where she is glad she put it on before she sat down, before the wanting started, before she understood what kind of night this was going to be. His shirt. The left breast pocket still holds the shape of the pen he keeps there.

She had noticed that this morning when she took it from the hook by the door, pressing her thumb against the slight ridge, the cotton soft and dense in a way that new fabric never is. Eleven days of washing her hands of him and here she is, wearing the proof that she hasn't. She is sitting with her back against the armchair, legs extended toward the dead fire, and the shirt falls to the middle of her thighs. She is aware of where the hem rests.

The fabric is warm from her body and slightly heavier than she expected when she put it on — it settles across her like something deliberate. Her right hand lifts. She slides it into the breast pocket first. This is not a decision.

It is the thing her hand does before she has caught up with it — the gesture she has watched him make a hundred times, checking for the pen, the receipt, the small proof that his hands know where to go. Her fingers find the bottom seam of the pocket and stop there. The cotton is warm. Her own warmth, held in the fabric, returned to her.

She exhales. The sound comes out longer than she meant it to, longer than the breath she took in, and she lets it go toward the dark window without looking away from it. The window gives her nothing. Just the black and the occasional soft impact of snow and her own faint reflection — the collar of his shirt, her jaw, the suggestion of her face watching itself watch for him.

Her hand is still in the pocket. She is aware of the other hand, open on her thigh, the heel of her palm against the flannel hem where it crosses her leg. The fabric there is slightly cooler — the part of the shirt that has been touching air instead of her. She presses the heel of her palm down, not moving it, just the weight of it, and the hem shifts a half-inch against the inside of her knee.

The window stays dark. She moves her right hand out of the pocket. Down. One slow transit along the placket buttons, not opening them, just tracking the line of them through the fabric, learning the distance between where she is and where she is going.