Stay in the Chair

His hands are resting on the armrests. That is the first thing I check. I told him to stay in the chair and I told him to keep his hands there, and he is doing both, and the fact that he is doing both is the reason the heat low in my stomach has been building since before I even sat down on the edge of the bed. The lamp behind him is amber, autumn-thick, and it catches the leather arms of the chair in a way that makes them look warm.

His hands look still. I know they won't stay that way. I have done this before. Not exactly this — not with him watching from exactly that distance, not with the city going on outside the window the way it does in October, all compressed sound and cold glass and the specific smell of radiator heat starting up for the first time since spring.

But I have done the shape of this. I know what I look like when I want something. I know, specifically, what I look like from a chair across the room when I decide to take it. That knowledge lives in my chest like a second pulse.

The glass is on the duvet beside me. I put it there before I asked him to sit down, before I arranged myself the way I arranged myself, back against the headboard, knees together, the duvet underneath me cool and then not cool. I haven't touched it yet. I am aware of it the way you are aware of something you placed with intention — its weight, its specific temperature, the way it catches the amber light and holds it differently than anything else in the room.

His hands are still on the armrests. I keep my knees together and I look at him looking at me and I feel the self-consciousness arrive the way it always does — not as shame, not quite, but as a kind of exposure that has its own heat. I am aware of my own collarbones. I am aware of the line my thigh makes against the duvet.

I am aware that he is tracking all of it and that I asked him to, that this is the arrangement, and the arrangement is the point. My right hand moves to the duvet. Not to the glass. Not yet.

Just to the duvet beside it, close enough that my wrist is near it, close enough that I can feel the temperature differential between the cotton and the glass without making contact. The cold of it reaches me before I touch it. My stomach contracts — one sharp involuntary pull, low, where the wanting has been sitting since before he sat down. I exhale.

The sound that comes out is smaller than I expected and stops somewhere before it finishes, cut off before I decide to cut it off. Across the room, I watch his jaw shift. I pick up the glass. It is heavier than it looks and colder than I remembered and the weight of it in my palm is specific and real and nothing like anything else.

I turn it once, slowly, watching his face while I do.