The Sunday Ritual, Silver Lake

The strip of light came through the same place it always did — two inches wide, maybe three, falling across the foot of the bed at the angle that meant it was still early. She had learned to read the Sunday morning by where it landed. Right now it cut across the white duvet and stopped just short of her left ankle, which meant she had time. She always had time on Sundays.

That was the point. She had already done the arrangement before she lay back down. Wand on the left, on top of the folded corner of the duvet. Glass dildo on the right, on the nightstand where she could reach it without looking.

The order was not negotiable and had not been for — she had stopped counting how long. Long enough that the sequence felt less like a choice and more like the shape of Sunday itself, the way the light came through the same gap every week whether she wanted it to or not. She did want it to. That was the resigned part.

She always wanted it to. The robe had come untied somewhere between the arrangement and lying back, and she hadn't retied it. It lay open along her sides, the cotton so thin and washed-out that it registered more as a temperature than a fabric — slightly cooler than her skin, which was already warmer than the room. She was aware of that warmth before she had done anything.

That was also part of it. The wanting that arrived ahead of her, that was already present when she woke and pulled the curtain to its strip and reached for what she'd set out the night before. The birds outside were doing what they did. Some Silver Lake bird she had never identified, three notes in a pattern, somewhere in the jacaranda that overhung the fence.

She had stopped hearing it as sound and started hearing it as time passing, the way you stop hearing a clock. She looked at the ceiling. The strip of light had moved a half-inch, maybe, since she lay down. Her right hand was at her side, resting against the outside of her thigh where the robe had fallen open.

She could feel the specific warmth of her own palm through the thin cotton that had pooled there — the small heat of contact, her own skin reporting back to itself. Her left hand was flat on her sternum, rising and falling, not doing anything yet. The glass dildo was cold. It was always cold on Sunday mornings.

That was part of what she was waiting for — the specific shock of it, the way her body would have to work to change it. She hadn't reached for it yet. She exhaled, and the sound that came out was longer than she had given it permission to be, unfolding into the quiet room like something she'd been holding since the night before. Her knees were together.

The robe lay across both thighs, light as nothing, the hem resting against the back of her right knee in a way she could feel precisely. She was going to reach for it. She knew she was going to reach for it.