While He Still Sleeps

The radiator knocked. Then knocked again. The sound had no pattern she could predict — three quick taps, a pause, one slow one — and she had stopped trying to anticipate it an hour ago, somewhere around the time she'd given up on sleep and started thinking instead about what she wanted. She was kneeling at the foot of the bed.

The wine-dark dress fell straight from her shoulders to the floor, pooling at her knees in a way that was almost formal, almost like she'd arranged herself. She hadn't. She'd just ended up here — the way you end up somewhere when you've been awake too long and your body has been making a quiet argument you've been pretending not to hear. He was asleep.

She could see the shape of him from here: the duvet rising and falling with a steadiness she'd catalogued without meaning to, the way she catalogued everything. Respiratory rate: slow. Body position: unchanged for forty minutes. He was deeply under.

She knew his sleep the way she knew his moods — by the evidence, not the announcement. The dress held all her warmth. She'd noticed that first, before anything else — the way her own heat had been gathering inside the fabric since she'd given up on lying still, a specific trapped temperature at the insides of her thighs that had nothing to do with the room. The room was cold.

February pressed against the window glass like a hand. But inside the dress, at the place where her thighs were pressed together, she was warmer than she should have been, and she'd been aware of it for longer than she wanted to admit. The wand was in her right hand. She hadn't turned it on yet.

Her left hand rested flat against the mattress, steadying her, and she was watching his chest — the rise, the fall, the rise — with the particular attention she gave to things she needed to monitor without appearing to monitor. The radiator knocked. She exhaled through her nose, slow, measured. A breath she'd planned.

She was good at planned breaths. Her right hand shifted. The dress moved with it — all that dark fabric rearranging over her lap, heavy and unhurried — and she felt the hem settle against the backs of her knees, the slight resistance of the fabric as her thighs parted the smallest amount. Just enough.

The wand's head pressed against the inside of her left knee first, cool through the dress, and she held it there a moment longer than necessary. The wanting had been present for an hour. She'd simply been negotiating the terms of what she was going to do about it. His chest rose.

Fell. She pressed the first setting on. The hum was low, lower than the radiator's knock, and the dress absorbed it further — a vibration she could feel before she'd moved the wand anywhere near where she needed it. Her thighs parted another inch.

The fabric slid inward with them, wine-dark and unhurried, and she held still in the new position, watching him, waiting to see if the sound had changed anything. It hadn't.