His Hand, Toronto Winter

The radiator ticks. She counts the intervals without meaning to — three seconds, four, three again — the way she counts things when she is trying not to think about what her body is doing.

His hand is still there. Has been for twenty minutes, maybe longer, the weight of it warm and entirely accidental now, fingers slack where they were once deliberate. He shifted onto his side an hour ago and simply didn't take it back, and she lay still in the dark listening to his breathing change into sleep, and then she lay still for a long time after that. The sheet is thin against her hip. The cold outside the window is the particular cold of a Toronto January, the kind that makes the glass tick differently than the radiator, a higher pitch, impatient. She knows that sound. She has lived here long enough to know that sound.

She is thinking about Montreal.

Not the city — a room in it. A smaller bed, a radiator that didn't work reliably, and herself at twenty-six, which was a version of herself she can now examine the way you examine a photograph: recognizable, slightly foreign, caught in the middle of something. She had been less careful then about what she let herself want. Or less aware that wanting carefully was something she had learned.

Her hips make a small adjustment. Barely anything. The kind of movement that could be sleep.

The radiator ticks.

The pressure of his fingers shifts with her — passive, unconscious, his hand simply present — and the sensation that moves through her lower belly is so specific and so immediate that she holds her breath without deciding to. Holds it for a full count. The exhale that follows comes out longer than the inhale went in, and quieter than she expected, a sound more felt in her chest than heard in the room.

She doesn't move again. Not yet. The wanting is a particular texture right now — not urgent, not simple, closer to the feeling of standing at the edge of something and understanding you are going to step off it but choosing to stand there one more moment. Her left hand rests open on the mattress beside her. Her right hand is at her sternum, fingers loose against the sheet.

In Montreal she hadn't waited. That was the difference. She had simply taken what she wanted from the dark, from the unreliable heat, from the body sleeping beside her, without cataloguing it first.

She wonders when she started cataloguing.

His breathing doesn't change. The cold presses at the glass. Somewhere below, a streetcar moves through the intersection, its sound arriving faint and brief and gone, and she feels the particular weight of the city being asleep around her, which is its own kind of permission.

Her hips shift again. Less like sleep this time.

The radiator ticks, and ticks, and marks the distance between what she is and what she is about to allow.