Watch Me from the Headboard

Snow pressed against every window in the cabin, a sound like held breath — steady, continuous, the particular hiss of flakes meeting glass that had been building since dark. She was aware of it the way she was aware of him: constantly, at the edge of everything else.

He hadn't moved from the headboard. Pillows stacked behind him, arms loose at his sides, watching her with the specific patience of someone who had asked for exactly this and intended to receive all of it.

She was on top of the sheets. Bare. The firelight from the woodstove in the corner reached the bed in uneven intervals, orange and amber shifting across her stomach, her thighs. She was aware of what she looked like — that was the whole point, he had said. The watching is the point. She had replayed that sentence for three months.

The rabbit sat in her right hand. She hadn't turned it on yet.

Her left hand rested flat against her own sternum, and she could feel her heartbeat there — not fast, exactly, but present in a way it usually wasn't. Declarative. Her skin was warm from the fire and from the specific heat of being looked at, and the two were indistinguishable now.

She had rehearsed this. Not in any embarrassing, explicit way — just in the way that certain thoughts return to the same room, arrange the same furniture. She had known what she would do with her left hand. She had known she would keep her eyes open.

She kept them open.

His face was still. Not blank — still. There was a difference. She had learned it over two years of watching him watch things he cared about.

Her thumb found the control on the rabbit without looking down. The small ridged wheel she had learned in the dark of another room, in a different kind of privacy. She didn't turn it yet. The weight of the thing in her palm, the specific density of it — she let herself feel that first. Let him watch her feel it.

The exhale that came out was not the one she planned. It arrived ahead of her permission, shorter and lower, and she felt it leave somewhere in her chest before she had decided to let it go.

His hands stayed at his sides.

Good, she thought — though the thought was less language than pressure, a compression behind her sternum that spread downward.

She shifted her knees apart. Not far. The first degree of a much larger opening, the threshold of something she had been standing at the edge of for months — in her head, in the quiet of ordinary evenings, in every moment she had not yet done this.

The snow kept pressing. The fire shifted once, a small collapse of wood.

She turned the wheel.