His Shirt, Chicago Sleet

The sleet finds the window in intervals — not constant, not predictable, just often enough that I keep waiting for the next time. It's the only sound. The rest of the apartment is the specific quiet that happens when someone who usually fills it is somewhere over Ohio, or Indiana by now, or wherever the delay put him.

I'm on his side. That part was deliberate. I pulled back his half of the comforter and got in from the wrong edge and lay there for a while just noticing how different the ceiling looks from here. His pillow still holds the faint pressure of his head, a shallow geography I pressed my palm into before I reached for the drawer.

His t-shirt is mine for the week. It falls to mid-thigh when I stand. Against my legs now it's just warmth and that particular softness that comes from a shirt being washed too many times to remember — the kind of soft that has no texture left, only temperature. I pulled the hem up and left it there. The air in the room is cold enough that I felt it immediately, the contrast sharp across my bare thighs before the comforter settled back over me.

The rabbit sits between my thighs the way his hand rests there when he's reading. That's the only way I know how to describe the position — not what it is but what it replaces. Heavy enough to feel deliberate. The rotation is slow. I haven't changed the setting. I'm not sure I want to yet.

I'm looking at the window.

The sleet comes again — a scatter of it, brief, like something thrown from a passing car — and I watch the light through the glass shift for a second and go still. His flight lands at 11:42 tomorrow morning. I know this the way I know my own name right now, the number sitting in my chest alongside everything else that's sitting there.

My left hand is flat against his pillow. I notice this without having decided it.

The wanting has been here since dinner, since I set one plate and then stood at the counter eating over the sink because sitting at the table alone felt like a performance of something I didn't want to perform. It moved through the evening the way cold moves through a room — not arriving, just becoming impossible to ignore.

I exhale, and it comes out longer than I meant it to, unfolding into the dark above me.

The rotation does something then — a small shift in pressure, nothing I chose — and my knees, which have been loosely together, drift. Just slightly. The hem of his shirt rides up another inch against my stomach and I feel the cool air reach somewhere warmer, and I go very still, holding the almost of it, waiting for myself to decide what comes next.