His Chair, Twenty Floors Up

The window runs floor to ceiling, and Toronto in January is twenty floors below — the grid of Bloor and Bay smeared orange-white through the cold, the glass holding it all at a distance that feels absolute. She can see it from the bed. She can see him, too, the chair angled just enough that his face catches the city light when he wants it to and disappears when he doesn't.

She is aware of the slip the way she is always aware of it when he watches — the satin has no weight worth naming, which means it lies against her skin like attention itself, registering every shift. She had pulled it on deliberately, chosen it for the way it gives nothing away while hiding nothing. It rests at mid-thigh now. She has not moved it.

He hasn't spoken since she sat back against the pillows. Neither has she.

The rabbit is on the duvet beside her right hip, and she has not picked it up yet, and she is aware that not picking it up is already a performance. This is what she understands about herself and cannot unknow: that even the waiting is shaped for him. Even the stillness. Her left hand rests open on her sternum — she can feel her own pulse in the heel of her palm — and she is watching the window, not him, because watching the window means he can watch her face without her watching back, and she wants him to have that.

The city doesn't move. The cold presses against the glass from the other side.

She picks up the rabbit with her right hand.

The silicone is cool — not cold, but cool enough that she registers it, a small fact her skin notes before anything else. She holds it without turning it on. Her thumb rests along the base. She is still watching the window, the orange-white smear of the city, and she lets him look at her looking at it, the slip lying flat across her thighs, the hem just at the point where the light from outside stops being useful.

Her exhale comes out longer than she meant to give it — not a sound exactly, more a release of something she had been holding in her chest without deciding to hold it. She feels it leave her.

She is aware of the inside of her own thighs now in a way she wasn't a moment ago. The satin. The warmth underneath it that is entirely her own, that has been building since he sat down in that chair and stopped talking.

Her right hand moves. Not far. Just enough.

The hem of the slip shifts, and she lets it, and she does not look at him yet — she keeps her eyes on the glass, on the city held twenty floors below in the cold — because the moment she looks at him she will know exactly what she looks like, and she is not ready for that.

Not yet.

She is almost ready.