Thirteen Minutes Before Six

Six-oh-two. Thirteen minutes.

I know because I looked. I looked at the clock before I reached for the wand, which means some part of me was already calculating — already deciding — before I had agreed to any of it. That is the part that annoys me. Not the wanting. The wanting I can explain away. It is the planning I resent, the quiet negotiation my body ran without consulting me.

The grey outside the curtains is the grey it will be until noon. Seattle in January does not offer much else. The rain has been going since before I woke, a low continuous sound against the glass, the kind that makes the room feel sealed from everything outside it. I have been awake for maybe four minutes. My mind was already doing the thing it does — the list, the schedule, the shower-before-coffee calculation — and then something lower and less organised interrupted it, and here I am.

I am bent forward over the spare pillow, the one I fold under my stomach when I sleep on my front. The sleep shirt has ridden up without my help. The hem sits at my waist now, cotton pooled in a soft ridge, and below it there is nothing between me and the cool air of the room. I noticed that first — the temperature, the specific not-warmth of six a.m. against the backs of my thighs. My own heat underneath, already contradicting it.

That was the moment I reached for the nightstand. Not a decision so much as a concession.

The wand is in my right hand. My left hand is pressed flat against the mattress, steadying. I can feel the give of the mattress under my palm, the slight resistance before it holds. The wand is not on yet. I am holding it against the outside of my right thigh, the head of it resting where my leg folds into the crease at my hip, and I am aware of its weight in a way that makes my stomach pull tight.

I did not want to want this right now.

That is the honest version. I have a shower to take and a commute to manage and thirteen minutes — twelve now, probably — is not a reasonable amount of time to be doing this before any of that. My body made a different assessment. My body woke up already there, already partway into something, and it presented me with the wand as a logical conclusion before my mind had filed a single objection.

The rain against the window does not stop. The grey does not lift.

I exhale — longer than I meant to, the breath unfolding out of me before I decided to release it — and shift my knees apart by an inch. Just one. The hem of the shirt is already out of the way. There is nothing to move, nothing to negotiate, only the wand in my right hand and the space I have just opened and the clock on the nightstand that has not changed its mind about anything.

Six-oh-three.

My thumb finds the switch.