Late for Eight, Toronto

The alarm clock on the nightstand was still blinking — not the number, just the colon between the hours, pulsing its small red argument into the grey morning light — and she was aware of it the way she was aware of everything right now: at a distance, through gauze, irrelevant.

She had silenced the alarm forty minutes ago. She had not gotten up.

The condo was cold in the specific way of October mornings when the heat hasn't clicked on yet, and the duvet was half off her, one corner dragging the floor, which meant she'd made some decision in her sleep that she hadn't ratified yet with the rest of herself. The underwear she'd worn yesterday — thin cotton, washed so many times it had gone soft as a second skin — had twisted slightly at the hip. She hadn't fixed it. That, too, felt like information.

The wand was on the mattress beside her right thigh. She'd reached for it before she was fully awake, before the part of her brain that managed calendars and commitments had come fully online. That part was online now. It was making its case — the 8 a.m. call, the three people waiting, her name on the agenda — and she was not listening to it.

She was annoyed at herself. That was real. The annoyance was present and specific and did nothing at all to change what her body was doing.

Her left hand lay flat on her stomach. She could feel her own pulse there, low and insistent, just below the navel. Her right hand was at her hip, not moving yet, fingers resting on the soft cotton, and the wand was humming — not against her, not yet, just against the mattress, sending a low vibration up through the fabric beneath her that she could feel in the backs of her thighs. The sound of it was barely audible under the muffled city traffic rising from the street below, a truck idling somewhere, the hiss of tires on wet pavement.

She exhaled. It came out longer than she'd meant it to, unwinding somewhere below her ribs, and she felt her hips settle heavier into the mattress on the way out.

This was not the plan. She was aware that this was not the plan.

Her right hand moved to the inside of her thigh — not high, not yet, just resting there, feeling the warmth that had already gathered in the thin fabric, her own heat held close. The wand was still humming beside her. She was still staring at the ceiling, jaw set, furious in a way that had nothing to do with stopping.

The blinking colon on the clock pulsed red in her peripheral vision. She didn't look at it.

She picked up the wand.