Six Fifteen, Undecided

Twenty minutes. I know because I checked his phone before I got up, the screen still showing the alarm set for six thirty-five, and now I am sitting on the edge of the other bed — the one neither of us slept in — with the robe half open and my bag on the floor and the hotel doing its low, pressurized nothing around me. The hum of it. The particular silence of a building full of people who are all still asleep.

I hadn't planned this. That's what I need to be clear about, at least to myself.

The robe is one of those waffle-weave things, medium weight, and where it falls open across my thighs the cotton holds its shape even when I don't. The belt is still loosely knotted. My hands are in my lap. The pre-dawn grey is coming in where the blackout curtain doesn't quite reach the wall — a strip of Chicago winter, flat and pale, doing nothing useful.

I'm already warm. That's the part that irritates me. I haven't done anything and I'm already warm, the heat collected under the robe where the fabric rests against the inside of my thighs, my own temperature held there, waiting for me to acknowledge it. I don't want to acknowledge it. I have a seven-thirty call. He is asleep twelve feet away and his alarm goes off in twenty minutes and I should be in the shower.

My bag is on the floor. I know exactly where in the bag it is.

I look at the strip of grey light instead. The distant sound of an elevator somewhere in the building — a cable moving, a door opening onto an empty corridor. Someone else up early. Someone else with somewhere to be.

The irritating thing is that I can feel it without touching anything. The specific pressure of my own thighs held together, the slight resistance of the robe's hem against the back of my knee where I'm sitting on it. My stomach had already pulled tight before I stood up, before I crossed to this bed, before I looked at his phone. The wanting had been there when I woke, already formed, already decided, and I had not been consulted.

I reach into the bag. I tell myself I'm only taking it out.

The wand is cool in my left hand — the kind of cool that will change quickly — and I hold it without turning it on, my right hand flat on my knee, the robe parting slightly with the shift of my weight. The hotel hums. The elevator somewhere settles.

Nineteen minutes.

My knees stay together for another moment. Then, slowly, they don't.