Pretentious

The house quiets slowly.

Not all at once, but in layers.

The kettle cooling first. Then the floorboards settling. Then the last streak of orange pulling itself thin across the window like something reluctant to leave.

Outside, the trees hold still in that peculiar way they do before rain.

And you are near me.

Not touching. Not yet.

Only the awareness of you moving softly through the room like a thought I have already had too many times to escape.

I pretend to read.

You pretend not to notice.

The distance between us becomes its own living thing.

Breathing. Waiting.

Your sleeve brushes my wrist once— accident or mercy, I cannot tell— and my body answers before my mind does.

A small betrayal.

A flinch toward warmth.

You say my name quietly, as though testing whether it still belongs in your mouth.

And something in me opens with the terrible patience of floodwater.

Not enough to spill.

Just enough to threaten.

The lamp hums. The rain still does not come.

I watch your hands instead of your face. Safer that way.

Faces make promises hands cannot keep.

But your hands have always been careful.

Even now, resting loosely against your knees, they look like they are resisting the instinct to reach.

That restraint again.

That unbearable kindness of it.

You could touch me. I know you could.

And perhaps what undoes me most is knowing you know it too.

The world narrows strangely then.

To breath. To fabric shifting. To the pause after one of us speaks and before the other answers.

Everything suspended there.

Everything almost.

You lean back against the couch, eyes half closed, tired in the familiar way that makes me ache toward you before I can stop myself.

And softly, without looking at me, you say,

“Stay awhile.”

As if I had ever been preparing to leave.

As if leaving had not become impossible the moment I learned the sound of being wanted gently.

Outside, thunder moves somewhere distant.

Not arriving.

Just approaching.

Soon, I think.

Soon.