Partner's Fingers in a Seattle Apartment, Rain, Winter

The rain comes in intervals. That is the thing I am noticing — not continuously, the way I always imagine Seattle rain, but in waves, pressing against the window glass and then retreating, pressing and retreating, as if it is deciding something.

I have been noticing things all evening. The way his cuffs were still buttoned when he sat beside me on the couch. The exact temperature of his hand when it first touched my knee — cooler than I expected, the skin of his palm against the skin of my leg, a contrast that made me aware of how warm I already was. I notice things and then I arrange them into sentences I will never say out loud. It is the habit I cannot stop even here, even now, in the dark, with his breath the only human sound in the room.

He is very still.

I am trying to understand what stillness means when it is his hand creating it. When it is his fingers — two of them, I am aware of two of them, their specific weight and presence and warmth — holding inside me without moving. I thought I knew what I wanted before this. I thought I wanted motion, the obvious thing, the thing that resolves. But he stopped, and the stopping has made me conscious of every millimeter of the space between what is happening and what could happen next.

My hands are flat against the sheet. I am aware of this. Both of them, palms down, fingers spread, as if I am steadying myself against something that has not moved yet.

The rain intensifies against the glass and then pulls back.

I exhale, and the exhale is longer than I intended — it unspools past the point where I would have chosen to stop it, past the point of composure, into something that sounds, even to me, like admission. He does not move. He is waiting for something from me and I do not know yet if I can give it, or if the not-giving is its own kind of want, the word held in the mouth that means more than the word said.

The crease where my thigh meets my hip has gone tight. I am aware of it the way I am aware of the rain — peripherally, precisely, unable to stop cataloguing.

I press my palms harder into the sheet.

He still does not move.

The rain comes back against the window, and I part my knees — just slightly, just enough — and wait for him to notice what I have said without saying it.