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The wall is doing something she hadn't expected.

She'd heard them before — two nights ago, briefly, a laugh and then a door — but this is different. This is sustained. A rhythm she can't unhear now that she's heard it, coming through the drywall with a clarity that means the insulation in this building is a polite fiction. The condo board's literature had called it 'boutique.' What it is, she now understands, is thin.

She is lying on her side in the dark, sleep shirt twisted, knees together, listening to strangers. The radiator clicks in the corner. Outside, the city is doing its winter thing — muffled, contracted, the sound of cold pressing down on Bloor Street until everything goes quiet except what's inside. And what's inside, tonight, is not quiet.

She is aware of her own stillness as a kind of held breath. The couple next door are not still. The rhythm through the wall is unhurried and then less so, and she finds herself tracking it the way you track a song that starts in another room — at first registering it as interference, then as information, then as something you are listening to on purpose.

She doesn't move.

The not-moving is its own thing. The specific pressure of her knees against each other. The cotton of the sleep shirt against the backs of her thighs, light enough that she can feel the warmth her own body is making underneath it. Her right hand is flat against the mattress in front of her face. Her left hand is at her side, doing nothing, and the doing-nothing has become effortful in a way it wasn't three minutes ago.

He is awake. She knows this without turning. She can tell by the quality of his stillness — it is the same quality as hers. Alert. Attending.

Her exhale comes out longer than she put it in. She hadn't planned the length of it. It unfolded past what she'd allotted, into the dark between them.

The wall continues. The strangers continue. The whole building is a column of lit windows stacked against the winter sky, and somewhere in it other people are awake in the dark doing what the dark is for, and she is one of them now, she is already one of them, her body has decided this without consulting her.

His hand finds the back of her hip. Not moving yet — just present, warm through the thin cotton, the weight of it registering along the full length of her awareness.

She does not close her knees tighter.

The wall does not stop.