Rabbit Vibrator Bedroom Armchair Partner Watching Late Night

The rain has been saying something to the roof for two hours now, a sound so constant it has become the room's silence. The lamp in the corner throws its low amber circle. Beyond it, at the edge of where light becomes shadow, Rajan sits in the armchair with his hands folded in his lap like a man in a waiting room. He is watching me. I am watching the ceiling.

I found the rabbit at the back of the drawer where I put things I don't want to explain. It is smooth, a pale lilac that looks gray in this light, lighter than I remember — almost nothing in my hand. But I hold it the way you hold something you have decided on.

The cotton of my nightdress is so thin from years of washing that I can feel the humid air through it. I pull the hem up past my knees with one hand, slowly, not for him, not performing anything. This is the motion of a woman who is trying to remember something. The fabric settles against my thighs and I breathe in once, all the way down, and let it go.

I do not look at him.

He came home four days ago from seven months in Hyderabad. He brought Mysore pak from a shop he knows I like, wrapped in wax paper, and set it on the kitchen counter without saying anything. We ate dinner. We were polite. At night he has slept on the far edge of our bed, his back a careful geography of distance, and I have lain awake listening to this rain that started the day before he arrived and has not stopped.

He used to put his hand flat against my sternum when he couldn't sleep. Just that. Palm down, warm, like he was checking that I was still there.

The vibrator hums when I press the button — low, almost private, nearly lost under the ceiling fan and the rain. I trace it where his hands would have gone if he were still the man who knew the particular geography of me. Slow. The way he used to be slow, before the months of distance taught him to be a stranger.

My jaw tightens. I keep my eyes on the ceiling's water stain, the one shaped like nothing in particular, and I breathe out through my nose.

From the armchair, I hear the small sound of him shifting his weight. He does not speak. I almost want him to. I almost want him to say my name — Priya — the way he used to say it when it was a question and an answer at the same time. But he doesn't. And I don't ask him to.

The rain keeps its conversation with the roof. The lamp holds its amber circle. Somewhere inside that distance between the armchair and this bed, between the man he was and the man sitting with his hands folded, something waits — not yet spoken, not yet crossed.