Silicone Dildo, January Apartment, His Eyes

The radiator clicks twice, then goes quiet, then clicks again — a sound I have stopped hearing except when I need something to track that isn't him. He pulled the chair to the foot of the bed before I was ready, before I had decided whether I was doing this or only thinking about doing this. He sat down, still in his coat for the first minute, and now the coat is folded over the arm and he hasn't moved since. Twenty minutes. I know because the radiator has its own rhythm and I have counted it without meaning to, the way you count anything when someone is watching you and you need somewhere else to put your attention. The lamp on the nightstand is the only light. It makes the room small and amber and it makes the chair — and him in it — a shape at the edge of what I can see clearly. He doesn't lean forward. He doesn't speak. He sits the way someone sits when they have decided that patience is its own kind of pressure, and he is not wrong. The sleep shirt is thin. I know how it looks from where he is sitting: the hem at the top of my thigh, the fabric gone soft from too many washings, the way it settles when I am still and shifts when I am not. I am not still. I have not been still since he sat down. The silicone is smooth and slightly cool where I first picked it up, warmed now from my own grip. My right hand holds it. My left hand is pressed flat against my sternum, against the cotton, feeling my own pulse there — a thing I did not plan and have not moved. The weight of the toy is specific, deliberate, a thing I chose from a drawer while he watched me choose it, and that choosing feels like part of it now, like the whole evening has been accumulating toward this moment on the bed with my thighs pressed together and him twelve feet away in the dark. I am watching his face. This is the thing I did not expect: that I would keep looking at him. That I would want to see what he sees. His expression hasn't changed and that is somehow worse than if it had — it is attention without commentary, witnessing without verdict, and it makes something in my chest pull tight in a way that is not separate from what is happening lower down. The radiator clicks. My thighs are pressed together around my own wrist. The cotton of the shirt is rucked up above my hip on the right side and I have not fixed it. I am aware of the air on that strip of skin. I am aware of the weight of his gaze on that strip of skin, which is not the same thing as the air but arrives in the same place. I take a breath. Let it out longer than I meant to. The toy is in my hand. My hand is between my thighs.