Silicone Dildo / Toronto Condo / Bathroom Floor / Afternoon

The tile is warm under my palms. That's the first thing I register, every time — not the light coming through the skylight, not the faint push of traffic fourteen floors below, but the specific, even warmth pressing up through my hands and knees, the heated floor doing its quiet work the way it does all winter and into spring when I forget to turn it off. I haven't turned it off. I like it.

I know what I'm here to do. I've known since this morning, when I was reviewing load calculations at my desk and felt the wanting arrive the way a structural problem arrives — not urgently, but with a kind of inevitability, a thing that would need to be solved before I could think clearly about anything else.

The sundress is still on. I didn't see the point of removing it. It's thin enough, old enough, that it doesn't feel like clothing so much as a habit — white cotton gone soft at the hem, the skirt pooling loose around my hips where I've knelt forward. The bodice presses flat across my chest. Below the waist, nothing between me and the afternoon air except the warmth rising from the floor.

I set the dildo on the tile beside my right hand before I came down to my knees. Silicone, mid-weight, the specific blue-grey of architectural concrete. I chose it deliberately. I choose everything deliberately.

The skylight drops a clean rectangle of light onto the floor two feet ahead of me. Spring light, still thin, the kind that doesn't commit. I watch the edge of it. There's a faint tremor of traffic from somewhere on King Street, then nothing. The bathroom holds its quiet around me like a material with good acoustic properties.

I am aware of the warmth before I've done anything to earn it. It's already there, low and specific, the wanting that arrived this morning now present in my body as a kind of pressure — not pain, not urgency, something more like a load the structure is already bearing, waiting for me to account for it.

I pick up the dildo with my right hand. My left hand stays flat on the tile, fingers spread, palm reading the heat.

I don't move yet.

This is the part I've learned to stay inside — the moment between having it and using it, when my body already knows what's coming and the knowing is its own thing, separate from the doing. My stomach contracts once, lightly, the way it does before I commit a line to paper. My jaw is loose. I'm watching the rectangle of light on the tile, the clean geometry of it, the way it doesn't waver.

I exhale. The sound that comes out is quieter than I expected — shorter, cut off somewhere before it finished — and I feel the backs of my thighs shift, a small involuntary adjustment, knees pressing fractionally wider against the warm tile.

I hold the position. The tile holds me back.

I lower my hand.