The maneuver is becoming routine. Sage Holloway falling, Archie Rosedale catching. A dynamic that has now occurred with sufficient frequency to qualify as a recurring feature of our interaction rather than an anomaly, and which my bodyhas adapted to by maintaining a constant state of readiness for the specific weight and trajectory of a five-foot-eight Omega whose center of gravity operates on a schedule I have not been provided.
She is light.
The observation arrived during the face-plant rescue before dinner and confirms itself now. Lighter than her athletic frame should produce. Lighter than a woman who consumed two full servings of pasta and a glass of water four hours ago should register on the biological scale that my arms use to calculate load. The kind of light that tells me her relationship with regular meals has not been a consistent one, that the community center training and the communal housing and the years of survival-mode existence have shaped a body that is accustomed to operating on less fuel than it requires.
I am going to feed her every meal until she weighs what an athlete of her conditioning should weigh, and she is going to fight me about it every single time, and I am going to win every single argument because I am stubborn and she is hungry and my pasta is better than whatever frozen convenience food she has been surviving on.
I carry her to my bed.
Not hers. The room she refused to claim, the one sitting empty across the hall with its untouched sheets and its bare walls and its message of temporariness that she internalized so thoroughly she chose to stack her suitcases in the corner of my room rather than unpack in a space she considered borrowed. I carry her past that room and into mine because my bed is warm and her body is already here and redirecting a sleepwalking Omega through a cold hallway to an unheated, unfamiliar room feels like a cruelty my conscience will not permit at two in the morning.
I lay her down.
The mattress accepts her weight with the soft, yielding compression of a surface that has been absorbing my body heat for the last two hours and now offers that warmth to the person I place upon it. She does not wake. Does not stir beyond the minimal, automatic adjustments that a sleeping body produces when its environment changes: a slight curling of the legs, a repositioning of the arms, the nesting behavior that Omega biology triggers during transitions between sleep surfaces.
She mutters.
The sound is quiet, muffled by the pillow her face has already turned toward, the syllables blurred by the specific vocal distortion that unconscious speech produces when the language centers of the brain are operating without editorial supervision.
"Glasses... four-eyes..."
My eyebrow arches.
She is insulting my eyewear in her sleep.
This woman's subconscious has prioritized the aesthetic critique of my corrective lenses as content worthy of transmission through the barriers of somnambulism and into the audible world. Even unconscious, even navigating the surreal architecture of whatever dreamscape her REM cycle has constructed, Sage Holloway has allocated neurological resources to the task of reminding me that my glasses are ugly.
I should be offended.
Instead, I am smiling.
I tuck the duvet around her shoulders, adjusting the fabric with the careful, minimal movements of a man performing maintenance on a sleeping person and treating the task with the same precision he applies to adjusting goalie pads. She shifts onto her side in response, her body curling toward the pillow with the instinctive, heat-seeking rotation of someone burrowing into a scent source.
My pillow.
She claims it with the territorial finality of a woman who has found the precise olfactory coordinates she was searching for. Her face presses into the fabric where my head has been resting for two hours, the cotton saturated with my cedarwood and graphite, and she inhales. Once. Twice. Three times, each breath deeper than the last, her sleeping body conducting a thorough inventory of the scent profile embedded in the pillowcase and responding with a relaxation so total that her entire frame softens against the mattress like a structure releasing the tension it has been carrying since its foundations were laid.
She is scenting my pillow.
In her sleep. Without conscious awareness or deliberate intent. Her biology navigated her body from her assigned corner of the room to the kitchen to my chest to my bed to my pillow, following a trail of cedarwood pheromones through the dark like a compass needle tracking magnetic north.
Her unconscious mind chose me.
Not the refrigerator. Not the water she presumably came for. Not the logical destination that a waking brain would have identified and pursued. Her sleeping self bypassed every rational waypoint and aimed directly at the source of the scent her body has decided constitutes safety.
I decide to leave her alone. Pretend I did not witness this. File the observation underthings Sage's subconscious has revealed about her attachment that her conscious self would deny with the full firepower of her vocabulary if confronted with the evidence.
I walk to the kitchen. Pour a glass of water. Drink it standing at the counter, the cold liquid grounding me in the mundane reality of hydration while my brain processes the non-mundane reality of a woman asleep in my bed with her face pressed into a pillow that smells like me.
I open the cabinet above the sink and retrieve the melatonin bottle that my therapist recommended during the facility stay as a supplementary sleep aid for nights when my brain refuses to honor the circadian contract it signed with the rest of my body. Two milligrams. The clinical dose. Sufficient to lower the neurological noise floor enough for sleep to establish a foothold without producing the sedation that heavier pharmaceuticals impose.
I swallow the tablet with the remaining water. Rinse the glass. Set it on the drying rack beside the plates from dinner.
And return to bed.
The mattress dips under my weight as I lower myself onto the side that Sage has not claimed, which constitutes approximately thirty-eight percent of the available surface area given that she has migrated toward the center during the three minutes I was absent and is now occupying the bed with the expansionist enthusiasm of a sleeping person whose unconscious body does not recognize property lines.
I stay on my edge. Back flat against the mattress. Arms at my sides. Maintaining the specific, rigid posture of a man who is sharing a sleeping surface with a woman he did not invite to this particular location and intends to respect the boundary between proximity and contact despite the fact that every cell in his body is voting unanimously to close the gap.
