It tasted like cotton and lavender soap and . . . ash? Who ate ash? And the particular dry nothing of—
I opened one eye.
And realized I was biting down on a pillow.
I had amouthfulof pillow.
It wasn’t a corner or an edge. Oh, no, I had somehow, during the night, committed to eating a significant portion of a pillowcase. My mouth was full of cotton and the ghost of whatever detergent Peter used, which was unscented because of course it was, because Peter believed that fabric should smell like fabric and not like “a chemical approximation of a meadow that has never existed.”
And yet, somehow, ittastedlike lavender.
I spat out the pillow.
Squeezed my eyes shut, then blinked.
The world was blurry, which was normal, because the world was always blurry for the first several minutes of consciousness. I wasnota morning person.This cannot be overstated.
I wasn’t even an afternoon person, most days.
I was a person who achieved full cognitive function at 7 p.m., which was convenient for bartending and inconvenient for everything else. The process of waking up for me was less “rising to greet the day” and more “slowly being dragged from a warm, dark place by a universe intent on continuing.”
I blinked again.
Inputs resolved into data. The ceiling was white. The light was, well, morning light. The blinds cast horizontal bars of sun across—
Wait, I didn’t have blinds on my windows. I had curtains like a good gay.
Only then did I realize something was on my chest.
Not something.
Someone.
More specifically, someone’s arm.
A warm, heavy arm lay draped across my bare chest with the unconscious weight of a body that had reached for another body during the night and held on. I felt the forearm against my ribs, the hand resting flat against my sternum, fingers slightly spread. The weight was grounding and specific and absolutely, definitivelynota marshmallow turned pillow or a cat or any of the things that had restedon my chest during the previous three months of sleeping in the foster room.
My brain, which had been operating at approximately four percent capacity, surged to something closer to sixty percent.
Pillow. Blinds. Sunlight. Arm. Chest. Bare skin. Not my arm.
Peter’s arm.
Peter’s bed.
I was in Peter’s bed.
The remaining details arrived in a cascade that my groggy brain processed in the wrong order, like a computer loading a webpage with the images before the text. First, the sheets (not my sheets, higher thread count, Peter sheets), then the mattress (firm, because Peter believed that sleep surfaces should provide support rather than comfort, a philosophical position I disagreed with but that my back was currently endorsing), then the smell (clean, warm, the specific scent of Peter’s skin that I’d learned last night was the same everywhere, consistent and understated and exactly right), and finally, the sound, which was breathing, slow and deep and coming from approximately four inches behind my left ear.
Peter was behind me.
Peter was asleep behind me with his arm on my chest and his breath on my neck and his body curvedtoward mine with the unconscious geometry of a person who had, during the night, arranged himself around another person without waking up, the way water arranges itself around a stone, not because it decided to, but because that’s what water does when something is in its path.
I lay very still and let my brain finish booting up.
Last night had happened. All of it.
The text in the parking lot.
