50. Jae #4
We collapse together. A tangle of limbs and sweat-damp sheets and the particular, bone-deep exhaustion of people who have just been entirely honest with each other’s bodies.
My weight comes down on my forearms, then shifts to my side when I remember I’m twice her size and crushing her is probably counterproductive to the whole experience.
She doesn’t seem to mind. Her leg stays hooked over my hip, her forehead pressed to my chest, her breathing coming in slow, deep pulls that I can feel against my ribs.
The morning light has arrived in earnest now.
It cuts through the half-drawn blinds in long amber bars, throwing stripes across the rumpled sheets, across her back, across the wall where her handprint is probably visible in the plaster from where she braced herself.
The coffee maker has gone silent in the kitchen.
The city hum continues outside—louder now, the particular midmorning drone of traffic and construction and the million small sounds that make up a Tuesday in Los Angeles.
Neither of us speaks. The quiet between us is the good kind—the kind that doesn’t need filling, that exists because there are no words urgent enough to interrupt it.
Amiyah’s hand finds my chest. Her fingertips trace slow, aimless patterns across my skin—down the center line, along a rib, across the dip above my stomach.
The touch is light. Exploratory. The kind of touch that isn’t asking for anything, isn’t promising anything—just acknowledging, with the particular unhurried precision that is entirely hers, that we are here.
That we are both here, in this bed, in this light, with the dried drool spot on my collarbone and the handprints on my back and the particular, catastrophic truth of what comes next suspended somewhere above us, temporarily held at bay by the simple fact of her fingers on my skin.
I notice, with the particular sharpness of attention I reserve for things that matter, that she is carefully avoiding the dried spot on my collarbone.
Her patterns steer clear of it—looping around the edges, tracing the perimeter without crossing the center, like the spot itself is a landmark she has decided is off-limits.
The observation lands in my chest and stays there, warm and private, a joke I will keep entirely to myself because sharing it would require acknowledging that I noticed, and acknowledging that I noticed would require her to murder me, and I have plans for the rest of the day that do not involve being murdered by the woman currently tracing circles on my sternum.
I catch her hand mid-pattern. Her fingers go still in mine.
I bring her palm to my mouth and press a kiss to the center—deliberate, unhurried, the kind of kiss that has no audience and no performance and exists solely because I want to put my mouth there and I can.
Her skin is warm. Soft. The particular texture of someone who moisturizes with the same precision she applies to everything else in her life.
She looks up at me. Her hair is a disaster.
There’s a crease on her cheek from the pillow.
Her eyes are soft, the particular softness that only appears when she’s stopped performing entirely, when the carefully maintained walls have come down and what’s left is just her, unedited and present.
The smile she gives me is small. Private.
Not the polished one she deploys for the world—the symmetrical, camera-ready expression that says I am fine and I am capable and I have everything under control.
This is the real one. The one with the slight asymmetry, the one that starts at the left corner of her mouth and takes its time reaching the right, the one that reaches her eyes in a way the other one never quite manages.
I hold it in my chest. Like something I am not ready to put down. Like a photograph I am still burning, frame by frame, into a memory that will have to last longer than it should.
The city hum continues. The coffee sits in the kitchen, probably gone cold by now.
The blush sectional waits in the living room, her pink throw pillows arranged alongside my gray ones in a configuration that neither of us planned and both of us recognize as permanent.
Outside, Los Angeles is having a Tuesday.
People are going to work. Traffic is backing up on the 10.
Someone is getting coffee at Beaned & Brew’d and arguing with the barista about oat milk.
The world is doing what it does, relentless and indifferent, and in this bedroom, on this mattress, with this woman’s hand in mine and her smile in my chest, none of it matters.
Amiyah’s fingers resume their slow trace across my skin. My thumb moves in a small circle against her palm. The future is entirely, blessedly suspended—not gone, not solved, but temporarily held at arm’s length by the simple, catastrophic fact of now.
We do not move to get up. The coffee can wait. The world can wait. Everything can wait.