Page 110 of IRL: In Real Life
Butter first.
Coffee next.
Then something warmer, richer, unmistakably breakfast.
That got my eyes open.
I turned onto my back slowly and looked around his room. My dress was folded over the chair by the window, which struck me as both sweet and dangerous. My heels sat neatly beside it. My jewelry had been gathered onto the dresser instead of left wherever I had abandoned it in the dark. His side of the bed was empty, the sheets pulled back and cooled.
The condo was quiet in that early-morning way that made every small sound matter.
A cabinet door.
A pan on the stove.
The low hum of the refrigerator.
The city waking up somewhere below us without knowing what had happened in one of its rooms.
I sat up and hissed softly at the pull between my thighs.
“Worth it,” I muttered to nobody.
A black Sunspel T-shirt waited folded at the foot of the bed, and that got me too. Soft cotton, expensive in that understated way men with real taste understood. I pulled it on and let it fall over my body, the hem grazing high on my thighs.
It smelled like him, but not the way I had expected.
Not cologne exactly.
Whatever warm, expensive, faintly addictive thing I had been catching on him all week was partly his fabric softener. Something soft and fresh and masculine tucked into the cotton itself.
That realization should not have done anything to me.
It did.
I had fallen asleep naked after our rinse-off shower, loose and satisfied and too tired to do more than crawl back into his bed. Now his shirt made me feel held in a different way, and that was almost worse.
I padded barefoot toward the bathroom first, because there were limits to how casually I could greet daylight after the kind of night we had had.
And there he was again.
In the details.
The new toothbrush still in its box. The fresh washcloth. The bath sheet folded on the shelf. Gentle soap at the sink and in the shower. He had thought of all of it. Thought of me. Not in some performative way either. In the quiet, useful way that mattered more.
I brushed my teeth like a civilized woman because I could. Washed my face properly. Ran wet fingers over my edges, though calling them decent afterward was generous considering the little curls trying to live their own life around my temples.
Then I looked up and caught myself in the mirror.
My mouth looked fuller. My skin looked better than it had any business looking on a workday morning. My whole face had that softened, satisfied look of a woman who had been pleased with intention and then slept in the middle of it.
My phone sat charging on the bathroom counter where I had plugged it in sometime in the night after we rinsed off all the evidence of ourselves and went right back to each other. I reached for it and saw the time.
Later than I liked.
Not disastrous.
But late enough that getting downtown, getting dressed, and getting into work on time would require a speed I had no desire to perform.
