It looks the same as it did the night I gave it to him.
His hand curls around the ring and my hand as he carries me into the bedroom. “It’s staying on my neck or going around your finger.”
I NEVER KNEW broken could feel so whole.
That’s the first thing I think as I feel myself starting to wake up. Part of it is the anesthetic of sleep talking, but part of it is me. The shattered me.
Torrin’s arm is caged around me, and his body is tucked beside mine, curled around me from head to toe. His leg is tucked through mine, and his slow breath fogs the side of my neck. I can faintly make out his heart beating against my back, and I can make out other parts pressed up against me below his chest.
I want to fall back asleep and freeze this moment. I don’t want to finish waking up. I want to stay in this world between asleep and awake and feel whole for the rest of my life. But I can’t. I know the moment, like the intact feeling, is ephemeral.
It will pass. It has to. But that doesn’t keep me from enjoying it while it’s happening.
He shifts in his sleep, somehow managing to roll closer. Now I can feel his zipper running against my spine.
We’re still clothed. Mostly. Restraint was something both of us seemed to have a tankful of last night when it came to crossing that final threshold. Torrin knew I wasn’t ready . . . and I knew that while he was definitely ready, it wasn’t the right time. Not yet. My head might have been swimming with the things his body was doing to mine but not so much it drowned out the acknowledgement of what he was.
When he carried me into my room last night, before lowering me onto my bed, he’d stopped. I thought he’d just reminded himself of what he was and given himself a mental cold shower, but he kissed my forehead and whispered something in my ear.
You’re not falling into bed with a priest. You’re climbing into it with me.
I think it was important for me to hear that. I know it was important to him that I believed that. And I did . . . but that didn’t change that he is what he is, just like I am who I am.
In each of our own ways, we’re unavailable.
This still feels right though. So right nothing feels wrong, not even if the Vatican is calling or the media is parading through my apartment.
When his body stirs against mine again, I know he’s waking up. Torrin’s always been a heavy sleeper—he goes through a process before he can wake up. I think sometimes his consciousness thinks he belongs more in the dream world than the real one.
I want to get some breakfast ready for him this morning, and I need to find something to put on because if he wakes up and we’re still like this, getting back to what we spent most of the night doing is inevitable. We wouldn’t be able to stop it, just like a person who rolls a rock to the edge of a cliff can’t stop it from falling. We’ll get trapped on this carousel ride of touching and kissing. I know I’m incapable of stepping off it when I’m with him, and I think he is too. So I need to find a shirt.
Holding my breath, I shimmy down the mattress, kicking the sheets off of me as I move. His arms tighten for a moment—like he can feel me escaping—but when I freeze, they relax. I keep shimmying and sliding. Untucking my head from beneath his arm’s the hardest because I have to lift it a little, and it feels like it weighs fifty pounds.
When my legs are swinging over the side of the mattress, I glance back at him. He’s still asleep. Still wrapped around my phantom shell, hanging on like the nothing around him is all the substance he needs.
I hold my breath and rise so slowly even the mattress doesn’t make a noise. I have lots of practice with this from before, when Torrin would sneak into my room late at night via my roof and we’d make out until my alarm was a few minutes from going off. We both know how to move around a mattress without making a sound.
I pad across my bedroom and tuck behind the half-open door. In the hall, I grab his soccer shirt from the floor and pull it on. The lights are still on. Almost all of them. It’s roughly seven in the morning, and the sun’s streaming through all of the windows, but my whole apartment is glowing from the inside out now too. Thanks to Torrin.
I won’t crawl into bed with the lights out again for a while. I don’t care what adults are “supposed” to do. Most of them don’t know the dark the way I do.
It isn’t just the absence of light—it’s the executioner of it.
The kitchen’s white cupboards are gleaming in the morning light, and I go to the other window in front of the dining table to let in more light. Mom picked up some basic groceries for me yesterday, but I don’t know what she grabbed. Since I still have to remind myself to eat, I didn’t check the fridge or cupboards last night.
What does a girl make for the guy in her bed the next morning?
I lean into the kitchen counter and think about that. If we were still seventeen, I would sneak a can of soda from the fridge and a box of whatever sugary cereal is in the cupboard. But what would twenty-seven-year-old Torrin want? What does he eat for breakfast now? What does he drink?
I don’t know.
Leaning into that kitchen counter, I never would have expected the realization that I don’t know what he eats for breakfast anymore to hit me like it does. I still know him—the man he is at the core of it all—but I don’t know what goes beyond that. At least not much of it.
Like what he eats. What he does in his spare time. What color his toothbrush is. Who his friends are. If he visits his dad’s grave every month. If he still changes his own oil or what candy bar he’d pick from a vending machine. I know the old Torrin answers to those things, but I don’t know the current Torrin’s.