I woke Saturday with his face still in my mind.
Not a dream just the residue of an evening that had gone somewhere real. The lamplight and the bench and my hand against his jaw and him staying perfectly still while I was there, not making anything of it, just receiving it.
I lay in bed and waited for the regret.
It was the thing that always came after the morning-after assessment, the inventory of what I'd given away, the specific tightening that said: too much, too fast, you've left yourself open and now you have to close it back up.
I lay there for ten minutes.
The regret didn't come.
What came instead was quieter and more disorienting: a kind of calm. Low and even, like a room that had been holding its breath for years and had finally, on this particular morning, exhaled.
I didn'
