Glass Skin

They come on a Tuesday, the hour late enough for headlights but not dark--November's an in-between month, like someone halfway through a gesture. From the window, behind my thinning net curtains, I watch them unload a life in segments. First the mother, sharp at the edges, quick-limbed, almost twitchy in her efficiency, as if coordination were something borrowed and nearly overdue. Then the father, round-backed and stolid, his face hidden by the flat weight of boxes. Last, the daughter--early twenties--trailing like a dislodged thought, her head bent so far into her phone she bounces off the frame of the door without seeming to register pain. A box slips from her hands. Uni paperwork, I think--the corner marked 'Course Handbook, 2023/24.'

Amber would have made them a cake. Something lemony with cracked glaze and ribbons of zest curled like wedding confetti. She's always like that--turning small acts into rituals, letting kindness soften the world's rough architecture. But I don't bake. I count instead. Twelve boxes. One mattress. A tall lamp with a broken neck. The girl's shoes are cheap, soles bald and the toes chewed soft, as if gnawed by dogs or time.

Our buildings stand close enough I can stretch my arms and almost touch the brick of theirs--maybe six, seven metres. In summer we live in one long exhale: open windows, curry smells, overlapping sitcom laughter, the faint watery splash of someone's bath. But now it's November, and all that has shut. A season of muttering kettles and single socks on radiators.

I work from home. "Home" meaning this one-bedroom flat with its pale carpet and the faint smell of mouse poison that clings no matter how often I clean. I build things meant to look like openness--chat systems, login screens, tiered protection protocols. Interfaces meant to hold people just far enough from each other that they'll feel close. I'm good at this. I build boundaries no one notices. Like God with a UX degree.

My desk faces the wall. A concession to focus. My screen is angled just enough that, in the empty slivers between windows and code, I can glimpse across. The daughter's bedroom sits flush with mine. She's nineteen, maybe twenty. The age where mascara still looks like rebellion. At night her room glows blue, soft and even, like something beneath an aquarium lid. Her shape moves in it--fluid, deliberate. She opens drawers with both hands. Sits gingerly. Her presence feels respectful, as if the air were sacred and not to be stirred.

Amber calls every other Sunday. She means well in the way people mean well once they've fixed their own lives and find yours slow and gummy with old decisions. "Any progress with dating?" she asks, and I tell her about the woman in the coffee shop who asked for my number. I don't tell her the number I gave was off by one digit. Just one. Enough to ensure silence. Enough to make sure if the woman did try, she'd feel rejected by the universe and not by me.

"Fern," she says--always my name, never 'sis' or anything sentimental--"relationships require vulnerability," she tells me.

I nod. She can't see it, but I do. The nod is true, and useless.

There's something inside me, a thing not quite broken but no longer working. Like a piano with too many keys stuck, each note holding too long or not at all. I don't cry. I sleep. I eat eggs most nights. The way forward, they say, is to pick a direction and begin. But I don't know if forward is a place. I'm not sure it ever was.

Winter has settled in, not with a storm but with a kind of quiet insistence--early dark and cold glass, breath fogging and vanishing, breath again. The space between our buildings shrinks with the season; shadows fall sooner and stay longer, clinging to the brick like mildew. The windows turn first into mirrors, then, with the click of a switch, into little stage boxes, each holding a separate scene: a mother scraping crumbs from a highchair tray, a man in a tie eating cereal over the sink, the girl--my girl, I've come to think--moving around her room in that aimless, adolescent drift.

Tonight she stands still. In profile at first, all pale limb and hesitation, like a deer sniffing the air. The light behind her is off, her figure carved out in the vague flicker of her screen. There's something broken-open about her face, as if sweetness has started there and not quite finished forming. Her shoulders turn, she sees me, and smiles. That thin, incandescent smile--God. It splits me. Not in half, but open.

I lift a hand. She lifts one back.

After that, we begin... something. A rhythm of nods. Glances held for the span of a breath. A near-wink one night that makes my ribs hurt, sharp as laughter held too long. Sometimes I catch her curled on her bed reading, knees up like a child's. Sometimes sketching, head bowed over the paper with reverence. Once I see her shoulders juddering. Silent crying--the worst kind. I look away, not out of cowardice but respect, and keep my light on. A signal. A room-shaped kindness. I want her to know she's not alone, even if we are both pretending to be.

Sunday. Amber again.

"Have you been out?" she asks.

"I'm fine." Across the way, the girl is pinning something to the wall. A drawing, maybe. I can't make it out. "Work keeps me busy."

"You should come visit," she says. "I repainted the spare room. Sage green--gorgeous."

I lean against the window. The chill of it spreads across my forehead like balm. Below, the courtyard's choked with sodden leaves, caught mid-death. "Maybe next month. Work's manic right now."

"That's what you said in September." There's an edge now, like she's standing on something narrow. "And July. And--"

"I know." My reflection grimaces back at me. In the window opposite, the girl's light flickers, then dies. "I just need..."

"What, Fern? What do you need?"

The silence stretches, not taut but limp. The kind that's been stretched and reused too many times. Across the way, a pigeon settles on the sill, pecks at invisible crumbs, and hops in that uncertain way birds have, like they're not fully convinced of the earth.

"I got your card," I say. "The glitter got everywhere."

"You didn't call."

"No." I draw my finger through the condensation on the glass. "I'm sorry."

She sighs. I picture her in that suburban kitchen of hers, bathed in warm light, her sleeves pushed up, wrists dusted in flour. Stress-baking. That's how she mends things--through making, layering sweetness into every empty space. I, on the other hand, cope by subtraction. By quiet. By making myself disappear.

"Fern," she says. Soft now. "You're thirty. You can't hide forever."

She doesn't get it. Hiding isn't some decision I make over tea. It happens. Like recoiling. Like breath catching when the wrong voice fills the room. I hear him sometimes, even now. That night-oiled command: *Show me how much you love each other.* And love--that word. It spoils in me, thickens like cream left too long out in the heat.

I don't answer.

She sighs again. It's smaller this time, and heavier, and I wonder if she's thinking about him too. "Well. I guess you keep being you."

It hits me in the chest. Not the words--her voice. The bitterness blooming there. I flinch. Lay my hand flat on the windowpane, feel the cold bite. "I should go. I've got a deadline."

"Okay." A pause. "Just... call me sometimes, okay? Don't wait for Sundays."

I nod. Say nothing. After we hang up, I keep my hand on the glass until it leaves a clear, perfect print. When the warmth fades, I press it there again. And again. Until my fingers go numb.

That night, I dream of deep water. Not blue, but black. I swim through it weightless, surrounded by watching eyes--eyes that blink in and out like distant stars. None of them speak. But I know they see me. That, somehow, is worse.

* * *

I still don't know her name. That's part of the bargain, or is--until she starts slipping herself out of silence in the only way she seems to know how. Drawings, first. Pinned or taped to the inside of her windowpane, each one left like an offering. At first they are plain, almost decorative: a bird mid-wingbeat, a thin tree drawn with fingers that understand winter. Then faces. Not mine, not hers. A woman maybe, maybe not. And then they shift--hands clasping bars, eyes open in darkness, screaming mouths sealed by the silence of graphite. It isn't attention she wants. It's release.

I answer her with notes of my own, scrawled in thick marker on the back of old envelopes, stuck to the glass. "Beautiful work." "Keep going." "The light in that one is perfect." Small encouragements. Half-forgotten compliments I wished someone had once said to me. She replies, too. "Hello." "Thank you." "Nice to be seen." Her handwriting, round and upright, bears the tremble of someone trying to be neat for strangers.

I keep them all. Not the paper itself--I'm not sentimental like that--but photographs. A small album on my phone, encrypted like everything else I care about. A catalogue of almosts.

Then one evening, the walls begin to bruise with sound. Not the usual things--cutlery slammed, a television turned too loud, sighs sharpened by routine--but real shouting. Raw, shaped like knives. I stand at the window, helpless, her light blinking in and out, on-off, on-off, like code. Like SOS. Like pain spelled in binary.

When it stops, it is worse. Her light doesn't return.

The next day, her mother intercepts me at the bins. Perfect teeth, perfect lipstick, a smile polished and printed, like an ad from a time before discontent. "You must be the neighbour," she says, gripping a bag of recycling with two manicured fingers. "Lara mentions you sometimes. The woman who writes."

"Cyber security," I say, dry.

"Same difference, isn't it?" Her laugh is high, hollow. "She spends too much time alone. Her father says she ought to be more... active. More normal."

I don't say anything. *Normal*--that old curse, the blade that shapes and shames. The measure no one survives uncut.

That night, hair damp from the shower, I stand at the window again. The robe around me smells of steam and fabric softener. I write a note. *Lara?* My handwriting still rough, still apologetic.

She replies: *Yes. What's your name?*

It takes longer than it should have to answer. *Fern.*

*Pretty*, she writes.

*Thanks.*

The air through the open window has a texture--cool and familiar, like old cotton. I shift, and the robe parts slightly, slipping open at the chest. I catch it--too late. Her eyes meet mine across the quiet span of brick and light. She freezes. Her cheeks flare. I feel it too, that prickling startle of being truly seen, not in gesture or drawing, but in skin.

She turns away. Not rejection--just the only response she has left. That brief, charged collision of gaze now sealed in the folds of night.

Later, I sleep, if that's what you call it. I drift somewhere between body and screen, and in the dream I'm pixels--just data, broken light--scattering. Dissolving across a field of endless white, no edges, no gravity. No hands. Just the silence of unbeing. And eyes watching me fade.

* * *

The following night, I leave the curtains open. Not wide--just enough. A sliver of self revealed like a sleeve slipping down the arm, half by accident, half in offering. I'm in a towel still damp from the shower, the air sharp against skin scrubbed pink. I prop one leg onto the bed, the other steady on the ground, and start to work lotion into my thigh. Not hurried. Not ashamed, not really. Just slow. Deliberate.

My heart beats in my mouth. My fingers shake.

Across the way, she's there. Not moving. Just present, which is more than most people manage. I keep going, my hand smoothing cream into skin, tracing the old crease where muscle meets hip. When I finally glance up--too fast, too sudden--she's gone.

The quiet after is its own kind of ache. It settles deep, like dust behind the radiator, something you notice too late. I pull the curtains shut, the towel still around me, and sit at the foot of the bed with regret spread wide across my chest. There are lines here I haven't named, only felt--and I've crossed one. It feels wrong, not in a loud way, but in the silent press of guilt that lingers beneath sleep.

I leave them closed for three days.

When I open them again, she's there--light on, desk cluttered, her spine in that familiar gentle curve of someone hunched over thought. She looks up. Sees me. And something in her shifts. She stands. Comes forward.

She writes: *Where you been?*

*Sorry.*

*It's okay.*

That's all. That's enough.

After that I stop measuring what I reveal. I let light spill where it will. I move unguarded. Sometimes wrapped in knit things with holes in the sleeves, sometimes in nothing that counts. Her art changes, too. The drawings she pins show faces with eyes burned out, black voids where sight should sit. As if watching were violence. As if being seen hurts.

One afternoon I pass through the room in something barely there--fabric so thin it seems to ask forgiveness from the air. She looks up. Our gazes meet. I freeze. And then she drops her head and attacks the paper in front of her. Scratching, tearing. Unmaking whatever she'd been building.

Still. That current. That live-wire knowledge of being seen. It doesn't repel. It ignites.

We fall into rhythm. A choreography of glances and ghost-touch. She comes home at seven. At seven-thirty, I shower. At eight, she sits at her desk, head bent, while I pose. The patterns comfort me. I write code every day for clients who'll never know my name, but this--this I learn by heart. One-zero-one. Presence and absence. Look and be looked at.

Sometimes, I press my palm against the glass, soft and still. Not in longing, but communion. A way of saying: I know. She does the same. Our hands, flattened on opposite sides of the pane, almost touching, almost warm.

I write: *I see you too.*

In the morning, her reply is there--a drawing in the window, smudged at the edges by condensation. It's me. In a nightie. Hand on the glass. Face turned, the neck caught in that exact tilt it takes when you hear your name in a crowd. The fabric clings--subtle, respectful. The shadow of a breast presses underneath, not obscene, just true.

But it's not the body that stops me.

It's the space between lines, the way her pencil has left something there I can't name. A held breath. A question. A wound. Or maybe just... a wanting that doesn't know yet what shape to take.

I stare at it until the sun eats the drawing, melting the paper's edges into glare. And even then, long after it's gone, I feel it. The ghost of being seen and not looked away from.

Things move faster after that. I give her more to draw--slow stretches near the window, a kind of moving stillness. I let light fall where it will. The towel slung low. A shoulder turned, bare.

Her sketches change. They turn raw. I begin to see myself through her hunger. Me, draped across a bed I've never made. Bent forward at the sink, the swell of my arse catching the light as imagined water coils down my spine. Images I haven't lived, only dreamed--if that. As if she's tunnelled into me and stolen things I haven't admitted even to myself.

I write: *You see too much. I can feel your eyes on me. Do you dream of me?*

No words come back.

Just pictures.

One of me on my stomach, face turned her way, hair loose and mouth parted. Another--my wrists bound, face lifted, as if in offering or plea. The lines in that one stutter and blur, like she's tried to hold too many versions of the same moment at once. Memory collapsing into want. Truth folding into fiction. The paper warps.

My sister tells me I'm withdrawing. "*Connection isn't just observation, Fern.*"

But she's wrong. Or speaking from a world I've long since stepped sideways out of.

Every night I shed a little more of myself--less performance, more permission. I become more real inside Lara's gaze than I've ever managed in my own. My body becomes interface and firewall both. A threshold. Something seen and not quite seized.

In the mornings, I find new drawings slipped onto my windowsill. The paper curled at the corners, the graphite smudged where her palm has pressed too hard. Always me. The arch of my back, the way the cotton of a vest clings damp to my thighs, the faint rise of nipple beneath worn material. But beyond all that--something else. She draws defiance, or grief, or ache. She draws the version of me that resists erasure.

And I let her.

The game--if it is a game--escalates. My movements become stitched with invitation. I let the robe fall open as I reach for a book I don't need. I stretch in just bra and knickers, arms lifted, spine arched, skin caught in the exact slant of the desk lamp. I wonder how many sketches she starts before she finds the right line.

She begins to leave them daily.

More explicit. More daring. Me bent over, knees apart. Me straddling air. Me on my knees, neck bare, mouth open. Poses I've never held, not for her, not for anyone. But they feel possible. They feel true.

* * *

The sky is low, the dark thick as velvet. Our windows glow against it, two soft squares--hers and mine--side by side across a corridor of air. I watch her. She's in an oversized t-shirt, hair wet. The kind of careless beauty that can undo you if you let it.

The space between us feels delicate. Breathable.

I grab a notepad. I don't think, just write what's burning at the roof of my mouth: *How old are you?*

Her reply comes fast. Letters careful, printed: *Twenty-one*

My hand shakes as I press pen to paper: *You're so beautiful.*

She reads it. Her head dips. A smile unfurls across her face--slow, almost shy. When she looks up again, her eyes are different. Brighter.

Her reply stops the air in my lungs: *So are you.*

The moment doesn't break. It hangs, suspended in the glow.

And then--still watching me--she reaches for the hem of her t-shirt. Slowly. Like pulling a thread.

My heart thunders. She lifts it, inch by inch. I stand frozen. My breath caught somewhere between ribs and throat, heart bucking like a frightened thing. Across the narrow dark, Lara's fingers toy with the hem of her shirt, not coy, not rushed--just deliberate. My mouth is dry. I don't swallow.

She lifts the fabric. An inch of stomach. Another. Pale skin lit by the warm glow of her desk lamp. The shirt moves up, revealing the soft curve of her ribs, the neat clasp of a white demi-cup bra--sweet, almost modest, almost not. Then over her head, slow, so slow, and when it clears, her hair falls loose, dark waves tumbling across her shoulders like ink bleeding through water.

The air in my flat thickens. My lungs forget how to behave. I reach for my pen with fingers that don't feel like mine. *Don't stop*, I write, the letters sharp with urgency.

She sees it. Smiles. Not bold--brave. That smile says *yes*, says *I was hoping*, says *I'm terrified too*. She brings her hands to the button of her jeans. I hear the sound of it give, though of course I don't--some trick of blood in my ears. Then another. And another. The zip opens like a held breath releasing.

She slides the denim down her legs. Her hips move the way hips must--intentional, unhurried. The jeans puddle at her feet. She steps out barefoot. Her knickers match the bra--clean, fitted, cotton pulled snug across pale skin.

She stands there in her underwear, lit by nothing but lamplight and the spill of street-glow. Her arms hang loose at her sides. She doesn't pose. She just *is*. The shadows collect in the hollows--the base of her throat, the curve where her waist tapers to hip.

I press my hand to the window. The glass fogs beneath it. A mark blooms and stays.

She writes.

I can see her hands shake slightly as she moves the pen. The letters tilt, uneven, tender with hesitation.

*Can I see you?*

The question lands like heat against my skin. My body answers before I do, shivering with the quiet, terrifying thrill of being wanted. Not as symbol. Not as silhouette. But *me*.

I nod. She sees it, and I step back from the window, the glass briefly catching my reflection--a ghost of movement framed by light. My fingers reach the buttons of my blouse, silk-covered and small, slipping free one by one with the quiet crispness of thread releasing from tension. The fabric pools at my feet, slow as water.

I shiver--not from cold, but from the sharp, electric fact of being watched.

The bra I chose this morning was black lace, Brazilian cut, a small act of private defiance I hadn't known I'd need. The colour is stark against my skin, which looks whiter now, moonlit by her gaze. I reach for the zipper at my side--loud in the hush of the room--and draw it down.

My skirt slides. I let it fall.

I trail my nails across my belly, faint scratches that leave pink lines. Goosebumps bloom along the path I trace. Across the gap, I see Lara watching, lips parted slightly, her expression somewhere between reverence and hunger.

Then her hands lift, move behind her back. I watch her fumble with the clasp, the tremble in her shoulders. And then the cotton slips forward--simple, quiet--revealing breasts small and firm, round as fruit, tipped in dark areolas, the nipples pinched and pink in the cooler air. The moment doesn't feel theatrical. It feels *offered*.

She's beautiful. In spirit, in slowness, in the unpractised bravery--the way she doesn't try to perform the moment but lives inside it. Her chest rises quickly now, caught in the momentum of what we've started. Her collarbones glow gold in the lamplight, the shadows dipping below them like fingerprints pressed into clay.

I press my thighs together, my hips tilting slightly forward, the pressure a relief and an ache. I'm wet in a way that's not clean. It feels like confession.

She stands there--half-naked, eyes on mine--and I can't tell who's leading anymore.

Lara hooks her thumbs into the waistband of her knickers. Pauses--just long enough to make the moment tremble. Then she looks up, those eyes still wide, still soft, but hungry too. I nod. It's all I can do. My throat is closed, heart hammering blood upward like punishment.

The cotton slides down her thighs. Snags slightly at her ankle. She steps free, graceful even in hesitation, and stands there--naked.

The light from the street outlines her. Slim hips, slight belly, a dark thatch between her legs. Her pussy visible even from here, a shadow nested in the smooth pale of her skin. Her hands twitch at her sides, unsure. She's offered herself, and now she waits to see what I'll do.

I reach for the clasp of my bra. It comes loose with a small, metallic sigh. The straps slip from my shoulders. My breasts drop free--weight I've carried for years, now suddenly seen. My nipples are already hard. Tender. I think of her tongue there and nearly sink to the floor.

She's nodding, mouthing the word *yes*, and the gesture undoes me.

I let my knickers fall. The air touches my cunt like breath. Wetness threads down my thigh. I'm open in a way I haven't been for anyone in years, and somehow not ashamed. Just here.

Lara watches me. Her lips part. Her gaze is fixed, unblinking. Then she lifts one foot, places it on the sill. Her fingers find herself. She spreads it for me. Pink, wet, glistening like something peeled. I see her--truly--and feel my own sex throb in answer, a deep, low pulse that starts in the root of me and expands outward. My body wants her in a way that terrifies me.

I mirror her, leaning back against the wall for balance. My fingers slide between my folds, already slick. I spread myself for her, two fingers parting the lips. My clit is flushed, almost too sensitive. I circle it, gentle at first, then firmer. Across the gap, Lara does the same.

She tilts her head back. Her hair spills like ink across her shoulder. One hand at her cunt, the other on her breast, fingers pinching the nipple until it darkens. Her body works against her palm--slow at first, then more urgent.

I slide two fingers into myself. Moan without meaning to.

Lara hears it. Or feels it. Her eyes snap back to mine. She doesn't smile, doesn't speak. Just stares.

There's nothing else. The city is gone. The street sounds. The televisions. The boiling air of the pub. All of it drops away.

There is only the window. And the space between us. And the wet, rhythmic sound of fingers on flesh.

My free hand finds my breast, squeezes, the pain grounding me. Lara copies the motion--her tits trembling with each movement. Her mouth falls open, lips wet. A sound escapes her, silent through the glass, but visible. A gasp shaped like surrender.

We're tethered--by breath, by rhythm, by the unseen threads that want spools between bodies. Each shift in her hips calls something out of mine. Each flick of her wrist echoes through my nerves like signal. Her face is flushed, cheeks blotched with pink, a film of sweat matting her hair to the nape of her neck. She's luminous in it--burning and wet and unafraid.

My clit throbs under me. I think of her fingers instead of mine--how they'd feel, how small her hand might be, how carefully she'd part me open.

"Lara..."

The name escapes like a spell, soft and hoarse. Across the gap, the streetlight cuts across her body, highlighting the shine slick on her thighs. Her wetness is visible, unapologetic. It gleams. She's beautiful like this--*raw*, undone by her own hand, willing to be watched.

My legs tremble as I chase the edge. I'm close--too close--but I can't look away. Her eyes hold me there, wide and dark, fixed on mine like I'm the only solid thing in her world.

Her free hand braces against the window. Fingers splay, leaving smeared prints across the pane. I match her, palm to glass, the same gesture. A mirror, a touch we can't complete. If I close my eyes and will it hard enough, I can almost feel her heat on the other side.

The feeling builds. Low and hot. From stomach to cunt, outward and upward. My body draws tight around the centre of it--each breath shallower, each pulse deeper. Across from me, I see Lara tense. Her jaw goes slack. Her pace stutters.

We're close. Both of us. Teetering.

And then--

Pleasure crashes through me. My back arches. I cry out, guttural, cracked at the edges. Come seeps out around my fingers, thick and slow. I tremble in it, mouth open, breath fractured.

Through the blur of orgasm I watch her shudder. Her mouth stretches wide in a silent gasp. Her hand jerks, almost helpless now, and then--she breaks. One last moan caught in the muscles of her throat. Her free hand slaps the window, leaves a streak. Her body shakes like a held breath finally let go.

The world whites out. Static and heat.

I float. Weightless. The only anchor: her eyes. Still locked on mine.

Time loses shape. The noise of the city seeps back in--the blare of a siren, a laugh from the pub, the drag of a bus engine. My thighs are wet. My chest heaves. Sweat cools on my belly.

Across the air, Lara stands motionless. Staring. Her hair wild, her chest rising and falling fast. Her skin is flushed everywhere--cheeks, breasts, belly. She looks like something startled out of hiding.

I don't move. Neither does she.

I press my hand to the glass again. It's cold now. The warmth of us gone. Six metres of air. Sixteen millimetres of glass.

And yet--I have never felt so seen.

She moves, finally. Slowly, like she's trying not to wake something. She bends. Retrieves her knickers. Pulls them on inch by inch, like winding a thread back onto the spool. Her eyes stay on mine, even then.

She reaches for her notebook. Writes something.

When she holds it up, her hands still shake.

*Fuck. x*

I breathe once, then write back.

*Yes. xx*

* * *

Every evening becomes a ritual--an unspoken ballet mapped across brick and windowpane. Our bodies move in tandem, not always in rhythm, but always in response. Some nights we draw it out, touching ourselves slow, feeding heat into each motion until we're shivering. Other nights we're quick, frantic, pressing flesh to glass as if the nearness might collapse the air between us.

Lara's sketches evolve. They loosen, grow bolder, the lines less about likeness and more about sensation. She captures what I didn't know could be rendered--the precise arch of my spine just before I come, the way my fingers disappear inside me, the softened, stunned look that settles in my eyes after. She folds them neatly, tucks them into the corner of my windowsill like love notes or farewell letters, always unsigned.

Then one evening, it shifts.

She stands at the window, fully dressed. No preamble. No undressing. Just a sheet of paper held up in both hands.

*Moving to uni halls next week. Closer to campus.*

My stomach knots. I don't breathe for a moment.

I write back: *When?*

*Saturday. Early.*

The pen feels different this time--heavier, resistant. I press it hard to the paper: *I'll miss this. Miss you.*

She doesn't answer in words. Just lifts her hand and presses her palm to the glass.

I match her. As always.

Our fingers meet in outline--heatless, skin to skin but never. We hold there, remembering. Or I do.

Her hand falls first. Mine lingers, suspended in the cool, a trace of all the nights we've shared, then slowly slides down the pane.

That night I lie in bed, the ceiling a dim blur. I scroll through the gallery on my phone--screenshots, photographs of her drawings, each one a moment fossilised. They're not erotic now. Not exactly. They're *honest*. Fragments of a connection that felt clean, private, outside language. Maybe that's what made it sacred. No demands. No roles. Just want.

When I finally sleep, I dream in light. My body pixelates, reforms. A soft glow on a black screen, assembling bit by bit. I am made again by her gaze.