She wakes beside you with a start.
It jolts you awake, as it always does.
Labored breath and skin flush like molten glass, she is stuttered limbs and a warm, slick back. Terribly awake as she heaves.
You rise, as though a puppet on strings, both of you moving with half empty minds. You wish she could stay dead to the world in your bedroom, asleep, you wish she could stay dead with you. And while the sentiment is hard to form in your brain as something cohesive and whole, to push through an asleep body, you still murmur into the curve of her neck, trace nothingness with your thumb on her trembling palm.
You hold her there with you quietly, barely with a conscious, wrapped on her form simply because she needs you to be, because she holds you the very same when you do, too.
‘’I’m….i need-I need a shower…I’m-yeah. Yeah…’’ Karen doesn’t sound right, out of breath, with her head like a hive, and. And maybe when she parts from you like boats from shore, you can only hum in a sad low little sound, squeezing the last of her fingers before she can slip from you fully. It stings, just so, just enough for a cotton brain. But you don’t follow, nor try and make her curl back into your side, as though poured from the same mold. This is a repeating thing. You know how it is to feel like skin isn’t meant to be on your body when dull aches turn to things which make you gasp and sweat with pains more in your head than engraved on your bones. So, like the shore, you are only left to wait for when she returns.
It is the falling sound of water a room away which reminds you of your heavy soul, empty head, reminds you of the crater next to you you are waiting to be filled again. Which you have crumpled up to soak in the dimming heat of Karens body. And rather easily does the world let you lay dead again, returning to bliss. Barely had you noticed how your eyes had lulled to close, how they will once more.
You wake with the ruffling of sheets, again, you wake. Her room just that bit washed in a lake green with the white sun behind her curtains, or perhaps the flutter of your eyes to greet the view of Karen simply picks and chooses which things your gaze wants to meet. It’s but a flutter, but you saw her, and there’s this way Karen softly huffs and you know you’re smiling honey warm into the side of her pillow case, knowing the red of her high cheeks aren’t from tears. Even if just barely.
She did take that shower, she did come back to your bed whole, warm. Though the wet of her hair is cool on your skin, your chin and neck, and bare shoulder, when you breathe your lover in she smells like your conditioner, and the lake greens you caught in that lazy glance is just a shirt of yours on her skin.
This time it’s her who tip toes her palms across the bare of your skin, it’s her who snakes to find a place in you, sighing when she can accept your embrace again. You warm her, broad and comfortable with every dip and curve, every part of you a beloved map beneath her hands. Hells’ Kitchen will always hiss and creek before birds sing, and she’ll find that ringing of gun shots even far from that night. But here, in her bed (though yours too in coming months), she will have your heart, and your hold, and soft hidden little smiles at just the sight of her.