overslept

You get ready to sleep, early, because last night gave you almost nothing.

Clothes on. Both of you. Her parents have a habit of arriving early, and neither of you knows the exact hour.
The futon lie only works if you look like you used it. So you shower, pull on shorts and a shirt that smell like her detergent, and come back to find Sandra standing at the foot of the mattress on the floor.

She is kicking it.

Not hard enough to move it. Hard enough to make a point.
As if the futon personally invented the concept of separate beds.
As if cotton on the floor chose this life for you.

“Hey.”

She kicks it again, smaller.

You come up behind her and engulf her the way you did in the window—arms around her waist, chin on her shoulder, the whole of you trying to be enough of a house that she does not have to hate the floor.

“We agreed,”
you remind her, quiet.
“Separate. To be safe. If they walk in at six and I’m in your bed, the shed is the least of the conversation.”

“I know.”
She is still grumpy. Knowing has never stopped her being grumpy.
“I know we agreed. I still hate it. It feels like you’re already gone.”

You kiss her hair and do not argue the feeling. You just steer her toward her own mattress, the real one, and you take the futon like a man serving a sentence he voted for.
The lights go off. The room becomes two outlines and a shark on a shelf.

Laying in your separate parts feels wrong and lonely at once.

The ceiling is the same ceiling you have stared at for years from this exact angle.
It used to be normal. It is not normal anymore.
You hear her turn over. You hear her sigh.
You settle onto your back and try to be a person who can sleep without her spine against your chest.

Not long after, you see it.

A hand.

Sticking out from the edge of her blanket, hovering in the dark above you because the futon is ground level and she does not even have to reach far.
Little grabby fingers, searching, not quite reaching low enough, not quite giving up.

You lift your arm and catch it.

Her hand closes on yours like that was the whole plan.
Not a cuddle. Not a broken rule.
Just contact. A bridge of fingers between the bed and the floor, as if a little bit could stand in for the rest.

Neither of you speaks.

She does not let go.Twenty minutes in, your arm is a dead thing raised into the dark.
All the blood has taken a vote and left. You try to ask, reasonably, whether you can put it down.

The answer is not language. It is an angry noise from the bed.
A small, offended sound, like you have suggested cutting a treaty.

“Sandra. We can’t sleep like this. My arm is gone.”

A little “okay,” grudging, whispered.

Seconds later she is on the futon.

She drops onto you with the blanket still half-attached to her, shoves her face into your chest, and tells you to shut up when you start to protest. The words come out muffled and sure.

“We’ll just wake up early. It’ll be fine. Stop talking.”

You are too tired to argue with this adorable gremlin.
The last two weeks have sanded your willpower down to a stub.
You surrender. You wrap her up, the way you wanted to all evening, and the fact of the embrace takes you both out almost instantly. Sleep deprivation collects its tax.
There is no plan. There is no alarm you remember setting. There is only her weight and the floor and the dark.

You do not wake early.

You wake to her mother’s voice.

It is not a polite cough at the door. It is an excited scream, aimed down the hall toward her husband, bright and disbelieving and already halfway to delighted.

“Come here—hurry up and come look—”

The room snaps into horrible clarity.

Morning. Real morning.
Too much light.
The futon.
Sandra still in your arms, both of you in the clothes you put on to look innocent, looking the opposite of innocent because you are tangled like you have been that way for hours.
Her hair is in your mouth.
Your dead arm is under her neck.

Sandra makes a sound that is not a word.

You make a sound that is several words stacked on top of each other.

Her mother is in the doorway. Holiday tan.
The exact expression of a woman who has just found the plot twist she has been privately shipping for a decade.

Footsteps. Her father, summoned, appearing over her shoulder.
He takes in the two of you blinking like criminals, and does the quiet thing Sandra predicted—except the quiet thing has a very small, very tired smile at the edge of it.

“We can explain,”
you say, lying.

Sandra has gone scarlet down to her collar. She has not let go of you. That feels important and also like the worst possible choice.

“You overslept,”
her mother says, and it is almost kind, which is worse.
“That’s all right. Hello, John. fancy seeing you like this”