morning wishes

The next morning comes soft.

Sun finds your face first—blinding, warm, the kind of light that makes the sheets look unfairly expensive. You turn to bury yourself and steal another stretch of sleep, and instead you find a fallen angel. Most people would argue summoned devil. She is beautiful all the same. Sandra is still relaxed into the mattress, mouth slightly open, one hand curled near her cheek like she lost a fight with the pillow and accepted the terms. Maybe she is dreaming. You do not ask.

You just look at her.

It goes on long enough that it might even be a bit creepy, the way you try to commit every detail to memory: the faint crease on her cheek from the sheet, the messy halo of hair, the tiny twitch of her brow, the way sleep takes all the performance out of her face and leaves only the girl you have known since you were small. You have seen this face a thousand mornings in other contexts—across a classroom, across a couch, across a controller. It is different when it is allowed to be this close on purpose.

You scurry over carefully.

The mattress dips. You take her into your arm like she might break, which is a lie she would mock you for if she were fully up. You smile stupidly into her hair. She makes a quiet, approving little noise—cute enough to be illegal—and adjusts her posture without opening her eyes, fitting her shape into yours like the two of you were cut from the same leftover piece. A knee slides between yours. Her forehead finds the hollow under your jaw. The sun keeps pouring over both of you and neither of you fights it.

She is already awake. Just dozing. Riding the same warm stupid morning you are.

“Five days,” she complains, voice rough with sleep, still not lifting her head.
“We only have five days left of peace. Waking up like this. Same bed. No one walking in. No lectures. No having to pretend we didn’t just invent a whole life in my parents’ house.”

The words are small. They still land.

You hold her tighter without making a speech of it. Five days of this exact thing: sunlight, her weight, the quiet after all the noise you two have made. After that the house fills again. The holiday ends. The world gets to have opinions. She says it like she is already mourning the mornings, which is how you know she means it.

“Then we use them,”
you murmur into her hair.

Sandra hums, unconvinced and comforted at the same time.

“I like this version of us,”
she says.
“The one that doesn’t have to get up. The one that gets to stare. Don’t tell me you weren’t staring. I could feel it. Creep.”

“I was collecting evidence.”

“Of what.”

“That you’re real.”

She pinches your side, weakly, and then leaves her hand there.

The room smells like clean sheets and yesterday’s soap and her. Outside, the damaged shed is still damaged. The pills are still ash. The group chat is still on her cracked phone. In here none of that gets a vote yet. There are five days left of waking up in the same bed with her in your arms, and she has already started counting them like coins.

You press a kiss to her hairline and let her doze against you while the sun keeps doing the only job it has.

She starts to think.

You can feel it happen against your chest: the doze thinning out, the complaint about five days turning into something with a shape. Sandra traces a slow line on your skin and talks into the hollow of your throat like the sun has made her brave.

“What if we move out together.”

It is not a joke when she says it. Not fully.

“Yeah, we’re both in university. I know. But maybe we find something small. Maybe Lila has connections through their company. Maybe our parents help us pay for it and she knows a place that isn’t a hellhole. We wouldn’t need much. A bedroom. A kitchen that isn’t this one. A door that locks because it’s ours.”

The dream builds whether you are ready for it or not.

You add a window that gets this same morning light. She adds a couch that is allowed to be wrecked. You add her stupid land shark on a real shelf instead of a shoe rack. She adds your games in a cabinet that does not belong to her parents. The two of you talk over each other, correcting details, stacking a life that does not have a holiday countdown on it. It is the scenario you have both dearly wished for in the quiet hours and never put in the same sentence until now.

Then you jinx each other.

You say it at the same time, the same cadence, the same cursed accuracy:

“We’d fill it with dozens of brats if we were left unchecked.”

The laugh that follows is violent.

It knocks the air out of the bed. Sandra snorts first, then howls, then hides her face in your chest because she cannot look at you and survive it. You are no better. Every time one of you tries to breathe, the truth of it sets you off again. You would. That is the problem, knowing each other so well that it isnt even a question. That is the joke. Left in a flat with a door that locks and no one to knock, the two of you would not be responsible adults with a study schedule. You would be a feedback loop without limits.

It takes a while to calm down.

Tears at the corners of her eyes. Your ribs aching. The sun still stupidly gentle on the wreck of the moment. When the laughter finally thins she is flushed and shining and looking at you like the joke did not finish when the sound did.

Because you both know how true it would be.

Also... that girl has a hair trigger on her switch.

just mentioning breeding relentlessly—dozens of brats, unchecked, a home that would not stop you—has her heated again.
You feel it in the way her thigh tightens over yours. In the little shift of her hips. In the way her voice drops when she tries to pretend she is only wiping her eyes. Her hand creeping down your shirt to search for the hem of your boxers.

“That’s not fair,”
she mutters.
“We were having a nice hypothetical.”

“You started the hypothetical.”

“I started apartments. You said brats at the same time I did. That’s on the universe.”

“thats on us”
You correct her with a kiss

She kisses you back anyway, still smiling, still dangerous, the dream of a shared place sitting in the room next to the fact that five days is all you officially have and neither of you has ever been good at leaving a thought unfinished.