She does not move.
I watch her not move. I watch her eyes on mine. She has been awake two seconds, three. Her hand is still at her mouth. Her knee is still bent. Her shoulder is still bare. Her breast is still visible above the sheet. She is looking at me over her own hand. Her eyes are steady. They are not the eyes of a woman who is about to pull a sheet up.
I don't look away.
I am not going to look away. I have already made the decision to be in the chair. I am not going to make the decision to look away while she looks at me looking at her. She has the floor.
Her mouth opens a quarter inch.
She lets a breath out. Her eyes do not leave mine.
Her hand slides. Slow. Not fast. Her hand at her mouth moves down to the pillow. The movement uncovers her mouth, the bow of it, the small stitch of a scar at the corner of the lower lip that I had not seen yet. Her hand lies on the pillow a quarter inch from her chin. The hand is not reaching for the sheet. The hand is not reaching for anything. The hand is lying there.
The sheet is where it is.
The sheet stays where it is.
She looks at me.
She holds the look long past where another woman would look away, and if I were somewhere else, on a radio, in a stairwell, on an engine, I would call it a held look. It is a held look. It is held by her. It is held by the part of her that is notpanicking, which is every part of her. She is awake, she has found a woman she met three days ago sitting in a chair watching her sleep naked, and she is holding the look.
A small heat comes up under her collarbone. I watch it come.
Her lips part a quarter inch more.
She says, "Good morning."
Her voice is low and a little rough with sleep. It is the voice of a woman who has just been looked at the way I was looking at her, and who knows the look, and is not going to pretend about it.
She is sexier than anyone I have ever seen.
"Good morning."
"How long have you been sitting there?”
“A while,” I say.
"Yeah."
A pause. Her eyes do not leave mine. Her hand on the pillow does not move. The sheet on her hip does not move.
"You should have said something," she says. Not quite a sentence. Half a question.
"I know."
"Why didn't you?”
"Because you were asleep."
"I'm not asleep now."
I have nothing to say to that.
Another pause. The light at the window goes pink at one corner. My eyes graze hungrily over her body again.
"Are you going to say something?” she says.
"I don't have anything to say."
