Work Text:
He wakes up with a start, his hands blindly grasping the empty side of the bed, his eyes wild and unseeing until finally, they settle onto where I sit on the armchair in the corner.
We watch each other. Quietly observing.
He, with his messy curls, dark rings under his eyes as if he hadn’t slept in weeks. He’s still in his jeans, his dress shirt had untucked overnight. There is a sense of wonder in his gaze, an unsure longing in the way he reaches his hand across the duvet as if he could bridge the distance between us with a motion as simple as that.
“It’s a brand-new day”, he whispers in the dusky shadows of our bedroom. “It’s a brand-new day”, he repeats, a prayer upon his cracked lips, and then the corners of his mouth tick upwards into a smile that looks nothing like it did on our wedding day.
“Every day’s a brand-new day”, I answer, the words monotone in their repetition, every bit sacrilege in comparison with his.
I make him eggs in our kitchen, he stands so close next to me that I can feel the heat radiating from his skin, it burns hotter than the stove does.
“I had cereal”, he tells me so quietly I can barely hear him over the sizzling oil, “Every day I had cereal.”
“But not anymore”, I say as the toast pops up.
“But not anymore”, he repeats as his chin drops on my shoulder.
His arms wrap around my waist with a kind of ease we do not share. Not when we first started dating, not when he put a ring on my finger and changed my name, not when the days bled into weeks until years had passed, and we still stuck around each other. A cruel kind of fate; intertwined but never touching, a layer of oil across the ocean, suffocating everything that lays beneath it.
“I love you”, he tells me across the kitchen table. He says it like he is used to it. He says it like a man, who does not fear the beating of his heart.
“What happened”, I ask him as my lips close around the edge of my glass. He likes it when I do—most of the time I don’t.
“I woke up with you in my arms”, he says as if in pain, his fork scrapes against the plate and he flinches while I remain still, “I woke up with you in my arms every day for a year or more. Every day was the same. Nothing I did changed it.”
“What did you do?”, I ask him for the first time. He looks at me, but his eyes are glazed over, when he talks it’s as if through a wall. “I found my way back to you.”
We get dressed in silence. I pick out a dress I haven’t worn in years, but he takes it out of my hands and replaces it with another one.
When I drop my robe in front of him, he does not react. When I step closer, he lifts his hand to my hips, digs his thumb in the soft flesh just beyond the bone. There should have been a bruise there, but he does not remember, it’s been so long.
He kisses me with a reluctance that should not exist between a married couple. He drags his fingers down my spine like we are on a first date. When he pulls off his shirt, he blushes bright and hot.
I dig my teeth into the juncture of his neck until he gasps in pain until his hand pushes against my forehead without any force. The second he lets go I bite down again.
We just ate but I am starving. After a season of fasting, I am ravenous at last and my teeth long for flesh and blood, digging so deep they find bone and maybe underneath those there will be a man, who isn’t a stranger. Maybe underneath those there will be all of that rage we held on for so long.
But he does not react. He strokes my hair as I draw blood. He lays me down and makes love to the person he believes to know.
It starts raining in the afternoon.
He begs me to go outside but I am too heavy to get out of bed, too exhausted to move a single finger.
He curls up in my armchair and peeks out the blinds. The dreary light makes him look paler than usual. Skinnier. A sick man. He’s beautiful.
“What if tomorrow is the same”, I ask him and without looking away from the window he answers. “As long as I’m with you it won’t matter.”
“Were you not with me yesterday?”
He seems to think about that, though, outwards he does not react. “That wasn’t really you, you know”, he says, outside thunder roars, “I know technically it was me who changed but you still felt different.”
“Like a stranger?”
He nods. “I guess so, like a stranger.”
“But I’m not a stranger now?”
He turns away from the window, his eyebrows drawn together. “No”, he says with a certainty that seems to baffle him, “No, you’re as familiar as it gets.”
We don’t eat dinner. When it gets dark again, he finally moves away from the chair and sheds the shirt that had confined him for so long, changes into pajamas he hadn’t worn in years instead.
He presses his lips against my temple.
He is fast asleep when I crawl out of bed and onto the armchair instead. The clock ticks soundlessly away. When the hand passes the twelve the date stays the same.
I watch him fret in his sleep, no longer dressed in comfortable pajamas but instead in jeans and a dress shirt.
Eventually, he will wake up and his eyes will find mine. “It’s a brand-new day”, he would say.
Every day’s a brand-new day.