The heating would have come on by now, creaking its way under floor. She would have been sat propped up, her head to one side. And she would be tired. It was a tiredness she’d never known before, it was something deeper than her muscles, than her blood. It was a solid mass of weight beyond her core and she pushed hard against it.
The wound across her belly throbbed, an alien ache that spread through her form. She would have fingered it with care, fearful of the change, a gentle pressure on the gauze as she breathed out.

His breaths were small, smaller than his form and she would have heard them beside her. They would drift up to her ear and she would hold each one close, a balm to soothe her gash. She would study his contours while he slept, the folds of skin behind his ears, the creases under his eyes.

And she was age and he was new. She would look beyond the old stereo from the first house, reminded of the way she used to dance and she was fragile, brittle. A calcified clump of herself.
She would have heard relatives downstairs, filling flasks, their time to leave and it was autumn, it was colours through her window out of reach.

And while he slept doors would have closed, the echo of aftershave lingering in the quiet of the house. Quiet apart from his breathing next to her and the soft scuff of fabric against her ankle. She would have rubbed one foot across the other, an attempt to warm up her feet and she was still.

Static.

And if she timed it right she would have made it to the bathroom and back before he woke. She would have taken all her weight, hand pressing down on her dressing table, all along the banisters and in the bathroom the vanity unit was cold and her legs were weak.

And manoeuvring herself back onto the bed she would have propped herself up by the pillow. He would have been warm in his fug and she would have had no sense of him with a back pack, no concept of him in the mist, in the autumn bronze with his blazer morphing into others behind the gate.

All she would have known was the home, empty for the first time in weeks, her limbs that resisted her movements. And the resolve, the saturating need to breathe and hold him.

To not think but hold tight and hold on.

The house would be warm by now. The road outside a clutter of noise as people fell into their day. And he would be stirring and she would be watching.

Her primal surge against the scars.