Four
It’s part of what they do now. There’s a new routine, a shared one. Breakfast in the morning, reading quietly late at night. In the afternoon, they curl up together on her big old bed for a nap. He wraps his arms around her and she sleeps.
Alta noite is still her time, the hours after midnight. She has the shows she tivoed earlier in the evening for company. Watching one episode of Project Runway together with him had not been fun. She won’t put him through that again. It’s easier this way, since she isn’t going to sleep at all anyway. She sits in the dark and stares at the images bleeding across the screen, her fingers occasionally tracing the cool waxy surface of the scar on her hip. He doesn’t ask her to come to bed and she tells herself that she’d only keep him awake if she did.
The scar doesn’t change.
The couch is perfectly comfortable when she can’t keep her eyes open for another second.
The afternoons don’t count.
It began that day she asked him to help her rearrange the furniture. They spent several hours moving the couch around, first here, then there, chairs and bookcases and tables all taken by surprise along the way. She got clumsy when she started getting tired. Her granny’s vase suffered for it. In the end, exhausted and near tears, she had him put everything back the way it had been. Nothing new worked quite as well as the old way.
It made her mad.
“I need to lie down for a while,” she told him. Her hip hurt and her head tingled in an ominous way.
Stranded in the center of her bed, she fretted. They had wasted a lot of time and energy, her body ached, she needed to get up to start dinner soon, tired, so tired, but she couldn’t make her head get quiet enough for sleep. She tossed and turned and thought about Emilie’s vase. He’d been so nice and she felt bad about taking advantage of his kindness.
The clock said one thing, then barely changed its mind.
When he opened the door to the bedroom, she looked up at him expectantly.
“I believe I need a nap, as well,” he said. “May I join you?”
“Yes, of course, I’m getting up in a minute anyway. I can’t sleep.”
Awkward at first, they ended up spooned together, his arm a warm weight across her body, as though it had always belonged there. She was watching the clock, wondering if it worked or not, and then it was nearly two hours later. His breathing was slow and steady. When she turned her head to look at him, he smiled, awake.
Most days now, right around the same time, he taps the face of his watch with his finger.
“Naptime.”
Four o’clock.
The afternoons don’t count.
Muse: Ynez Castillo
Fandom: Original Character
Word Count: 480ish