-rj353254- - -eng- Sleeping Cousin

Minutes passed. Or an hour. Time had turned syrupy. A moth bumbled against the screen, frantic and soft. I watched her breathe. In. Out. In. Out. The rhythm began to sync with my own heart.

Then she shifted.

Instead, I sat down on the floor. Cross-legged. Two feet from the chaise.

The night was thick and wet. I could smell the lake, the citronella candle that had burned out hours ago, and something else—her shampoo. Coconut and something green. I watched the dim light from a distant dock play across her face. In sleep, the sharpness in her eyes was gone. The mocking tilt of her mouth had softened. She looked younger. She looked like a stranger. -ENG- Sleeping Cousin -RJ353254-

Her fingers were warm. Light as a fallen petal. She didn’t pull away. She didn’t open her eyes. In that half-dream state, perhaps she thought the chaise was wider, or that the warmth beside her was just the memory of a body.

I should have left. I knew that. The rational part of my brain—the part that sounded like my mother, like every etiquette book, like the unspoken law of cousins and family gatherings—was screaming at me to turn around, to go sweat it out in my tiny room.

Not because she was beautiful, though she was—the sharp line of her jaw, the dark fan of her lashes, the slow rise and fall of her chest. But because she was there . Unaware. Unguarded. Sleeping people exist in a different dimension, one where they cannot see you looking, cannot catch you staring. They are utterly vulnerable, and that vulnerability is a kind of power you steal without permission. Minutes passed

I stopped breathing.

It was the summer of the broken air conditioner, the summer the magnolia trees dropped their petals like crumpled love letters onto the driveway, and the summer I learned that a sleeping person is a locked room.

I did not move. I did not breathe. I simply sat there, her fingertips resting against the bone of my knee, and felt the terrible, exquisite weight of being this close to something I could never have. A moth bumbled against the screen, frantic and soft

A loon called across the water. Long and low and sad. Lena’s fingers twitched, then curled slightly, as if she were holding onto something in a dream.

I froze.

I never told her.