From the Edge of the Bed

*This one's for the messy mornings where you don't know if you're supposed to stay or go. I hope the ache and the heat both land. Thanks for reading.*

I woke up on my stomach, which was not how I'd gone to sleep, and the first thing I felt was the ache. Low and deep, right where you'd expect it after a night like that. Not a bad ache. A warm one. The kind that makes you pull the blanket up and grin into the pillow like an idiot.

Kayla, I said to myself, you absolute disaster. You went home with a man from a conference.

Well. Technically I went upstairs with him. Same hotel. My room was on the fourth floor and his was on the fifth, and I'd know that better if my legs hadn't been shaking so bad in the elevator.

I lay there a while and let the night come back in pieces. The lobby first. I'd come down at nine to find the vending machines because the comp room had no snacks and I have the self-control of a raccoon. And there he was, this tall guy in a wrinkled button-down, feeding quarters into the machine like it had personally wronged him. David. Thirty-four, software architect, in town for the same childcare conference I was at, because his company builds the scheduling app half the daycares use. He'd matched with me on the app the night before and then done nothing about it, and then there he was in the flesh, swearing softly at a bag of M&Ms that got stuck.

"Need a hand?" I asked.

"I need this machine to respect me," he said, and I laughed so hard I snorted, which, wonderful, great first impression, Kayla.

But he liked the snort. He said it was the first honest sound he'd heard all week. We talked by the machines for forty minutes about nothing. The popcorn smell in the lobby. How the AC in the hotel sounded like a dying lawnmower. His kid, a little, mine not at all because I don't have any except the two I nanny for, which is different. Then he asked if I wanted to see the view from the fifth floor and I said yes before he finished the sentence, and we both knew what that meant.

Here's what I keep coming back to, lying there with my face in the pillow. He paid attention. That's the whole thing. He watched me the whole time. Every new thing, he'd go slow and ask, and when I said more he gave me more, and when I got close to my edge he'd ease back and then push it again, just a little, just enough that I'd groan and say don't stop and he wouldn't.

I'm twenty-eight years old and I've had exactly one serious adult relationship, and it lasted three years and ended a year ago with a guy who thought going down on a woman was a chore he'd already done his quota of. So yeah. Last night felt like being handed a winning lottery ticket by a stranger.

The lube on his nightstand. That's the detail that keeps floating up. A fresh bottle, unopened until he tore it, plus a towel laid out like he'd actually thought about me beforehand. When did a man last think about me beforehand?

My phone buzzed on the nightstand. Six minutes ago, the text said.

David: coffee?

Just that. Lowercase. No winky face, no paragraph about last night. I stared at the ceiling. There was a water stain up there shaped a little like a thumbprint. I thought about the plug, how he'd warmed it between his palms first, how he made me say please before he pressed it in, how my voice cracked on the word and he smiled like I'd given him a gift.

Please, Kayla. You can manage a two-letter reply.

I typed okay and deleted it. Then typed sure and deleted that. Then I got up to pee and winced so hard I actually said "oof" out loud to an empty room, and when I came back I just sent the word okay before I could overthink it again.

He answered in ten seconds. Breakfast nook, 40 min? I can't eat another protein bar in silence.

I laughed alone in my bed. Sure, I typed. Try to be dressed this time.

***

The shower was a tragedy. Marriott water pressure, or lack of it, coming out in this sad whisper like the showerhead was embarrassed to be there. I stood under it anyway and washed the night off, and while I did I found the bruise. Left hip, four fingertips wide, right where his hand had held me steady when I was up on my knees and he was going deep and slow and I was biting my own hand to keep from yelling in a hotel with thin walls.

I pressed on it. It hurt in that good way. I didn't mind one bit.

I dried off and stood in front of the closet in my towel, doing the math on my body. Everything south of my waist was staging a protest. So: no jeans, obviously. The loose gray skirt, the soft one. A tank top. Hair up, minimal face stuff. I am not the kind of woman who puts on a full face to eat hotel eggs with a man who already heard me say please.

Forty minutes goes fast when you spend twenty of it arguing with yourself in a mirror. I left with nine minutes to spare and my heart doing a jog down the hallway.

***

The breakfast nook was this sad little annex off the main buffet, all beige walls and gray carpet like the rest of the place, half full of people wearing conference lanyards. David was already there in the corner with two coffees and a plate of bagels that looked like they'd been baked during a previous administration.

"You got me coffee," I said, sliding in across from him.

"You got yourself waffles last night," he said. "Seemed fair."

"They're out of waffles at breakfast, aren't they."

"They're out of everything at breakfast. This bagel may be a fossil."

I bit into one and he was right, it was like eating a drywall corner, and we both sat there chewing and looking at each other and not saying a word about the obvious thing. The plug. The bruise. The fact that I could feel him in a way that made sitting on a vinyl chair its own little adventure.

"So," he said, stirring his coffee. "The nanny thing. How'd you end up doing that?"

"Long story, short version. I moved here, I answered an ad, and it turned out I'm weirdly good at wrangling two kids under six." I shrugged. "It's not a career. It's a job I don't hate, which puts it ahead of most jobs."

"The conference your people are putting on is about nap science or something?"

"Nap scheduling, actually. There's a whole talk. Charts."

"Charts," he repeated, grinning into his cup. "God help us."

"What about you? Architecture, but software. I don't even know what that means day to day."

"Systems nobody sees. I design the plumbing behind apps." He took a sip. "It's lonelier than it sounds, which sounds lonely enough already."

I asked about his kid. He lit up in a way he hadn't yet, all morning voice gone, this little boy he sees every other weekend, they build with blocks and he pretends the towers are okay when they fall, which is a lesson I could stand to learn myself. Two years since the divorce. Two years of apps, he admitted, mostly women who wanted to be stepmoms by the third date or who vanished when he mentioned the custody schedule.

"And then there's you," he said, "who I met at a vending machine and who hasn't asked me for anything yet."

"I asked for the M&Ms."

"You earned the M&Ms."

It was almost polite, all of it. Almost funny. Two adults eating bad bagels and circling the real subject like it was a sleeping dog. Under the table my knee bumped his and neither of us moved away, and that little point of contact was louder than