I Let Him Know I Am Here
The house was finally quiet. I know that sound—when the last crib gate is closed, the last pajama top is on, the last story is finished. It is a particular kind of silence, heavy with exhaustion and the good kind of tired that comes from being useful all day.
I am still awake when he comes in. He moves quietly, the way men do when they think their wives are sleeping and they want to be gentle. He does not have to. I am not sleeping. I have been sitting on the edge of the bed, phone in hand, pretending to scroll while listening to him move around the house. The water running in the bathroom. The soft click of the light switch. The way his steps get slower as he gets closer.
I hear him turn off the bedside lamp. The room goes dark except for the streetlight filtering through the curtains. I keep my eyes closed until I feel him settle into the mattress beside me, the weight of him pressing into the side of the bed, the familiar shift as he gets comfortable.
That is when I turn.
His face is half in shadow, one arm under the pillow, the other resting on the blanket beside him. He does not know I am looking. I am watching the way his mouth is slightly open, the way his breathing has slowed into that even rhythm of someone who is actually sleeping. I am tired but my eyes are open and I want to see him like this—unprotected, unguarded.
I slide my hand over the blanket, slow enough that he will feel the difference but not quick enough to startle him. His hand is where my hand goes before I have decided to put it there. I remember the early days of marriage when we were figuring out how we wanted each other, before life got so full of everything else. This is still what happens when I touch him. His fingers curl around mine, not pulling, not pushing, just holding on like he has been holding it for me to find.
"I am awake," I whisper. It is not even a question.
His voice is gravel in the dark. "Could not sleep either?"
Something in the way he says it makes my stomach do that thing where I get a little breathless. Maybe it is the exhaustion. Maybe it is that after eleven years of marriage I still get that spark when I know he wants me. Maybe it is just that I am a woman who wants her husband.
I let go of his hand and slide my palm down the sheet, past my own hip, past the soft of my stomach, to where he is through the fabric of his boxers. Not urgent. Not rushed. Just there, my hand resting against him, feeling the slow pulse of his body under my palm.
He does not move. He lets me decide what comes next.
That is the thing I love about him, maybe more than the other things. He does not grab. He does not demand. He waits. He lets me choose. And I choose him. Every time.
My hand moves over the fabric, the same motion I learned a thousand times ago, and he shifts his hips into it. Just enough to let me know what I am doing. Just enough to tell me I am doing it right. I do not pull his boxers down. I do not have to. I know where he is. I know how to touch him.
His breathing changes. It is deeper, slower, and when I glance at his face I can see his eyes open in the dark. He watches me watching him. I cannot see his pupils in the dark, but I can feel them. I am the center of his whole world right now and I know that he knows I know that.
It has been a long day. There are emails I have not answered in the morning. There are lesson plans I need to grade for the homeschool co-op meeting tomorrow. There is a kid who will need to be woken up in exactly four hours. None of that exists right now. Right now, there is only this: the dark room, the sound of our breathing, the way my hand can make him say things in the dark that he never says in the light.
His hand finds my face. He does not pull. He does not push. Just rests his palm against my cheek like he is memorizing the feeling of me, like he wants to make sure he knows what I feel like when I am his.
"Hey," he says. Just that. "Hey."
"Hey," I say back. And then I do what I do when I want something and I am too tired to be coy about it.
I let him know. I let him know I am here. I let him know I am his. I let him know that when the house is asleep and the kids are in their beds and the emails can wait, I am still the woman who wants him the way he wants me.
And he answers.