Weekly Writing – October 28 2023

I love you.
He leaned over my bed and whispered it, while I pretended to sleep. Again and again, so close that his breath quivered my eyelashes, the hazy, half-shut camouflage through which I watched him.
His face a black-hole silhouette in the light from the hall, his jaw the fine edge of an event horizon, capturing light. I didn’t know him.
I didn’t know him, and I lay as still as I could, breathing as slowly as I could, in the only bed in the only bedroom of the apartment where I lived alone.
I love you.
His voice merged into the drone of my pulse. A hum like a drain in the universe, a swirling exit for light and sense. He said it eighty-seven times.
I counted. There was nothing else I could do. When he finally stepped back, when he finally left, my bedroom door was the only one that closed behind him.