The Way You Dry First

—desire quietly gathers in the spaces where the warmth begins

When we step in from the early winter rain, who notices first that the house is holding its breath with us?

Does the cold cling more stubbornly to your breasts, or to the hush we carry across the threshold?

How does your wet sweater surrender so easily to gravity, as if it has been waiting all day to fall at your feet?

Am I dreaming, or does steam begin to rise from your pale skin before the fire has found its crackle?

Why do the droplets gather along your folds, as though they prefer that hollow to the floor?

When you laugh and shake your hair loose, do you know how the room morphs to the spray of your water?

Which part of you warms first—the small of your back, the curve of your thigh, or that place just beneath your ribs where I cup my palm?

Can you feel how my gaze roams, careful as a towel, drying what it dares not yet touch?

What is courtesy, what is restraint, when your breath has already begun to stutter under my watching?

Do you shiver because of the rain, or because I am locked upon you?

How does your skin decide which droplets to keep and which to release?

When my fingers hover at your wrist, are they asking permission, or confessing hunger?

Is warmth something we generate alone, or does it bloom only where we stand close enough to share it?

Why does the rainwater trace such deliberate paths along you, as if telling me where I will follow?

If I press my lips to your damp chest, will the chill retreat, or deepen?

What is it about winter that makes the smallest touch feel like a promise?

Do you notice that I am slower with you than with the fire, as though tending your heat requires a different kind of patience?

When your body dries before mine, is it because you burn brighter, or because I have lingered too long at your folds?

What would happen if I let my hands learn the landscape of every place the rain has just abandoned?

Are we still pretending this is about weather?

If I run the bath and watch the water cloud with steam, will you step in first, or will you wait for me to ask?

And when we lower ourselves into that first shared heat, will we remember the rain at all, or only the way you dried beneath my careful, unsteady gaze?