The author.
I was never meant to write you, only to trace what was already there. A quiet archivist of your warmth, cataloging the way your pulse flickers beneath my fingertips.
You open in fragments, not pages but pauses, breath caught in the throat, a hesitation that feels like language I almost understand.
I read you slowly. Not out of patience, but because too much at once feels like it might erase you.
There’s a margin where you soften, where the meaning blurs into touch, and I lose the discipline of distance, forget I was supposed to observe, not participate.
Your voice, low and unguarded, rewrites the room around us. Even silence begins to say too much, pressing against me like a sentence that won’t end.
I tell myself this is study, that I am only learning your shape, but my hands betray me, turning each line into longing, each pause into permission.
And somewhere between what is written and what is wanted, I stop being a reader at all, and become something that lingers.