On an Edge of Glass

changed into a pair of loose flannel pants and a sweatshirt, it’s after midnight.  Payton crawled home a few minutes ago. 
    No, seriously. 
    She literally crawled through the front door with her hands on the ground in front of her, wheezing like a gorilla.  Her friend Dominic tells me that she’d had six lemon drops in a row.  In light of the revelation, I’m sort of impressed that she can still manage to crawl.
    I help her undress and get into the bed, and then I place a glass of water on the small table next to her just in case she wakes up thirsty. 
    I keep her door cracked and decide to find something on TV and make myself a bag of popcorn and a hot chocolate to get rid of the feel of this entire night.  Going out with Evan was a mistake.  That much is clear to me now. 
                  I’m in the kitchen pouring the contents of the hot chocolate packet into a mug when Ben gets home.  He pauses when he sees me and I think that he’s going to blow me off and disappear into his room, but on that count, I’m surprised.  He looks to the television and then back to me and utters one word: “ Goonies ?”
                  And it’s like a white flag waving in the breeze.  A truce. 
                  I smile.  “What can I say?  It was on and I guess I’m a sucker for bad eighties movies.”
    Ben doesn’t say anything.  He comes up behind me in the kitchen and pulls a second mug off the dish drying rack.  He sets it down next to mine like we do this all of the time.
    In response, I get another packet of hot chocolate mix out of the box.  I look up, and he’s peering down at me with those dark eyes of his, a small grin pulling up the sides of his mouth. 
    I gnoring the flutter in my stomach, I take a deep breath.  We can do this.  Ben and I can be roommates who share hot chocolate.
    The microwave dings.  He removes the bag of popcorn and bounces it back and forth between his hands before opening the top and dumping the contents into a large plastic bowl.  He asks me if he should add salt.
    “That works,” I say, though it’s not really an answer.
    When the hot chocolates are made and the popcorn is salted, we plonk ourselves down on the couch to watch the movie.  It was already halfway through when I turned the television on, but we’ve both seen this one before so it doesn’t really matter.
    This might be a good time to talk about what happened that night six weeks ago.  To talk about memories and regret and the indeterminable why of it all, but that’s not what we do.  We watch the movie and for the first time in weeks, I feel like I can breathe.
     
     
    Before the end of the movie, I fall asleep.
    Then I wake up.  And, it’s not the purple-hued light of the house at three in the morning that has woken me, or the sound of Payton stumbling into the bathroom.  It’s a hand.
                  A single hand.
                  So innocuous.
                  I feel it before my eyes blink open.  A slight weight on my hip.  A current of electricity running through me, reshaping the air that I breathe.  It takes only a second for me to process what it is—to rearrange the spaces in my head around the feel of his fingers on my body.
                  Ben fell asleep watching the movie too.  Though, unlike me—flopped sideways with my hand flung over my face—he’s still upright on the couch with his feet on the wood floor.  Only his closed eyes and his head, drifting back over the cushions, give him away.  And his hand.  It rests, palm-down, fingers splayed open, lightly on my hip. 
                  I try to remain still but he must sense the movement, because his fingers tighten, then relax on my skin.  I turn over and the hand rolls with me, sliding over the bare surface of my stomach.
    Everything about the moment is in slow motion.  It’s like the molecules in the atmosphere have slowed down just so that Ben and I can have t his handful of seconds for a bit longer.  I savor the feel of his fingers dragging over my skin, brushing across my bellybutton.  I hear him suck in his breath and I look up.              
    M uted light from the television plays over his face, making new shadows, blue and silver, that run along his narrow nose and straight mouth to the hollow at the base of his neck.  He’s staring down at me with hooded eyes, lazily blinking away