Something small and warm pressed against Sienna's chin.
She opened one eye. A tortoiseshell face stared back at her from three inches away, amber eyes unblinking, whiskers twitching. Millie's nose was cold and damp and she pushed it against Sienna's jawline with the insistent affection of a cat who had been awake for at least twenty minutes and had decided that waiting any longer for breakfast was an unacceptable breach of the social contract.
"Good morning," Sienna whispered.
Millie responded by headbutting her chin, hard, and purring.
Sienna smiled. She lay still and let the cat press against her and the morning assemble around her in layers. The pale gold light through the curtains, warmer now than it had been six months ago, the season having turned from autumn to summer while she wasn't paying attention. The sound of the ocean through the cracked window, steady and familiar. The smell of the sheets, detergent and salt air and the faint trace of Elise's vanilla shampoo. The heat of the body beside her, a heat she'd woken to every morning for six months and that still, everysingle time, made her chest expand with a gratitude she no longer tried to analyse.
This was her bed now. Their bed. In their apartment.
They'd stopped calling it Elise's apartment around the second month, when Sienna's books had taken over the living room shelf and her oat milk had become a permanent fixture in the fridge and her running shoes sat beside Elise's trainers at the front door in a neat, parallel arrangement that Elise found endearing and Sienna found structurally necessary. Millie had arrived in the third month, a scrawny tortoiseshell rescue from the shelter on Pine Street, with one chipped ear and a distrust of sudden movements and an immediate, ferocious attachment to Sienna that the shelter staff said was unusual for a cat who'd been returned twice.
"She chose you," Elise had said, watching Millie climb into Sienna's lap at the shelter and curl into a ball and fall asleep. "You can't argue with that."
Sienna hadn't argued.
Millie headbutted her chin again, more emphatically. The purring intensified.
"All right," Sienna murmured. "I'm coming."
She eased out of bed, careful not to disturb Elise, who was still deeply asleep. The floorboards were cool under her bare feet and the apartment was quiet except for Millie's accelerating purr, which sounded like a small, furry motor. The cat wound between her ankles as she padded to the kitchen, her tortoiseshell tail held high, the chipped ear giving her a slightly raffish air.
Sienna filled the kettle. While it heated, she opened the cabinet and spooned out Millie's food, the brand the vet had recommended, into the blue ceramic bowl that Elise had bought from the market because it matched Millie's eyes, which it didn't, but Sienna hadn't corrected her. She placed the bowl onthe mat by the fridge and Millie attacked it with the dedication of a cat who had not been fed in approximately nine hours and was frankly appalled by the neglect.
"You're so dramatic," Sienna told her.
Millie ignored her entirely, focused on the business at hand.
Sienna made tea. The kettle clicked off and she poured the water over the tea bag and added a splash of oat milk and stood in the kitchen in her t-shirt and bare legs, leaning against the counter, holding the warm mug in both hands and watching the light move across the walls. The apartment had changed since she'd moved in. Her medical textbooks on the shelf beside Elise's trophy photos. The corkboard by the fridge covered in game schedules and takeaway menus and a Polaroid that Frankie had taken of them at the team barbecue last month, Sienna's head on Elise's shoulder, both of them laughing at a joke Lou had told. Helen's number was pinned there too, next to the calendar where Sienna still marked her fortnightly sessions with a small blue dot. The cast was long gone. Her left arm was fully healed, the forearm carrying a thin scar where the fracture had been plated, a line she traced sometimes when she was thinking, as she used to trace the scar on her thumb. Her ribs had healed cleanly. She swam every morning again, three days a week in the ocean, two in the pool, and her body was stronger than it had been before the accident. The ocean swims were different now. She went earlier, in the pre-dawn dark, and sometimes Elise came with her and sat on the beach wrapped in a blanket and watched or sometimes came in with her- if it wasn’t going to disrupt her training. Sometimes she went alone and the solitude was welcome and temporary, because she always came home to Elise.
She took her tea and walked back to the bedroom.
Elise was still asleep. She lay on her stomach, one arm stretched across the space Sienna had vacated, her face turnedinto the pillow. The sheet had slipped to her waist, exposing the long line of her back, the strong shoulders, the ridge of her spine. Her dark hair was spread across the white pillow, loose and tangled. The morning light traced the contours of her body, the muscles of her shoulders, the small scar on her right forearm, the faint freckles across the bridge of her nose that were only visible in direct light.
She was naked. Completely. They slept naked now, had since the first night Sienna moved in, and the sight of Elise's bare body in the morning light still sent a pulse of heat through Sienna's chest and lower. Not a tentative, guilty heat. Not the furtive ache she'd spent decades suppressing. Open and familiar and hers.
Six months ago, the sight of a naked woman in her bed would have triggered a cascade of clinical analysis: the professional implications, the emotional risks, the vulnerability exposure. Now it triggered a single, uncomplicated thought: she's beautiful and she's mine and I want her.
Sienna set her tea on the nightstand and got back into bed. The mattress dipped under her weight and Elise stirred, a small murmur against the pillow, but didn't wake. Sienna propped herself on one elbow and looked at her.
She was still looking.
She'd look at Elise for hours. She'd tried to explain this to Helen, in one of their sessions, and Helen had smiled and said, "That's not a diagnosis, Sienna. That's love." And Sienna had blushed and changed the subject, but Helen was right. It was love. The simple, ordinary, extraordinary kind that showed up every morning and didn't require analysis.
She leaned down and kissed the back of Elise's neck. Then lower, each kiss placed along the line of her spine, slow and unhurried. Elise's body woke before her mind, shifting toward the contact, her back arching fractionally.
"S'nice," Elise mumbled into the pillow. Her voice was thick with sleep.
Sienna smiled against her skin and kissed lower.
"Good morning," she murmured against the small of Elise's back.
"What are you doing?" Elise's voice was rough but there was a smile in it.
"Waking you up."
Sienna kissed the dip at the base of her spine. Elise's hips shifted against the mattress.