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Morning wakes alongside her. A dusting of pre-dawn across her skin, exhaled into their room through the open window.
Her awareness is only a hazy pinhole camera focus, dream-memory sneak peeks into the day ahead of her. The sleep-warmed ember heat of the mattress below her, the gentle flapping of birds’ wings between the trees outside the window, the chapped stinging at the corner of her bottom lip.
She stretches, draws breath long and slow through her nose as she pulls her legs and thighs and shoulders taut, rolls her head to loosen her neck and her spine, then melts back into the sheets. Stillness is bright on the air, grasping tight to the last minutes of quiet slumber, and she can taste it, like cotton and lavender and petrichor.
She hears a murmur from next to her. Drops her right leg to brush against the sham-carpet on the floor and flexes her left out until her toes brush against warm skin.
The murmur turns happy, then fades away. She lolls her head to the side on the pillow she shares. Lavender. She lets her eyes open slow.
The morning around them is grey like steeping tea, the sunlight not yet unfurled, not yet seeped into the air. The morning is grey like the streaks of her hair that have come loose from their braid in the night. She blows cool air up and out between her lips to move them out of her vision.
Her breath tickles her pillow-stealer’s face. Makes his nose scrunch up. She wants to plant a kiss on it. “Early bird,” Gabriel murmurs again, this time in English, though stilted and thickly accented with sleep, like she remembers him once sounding. She smiles with the corner of her lips pinched.
Inhale, exhale, bom dia, she tells the city. She curls her toes in the rug and turns over again. Swings her other leg out from under the sheets and only has to shiver for a moment before an embrace of spring-humid breeze sweeps gently into the bedroom.
She shuffles the few small steps to their vanity and seats herself in front of it with a huff, butterflying her thighs against the soft crushed velvet of the stool. She picks up her hairbrush and runs her thumb across its smooth porcelain handle as she untangles her sleep-mussed braid with the fingers of her other hand.
She brushes her hair, and can feel his gaze on her from where he still lies in bed, tingling along the curve of her spine. With a sweet sigh she tilts her head to the side, takes care to release her smoothed hair over her shoulder in rivulets across her bare breast. She hears more soft-muttered French coming from their bed and knows Gabriel is only not pressing himself up behind her and taking the brush out of her hands because of the heavy weight of their lover stretched out over his limbs.
She drops the hairbrush back onto the vanity table and stands, pulling her arms above her head by her elbows, stretching herself loose once more.
She turns, presses the tips of her fingers to the mattress and leans over. Her boys shift with the dip in their bed and Gabriel’s mouth curls up. "Endormi," she whispers into Gabriel’s ear. She grins back at him, though he cannot see it behind his delusive, still-sleeping eyes.
Her lips part at the feeling of his knuckles tracing cool and feather-light up the skin over her ribs. “Moi? Non,” he breaths out. They are quiet, the birds louder in the air than their own voices, mindful of Nathan between them. “Regarde notre amour,” he peers open an eye, purses his lips fondly. “Il va dormir cette un petit chaton pendant encore une heure.”
Annalise catches a laugh in the back of her throat. The skin of her chapped lips stretches and burns.
She leans forward even more, sighing at the blanket-heavy feel of Gabriel’s hand unfurling at her waist and at the soft scratch of their crumpled duvet against the peaks of her nipples. She’s close enough to Nathan now, where he lays sprawled with his head over Gabriel’s heart, close enough to press the tip of her nose against the nape of his neck. She breathes in. Cotton. She exhales until she sees gooseflesh.
She watches as Gabriel’s chest moves up and down. Breathing into the tea-stained air, lungs expanding and collapsing. Waves rolling in and out. Nathan shifts languidly, roiling along with it. Surf on shore. She can almost smell the salt on the morning breeze.
Nathan stretches up, up, just enough to press the bridge of his nose against Gabriel’s chin, to throw his head back and arch his neck, searching for a sensation, just enough to tighten the breath in her diaphragm.
Annalise is pulled by the tide. She presses her face into the space where their’s meet, runs her mouth along the line that Nathan’s breath had smeared on Gabriel’s jaw, and cups the plush bottom of her lip around the top of Nathan’s. She drags him into her with her tongue and tilts her head back to capture the corner of Gabriel’s lip with the top of hers, and presses.
Presses forward, presses together, presses in, and what she tastes isn’t lavender or cotton or earl grey but sunshine, buttery sweet and molten. She kisses them both and they kiss her and Gabriel’s fingers leave dye-stained bruises on the flesh of her hip and Nathan moans something high and sweet and barely there into their mouths and it’s all wet, warm and messy, bom dia, the birds flit by their open window and the sunshine blooms into a pale yellow around them.
Annalise eventually leaves them to sleep just a little longer and settles herself onto the wide ledge of their window to watch the rest of the sunrise, cooling the bright pink flush of her skin with the morning air.
She looks out at the checker-board balconies and at the slow-filling street below, at the tops of the trees and the birds’ nests tucked between branches. Breathes in. Petrichor. She leans out over the sill enough to convince herself it’s not all a painting, like she does every morning. She shifts, settles back, rubs her calves and ankles against the rounded edges of the well-used cushion she sits on, Gabriel’s ridiculous crushed velvet.
Gabriel and Nathan’s hushed giggles flutter out from underneath parachuted bedsheets, brush past her and out into their little world beyond the window, and Annalise breathes it all in with a smile and dreams about the million more mornings she’ll have, just like this one.