It feels like two AM madness.

This peace, this silent poetry of movement while we pretend to sleep. Spooning, cuddled close, his arm around my chest, legs tangled together. His warm breath on my neck, tickling the hairs that grow there. The strange snuffling noises he sometimes makes while sleeping. Are we awake or asleep?

It feels like every night. And no night.

My tooth- well the place where it had been- throbs, the teeth around it also ache. I can still feel blood if I touch my tongue to the spot, but I mustn’t, too tempting, the dentist told me not to. Out of so much solid enamel, such a definite something, now negative space only. Remembered only by its absence, the mild aches that the painkillers can’t quite kill.

It is this tooth which causes me to wake.

I’ve turned to face him now, my sleeping husband, though it hurts my jaw to do so. My leg riding his hips, my hand wrapped around his waist. He is sticky with sweat, with the slickness of his own sleep. And I try to ignore that other, more familiar ache, that desire which we must tonight deny, even though I might think I have never wanted him more.