He’s quiet. A long time, actually. Much longer than the question merits; he’s always talked through his ideas with me, from inception to publication.

“I…” he sighs. “This one, I think…I think I need to sit on it a bit longer before I’m ready to talk about it.”

I don’t know what to make of that. “Um. Okay?”

I’m on my back, head resting on his bicep. Sheets around our hips. The afterglow is pungent. His finger idly, lazily traces figure eights around my breasts, circling one nipple then the other, back and forth, possessively, simply enjoying the privilege and right of touching my body.

He does not physically, audibly sigh again, but nonetheless, his pause before responses just…feels like a sigh. “I don’t know how to explain it, Nadia. All my stories up till now have just sort of flowed out of me. Naturally, easy as breathing. Some have felt…bigger than others. You know what I mean? Like, not in terms of length, or even possible popularity, sales, like that. Just…the size of the story. The weight of it, inside me.”

“Like when you wrote Love, Me?” I ask, referencing the book that put him on the literary map, and cementing his place in the public mind. “Because I remember when you first started talking about that idea, you said it felt big.”

He nods. “Like that. But this one is…bigger. Just more.”

“And you can’t talk about it?”

He shakes his head. “Not yet. I need time to stew on it. I might need to get some of it down even before the research is done. I just feel it, Nadia. And it’s not going to come out the way I usually work, so just…just be patient with me, okay? Just give me some space to do this one differently, is all I’m asking, I guess.”

His words feel heavy. Like they are freighted with meaning I cannot quite fathom. As if the true depth of what he means is something he could not truly even put into language.

I lie in the silence. “Adrian…” But I don’t even know what I’m trying to say, what I want to say.

There’s something, but I don’t have the shape of it yet. Like someone blindfolded me, brought me to a table, sat me down, took off the blindfold, and in front of me was a two-thousand piece jigsaw puzzle, but I didn’t have the box for reference of what it was supposed to look like—I just had to try to fit the pieces together one at a time and get a feel for what it was supposed to be as I went.