Carmen, muscles languid with pleasure but mind awake, looks up from the notebook she has been reading to candlelight over to the sleeping form of Kierk in her bed, who is pleasingly naked except for the thin tus-sled sheet that covers little. Is he waking? Around her the room is a blue eye dissolving in liquid, materials left around, the shucked remnants of clothes, everything has gone soft, physics has left them alone for now and only the delicate birds of thoughts lie roosting. Kierk, still near-dreaming something sinister and sweet all at the same time, moves a foot, finds nothing but sheet. His head turns away from an empty pillow, looks around for her. Maybe just the occasional flip of the page had awoken him, or had he sensed her absence? Carmen is a few feet away on the small couch, reading his notebook by the single remaining candle on the end table. Her expression as she looks up from the pages is one of consternation, no, revelation, while his look is one of unkempt waking, small shock, bleary, propping himself up on his elbows. She glances down at the notebook in her hand.

“Kierk, you know . . .”

“Come back to bed.”

“But these aren’t just some random notes. This is a whole journal. And it’s good.”

“. . . Yes. I know.”

“I want to finish this part.”

“Come back to bed.”

“Okay, in a second . . .”

“Just . . . come back to bed.”

Kierk holds the blankets open for her. They settle in together, afraid to inconvenience the other in their movements. Eventually, after he has done so, Carmen falls asleep, and dreams of blue dissolving, of sounds and pleasures, of strange happenstances, primitive feelings with only bare visuals, and for the first time in a long time she does not have the dream of the subway train light impossibly bright and impossibly close bearing down with the sound of screaming metal.

SATURDAY

Carmen wakes up. A slow and refreshing waking without the beep of an alarm, the natural waking point of a dream comfortably ended, and as REM sleep slides away Carmen opens her eyes. Her familiar apartment ceiling. She comfortably moves a knee and finds a startling heat, and, smiling, rolls over to find the still, sleeping form of Kierk, his mouth open. She pauses, oscillating between intense melancholy that this moment is already passing, and an ebullient joy and nervousness.

“Kierk!”

“Mmm . . . hey.”

“The power is back on.”

The apartment is a palladium of sunrays now—there are clothes everywhere, the bed is clearly askew, diagonal now, and she has no idea how that pile of books was knocked over, maybe when—Carmen smiles idly. An arm reaches out and pulls her sitting form back into bed. His face up against hers.

“Well,” she says, in close, “would you like a latte or something?”

“That sounds great.”