Warmth

Tommaso

I woke to my phone softly blaring a bombastic classical piece I used as an alarm most mornings. I groaned in the back of my throat and started to reach to shut it off, but a weight on my chest stopped me in my tracks. I opened my eyes, and my breath caught.

In the night, Paige had draped herself across me. Her fiery hair spilled across the plain white of my pajama shirt, and the early morning sunlight illuminated the angles of her face. Though she’d started filling out, regaining some roundness in her cheeks and lips, her cheekbones still cut a sharp angle, and her Roman nose cast a shadow on the lower half of her face. In this light, I could even see a few faint freckles dusted across the middle of her face. My heart pounded unevenly, and I shut my alarm off as subtly as I could. She looked peaceful, an expression I saw so rarely, but it suited her just as well as her furrowed-brow determination. I ached to brush the hair out of her face, to press a kiss to her forehead, to f