POV: VIVIAN
The light comes through the wrong curtains first.
That's the initial disorientation, the unfamiliar quality of morning in an unfamiliar room, the way the light moves differently here than in my apartment, and for exactly two seconds before I'm fully conscious I exist in the clean space before memory arrives and the night before is simply the night before, and the candles are burned to nothing on the nightstand, and Chase is beside me, and I am warm.
Then memory arrives.
Not bad memory. The memory of the garden and the string lights and what I said and what he said back, and the apartment and the candles and the conversation and his hand in my hair and the specific quality of the night that felt, more than any night in recent memory, like something that was ours without costing us anything. I lie still for a moment and I hold the warmth of it before looking at him, the way you hold the last seconds of a good dream before full waking takes it.
I turn over.
