since march

july 8, 2026

June is reading. Her ankle is hooked over mine and she is not paying attention to me at all, which is what I have wanted all night. I am counting.

Fourteen so far. I have counted them all week. It started when Ada asked me a question on Wednesday and I couldn’t answer because I was inside a very small event from March, the way June had opened a jar of olives one-handed while looking at her phone, and I could see the jar and the phone and the pale muscle in the inside of her wrist, but not Ada’s face across from me, and not the question Ada was asking. I said sorry, distracted. Ada let it go. I ate an olive and thought: she cannot know how much of my week is inside her.

She turns a page.

I say, “I’ve been keeping a list.”

“Mm.”

“About you.”

She glances over. “Should I be nervous.”

“No.”

I don’t know how to start. I have been holding all of them precisely and now they are trying to come out at once. I say, “Number one is Wednesday in March. You opened a jar of olives one-handed while looking at your phone. Your wrist. The inside of your wrist. I don’t know why I still have that one but I do.”

June puts the book down flat on her stomach, her thumb still holding the page. “One what?”

“One of the things.”

She waits.

“Two. That Sunday we drove up to Point Reyes. Twenty minutes in, you took your hair down and did it again. You didn’t fix it. You just took it down and put it back up. That was the whole thing you did.”

“That was over a year ago.”

“I know.”

She looks at me for a long moment. She has an expression I can’t read yet. Amusement, but underneath it something interested and quieter. She says, “Go on.”

I do. “Three. The morning your sister called and you were on the phone and you leaned against the fridge and one bare heel came up out of your slipper. Only for a second. Your heel was pink where you’d stood on it. Four. When you tie your shoe you look up at me first, like I might be leaving. Every time. I’ve watched. Every time.”

She has stopped breathing quite right.

“Five. When you brush your teeth you rock forward slightly on the balls of your feet at the very end of it, before you spit. You have done this every night for months and I am not sure you know.”

“Stop.”

“Six. When I made you laugh at that dinner in November, the thing about the parrot, you closed your eyes for about a second and a half and you had this smile like you were surprised the laugh was still in you. I got home and I wrote parrot, eyes closed, surprised on a receipt.”

“Rin.”

“That’s me. I know.”

She laughs, breath-first, and puts a hand over her face. “God.”

“Yeah.”

“Stop.”

“No.”

She is looking at me between her fingers. Her mouth has opened slightly. I have never done this before and I am learning how to do it as I do it. The learning is that once you start there is nothing to do with the accumulation but keep going. The alternative is to smother it and I have been smothering it for four months and it is what my hands have been full of and I am so tired of it.

“Seven. When you kiss me you press your bottom teeth against my lower lip a little bit before you actually kiss. It is not a bite. I don’t even think you know you do it. It is like you are checking that my mouth is where you left it.”

She makes a sound. Nothing shaped. She has moved her hand off her face and it is lying open on the bedspread like she doesn’t know where to put it.

“Eight.”

“Rin.”

“Eight is that when you come, your right hand always finds the crease of my hip, and it stays. It doesn’t grab, it just settles. Both times you have said sorry. It hasn’t happened to me on the left side. Only the right. I have kept track.”

“Oh god.”

“Nine.”

“Please.”

“Nine, then. Nine is that you are looking at me right now the way you looked at me the first time. Which I also kept.”

I put my hand on her cheek. She turns her face into it. She is warm in a way that is a specific temperature I know. She says, “how long have you had these.”

“Since March.”

“Since March what.”

“Since March all of them. Since we came back from the trip. Since the olives. That is when I started counting.”

She kisses my palm. It is not a beat, it is an event. It is the event of her doing the thing she does with her bottom teeth against the inside of my hand, which she has never done there before, which I feel and understand and file, number one on a different list, or the same list expanded, I don’t know which and I cannot think about it because she is moving now, unhurried, and taking my wrist and putting my hand where I know she is going to put it, which is where she always puts it first, which I could have listed and did not, because there are things I keep for later and things I keep for now.

She says, into my mouth, “keep going.”

I do. I say them while she takes her shirt off. I say them when her mouth is under my ear. I say the small ones. I say the ones I’ve been afraid to. She is laughing at some of them into my skin and going quieter and quieter at others. I keep going. It turns out I can say them and touch her at the same time. It turns out that is not two things.

When I come I do not know which number I am on. She has her hand where hers goes and I am inside her list now, apparently, and I have lost count. She holds me while I lose count. She holds me back into my body afterwards with a very slow, very deliberate hand at the back of my neck.

She is quiet for a long time. Then she says, close to my ear:

“March fourteen. You brought me a glass of water and you didn’t say anything. You just set it down. And when I picked it up the glass was cold. You’d put it in the freezer for a minute first.”

“I did.”

“Number one,” she says. “Mine, I mean.”

“How many are yours?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “Enough.”