The room was a testament to whatever had happened the night before.

Silk sheets coiled like seawater around the foot of the bed. The dress - yellow, whisper-thin, priced somewhere in the neighborhood of three hundred eighty dollars - was draped over the armchair in the corner with its straps pointing in two different directions, as if it had been removed hastily and without apology. A man's white shirt lay crumpled near the window. One champagne-colored heel listed alone against the baseboard, its partner nowhere in evidence. On the bedside table, a half-empty glass of water, two room service menus, and a set of rimless glasses folded precisely, the only precise thing in the room.

Light came through the sheer curtains in that particular early-morning way - pale gold, almost apologetic, not quite willing to announce itself but unable to stay out. It fell across the white duvet. Across the long, pale arm that lay on top of it, half-curled. Across the dark hair spread across the pillow in every direction, thick and shining even in disarray, the kind of hair that held light the way water holds light.

The woman in the bed was deeply, elaborately asleep.

One bare shoulder was visible above the duvet. The other side of the bed showed evidence of recent habitation - a second dented pillow, the sheets pulled and re-pulled - but was now empty.

The sound of a shower running had long since stopped.

The bathroom door opened.

He came out with a white hotel towel slung at his hips and his hair still dripping - dark water tracing slow lines down the bridge of his nose, along the cut of his jaw, over the clean topography of his chest. He moved across the room without hurrying, as if he had never in his life been required to hurry, retrieving his glasses from the nightstand and putting them on with a single practiced gesture. He checked his phone. Then he set it face-down on the table again. He stood there for a moment in the morning quiet.

She was still asleep.

He looked at her for exactly as long as he permitted himself to look - which was slightly too long, if he was being honest, and honesty was not always his strong suit at seven in the morning - and then he crossed to the bed.

He sat on the edge.

He reached out, unhurried, and let the back of his hand travel up the outside of her calf in the lightest possible gesture, the very tip of a question.

She stirred.

Not awake - not yet - just registering warmth, registering presence. A slow, somatic awareness that something wanted her attention. The barest alteration in her breathing. She shifted slightly under the covers, not away from his hand but toward it, like a plant tracking heat.

He did it again - unhurried still, patient in the infuriating way of a man who knew exactly what he was doing - this time continuing past her knee. The duvet had pulled aside at some point during the night and her legs were bare from mid-thigh down. She had extraordinary legs. He had thought so last night and he thought so again now with the morning light making its modest contribution.

"Hmm." It was barely a sound. A vibration. Something from a dream that hadn't quite ended.

He stopped. Waited.

She pulled one arm under her pillow and turned her face away from the light. Her lips were slightly parted. Her dark hair was all over the place and there was a pillow-crease mark on her cheek and she looked - in this unguarded, unperformed, thoroughly disheveled state - even more devastating than she'd looked in that yellow dress at the gate of the party, which was saying something, because that had stopped him mid-stride.

He started again. A slow, deliberate passage from just below the back of her knee upward.

The response came faster this time - a sharp intake of breath, a clench of the hand under the pillow, her foot pressing reflexively against the mattress.

"Mmmm - no." Muzzy. Not entirely convincing.

"No?" His voice was very quiet. Low and a little rough in the way voices are before they've been properly used.

"Stop." A pause. "Don't stop." Another pause. Her hand, the one that had been under the pillow, came out and reached back without looking, finding the side of his knee, and she held on to it with the seriousness of someone establishing an anchor. "Don't - I'm sleeping."

"You're talking to me."

"I'm talking in my sleep."

"You're not."

"I'm very good at it."

He leaned forward. He pressed his lips to the back of her neck - just at the place where her hair parted and her skin was warm and faintly flushed from the heat of the bed - and she made a sound that was nothing at all like sleep.

Her hand tightened on his knee.

"Last night," he said, against her neck, "you were not this cautious."

She laughed - small, slightly breathless. "Last night I had different - reasoning capabilities."

"So did I."