SUDDEN DESIRE - marcus pike

12: mornings are for coffee and sexual tension

SUDDEN DESIRE
12: mornings are for coffee and sexual tension

            SOME MORNINGS BEAT HER DOWN. She'll wake with a terrible weight on her chest and her head in a haze, and the day will stretch on in slow motion. Sadness and pain and upset stretching the hours for miles and miles. Those days, she hates to leave her bed. Her body feels too heavy to move from the mattress. But those days come far less frequent than they used to; every couple of months, when the rain lashes heavy against the window panes and the fog rolls over the river. Melancholia lingers like the smell after it rains and hoodies keep her together and the gazes away.

Others are rosy, honeysuckle sweet and tipped in golden sunshine. She'll wake to the familiar smell of roses and fresh cotton, of cinnamon and citrus and the candles she'd burned the night before. She's weightless as she rises, breezy dresses and peach lipgloss, and it's like a never-ending summer, even when the weather turns frigid and she's freezing in dresses made for the heat. Those mornings are mornings made for Marcus and syrupy sweet coffee in tiny coffee shops.

But some mornings exist alone; those mornings when anticipating hangs in the air, when change still has yet to set in. Mornings she doesn't know how to feel when she wakes surrounded by her duvet. Mornings that can become the best or the worst of her life.

Mornings with Marcus over coffee in the sunshine are usually the best.

They're filled with familiar laughter.

Coraline wakes to the sun streaming into her bedroom, bright, golden and insistent. The curtains are cracked open a little - disturbed and out-of-line, no longer drawn together like they had been when she'd fallen asleep - and the gap lets the warm morning sunlight in. A chill pulls through her; even as she tugs her duvet up underneath her chin for a moment. It's thicker than it normally is, the weather proving to be much harsher than she'd ever anticipated it could be as Spring edges closer, and it's even worse when she feels the bed beside her empty and cold. Coraline stretches an arm out over the sparse half of the bed, the sheets there cool, neat and frustratingly unoccupied.

Her heart sinks a little at the realisation.

Even if she isn't entirely sure what she would have done if she'd woken up with Marcus by her side.

Marcus is a morning person, only allowing himself to sleep in on weekends . But Coraline is usually always the first one of them awake; the one who wakes him up with a text or coffee at his front door. He normally claims her to be ridiculously - and, she's sure, annoyingly - springly in the early mornings, no matter what time she wakes, no matter how many hours of sleep she's managed. It takes a while, and far too many cups of coffee, and she usually crashes in the late evening when things catch up on her with ferocity. She knows, this morning, Marcus has done the gentlemanly thing and left her to sleep in those precious few hours, before she has to wake up and head to the heavy load of interviews she has peppered throughout the day. But she really wishes he'd woken her, even just to say goodbye, before he'd left for work.

Coraline knows he'd never intended on staying the night. It wasn't that kind of arrangement, they both knew that, but it had just happened. And, honestly, neither of them had been entirely made about it, either. He'd made a joke about how her bed was so much comfier than his and she'd giggled and yawned and tucked herself into the warmth of his side, without a second thought. Neither of them had complained about the closeness. Her eyes had grown heavy with sleep and her words quiet, and Marcus had traced patterns into her lower back until she'd fallen asleep a few moments later.

She digs a knuckled into her eyes to rub away the sleep that weighs down her eyelids and groans as she stretches out her aching limbs. Everything aches - even places she didn't know could ache - especially her back as she lifts her head to glance over at the alarm clock. She's utterly exhausted, the late night catching up with her, but she's too worried she's overslept to even think about going back to sleep. 8:04 blinks back at her in glaring white fluorescent.