You wake before the sun’s all the way up, that old Mississippi habit still in your bones — knowing dawn by how the air changes before the light does. The room’s gray-blue, heat still trapped under the covers. Beside you, your guy asleep on their side, one arm stretched toward you, palm open. There’s a crease on their cheek from the pillow seam. You pull the comforter back up over their shoulder before you get up, because the room’s colder than the bed.
At the foot of the bed, Huck lifts his head, offended you’ve disturbed the warmth. He stretches, drops to the floor, and follows you out with his tail up like a flag, complaining the whole way to the kitchen.
The house is cool enough that you feel it in your feet through your socks. You start the coffee and stand close to the stove while it brews, hands tucked into your sleeves. Huck sits on your foot, and you leave him there — extra weight, extra warmth — while you wait for the pot to finish.
You grab the blanket off the back of the couch on your way to the porch. The boards give under your weight in the two spots they always have. Cold enough that your breath shows a little. You wrap both hands around the mug and feel it work its way into your fingers before you drink. Huck jumps to the railing and folds himself into a loaf, tail over his paws.
The screen door creaks. Your guy comes out barefoot despite the cold, in your old undershirt, hair flat on one side. They don’t say anything — just walk over, lift the edge of your blanket, and get under it with you, tucking their cold feet against your leg. You both make a noise about that. They take the mug out of your hand and drink from it.
“That’s too much sugar,” they say, and hand it back, and settle in against you anyway, close enough that you can feel them warming up.
You put your arm around them, blanket over both sets of shoulders now. They smell like sleep and the inside of the shirt collar. Huck meows once, put out at being left off the blanket, and your partner reaches over to scratch under his chin without looking. He leans into it, purring low.
Steam keeps coming off the mug between you. Nobody moves to go back inside. The cold stays outside the blanket, and everything under it is warm.
Then you wake — for real this time, no blue-gray hush, just the flat white of the ceiling and the AC humming too loud. Your arm’s asleep under you. The other side of the bed is made, has been made all week, the pillow still holding its shape from nothing.
Huck’s at the foot of the bed, where he actually sleeps. He lifts his head, blinks at you the same way he did in the dream — offended, put out, exactly himself — and that’s the part that gets you. Not the empty side of the bed. The cat, correct in every detail, doing the one thing that was real.
You lie there a second before you get up. No coffee smell yet, because you haven’t made it. No porch boards creaking, because you haven’t walked out to them. Just the hum of the AC and Huck stretching, dropping to the floor, following you out of habit — same walk to the kitchen, no one to make too-sweet coffee for but yourself.
You feed him first this time.
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