From under a polyester quilt in the back bedroom, shivering up against the edge of morning, a long-held sigh shook out of her in a rattle. She couldn’t move too much without waking him up; he was such a light sleeper where she was concerned, that she was surprised the shakes hadn’t done it already. His habit of babying her rankled in the harsh, ill-fitting cover of sobriety– it would be a tense 36 hours until he re-upped and she could sink under the honeyed spill of his blues. She found that she quite liked being treated with his kid gloves then, when everything was soft and round at the edges; he would lay with her on the couch, reading to her with her feet in his lap.  She recalled with a sort of barbed fondness a time before now, before the sweating and shaking, when the giggles bubbled up through her mouth and out across the knuckles of his left hand as she mouthed at the valleys in between them, letting her teeth graze the peaks. Eyelids low as she turned her face up to him from her place on the floor in front of the couch, the soft yellow lamplight spreading like honey across everything. His voice, quiet with tenderness as he spoke, “Whatchya doin’, my girl?” “Nothin’ much,” her answer slipped out of her, almost a sigh. “You bite like a puppy. Are you a little puppy, baby?” Her eyes rolled beneath their closing lids as she breathed out a laugh. “I’ll come when you call, if that’s what you mean.”