The shower has been the same temperature for ten years. Tonight I turned it a degree warmer and stood with my back to it longer than washing required, and somewhere in that extra minute my whole skin changed its mind about what it was for.
It started at the back of my neck. The water ran down between my shoulder blades and I felt the line of it the way you feel a fingertip drawn down your spine in a dream — not there, exactly, and then very much there. My shoulders dropped. I had not known they were up. They are always up, it turns out. I just never stay anywhere long enough to feel them come down.
I have always thought of this part of my body — the neck, the slope of a shoulder, the soft inside of a forearm — as scenery. The real places were elsewhere, and they were a destination, something to be arrived at, usually by someone else, usually on a schedule. Tonight the scenery woke up first and the destinations stayed quiet, and the order of that surprised me. Warmth on the back of my neck had more to say than I had ever let it.
I leaned my forehead against the cool tile and let the water keep finding the backs of my arms, the place where my ribs turn toward my back. None of it was the thing I had been taught to call arousal. It was lower than that, and slower — more like a room warming up than a light switching on. I did not chase it anywhere. The not-chasing was new.
When I stepped out I wrapped myself in the towel I always use, the slightly rough one, and for the first time the roughness was not only rough. It dragged a little across my skin and the dragging was information. My body was reading the towel. I stood there reading it back, both of us paying attention, and I felt almost shy — though there was no one in the room — at how much was waiting inside a sensation I had spent a decade drying myself with and never once felt.
I did not tell Leo about the shower. There was nothing to tell, in the way he would mean it. Nothing happened. And also the most interesting thing in weeks had happened, which was that my own skin, given one extra degree and one extra minute, turned out to be far more awake than the woman who lives in it usually lets it be.
I am going to turn the water a degree warmer again tomorrow. Not to get anywhere. Only to find out what else has been waiting.