(Content Warning: alcoholism & relapse)

You reach for me in the darkest hour of the night and wrap your arms around me. It’s instinctive, an old habit your body hasn’t yet unlearned. Strange. Just this afternoon, sunlight slanted through the blinds, catching in the smoke curling from your cigarette, you looked at me from across the home office and said you weren’t staying out of love—only out of obligation. After all, we share a lease.

Our two-bedroom apartment in the East Village is a rent-stabilized gem. Hardwood floors, original moldings, a bathroom barely big enough to turn around in. But still, ours. The mattress in our room has felt us make love magnificently, intimately, and so quietly it hurts. We don’t touch anymore. Your hands barely skim the surface of my skin—maybe only in passing, like when you hand me a dish to dry after dinner.

So tonight, when you hold me in your sleep, it feels significant. Almost sacred. Your breath on the back of my neck, your knees curled behind mine. It feels glorious, almost holy, even if it’s unconscious. Even if your mind is somewhere far from your body, and your arms around my waist are just muscle memory, your body remembering what it used to want.

A week ago, you were sick—feverish and sweat-drenched. I kept you quarantined in the home office. One afternoon, pants half-pulled down, you pressed your cock against the glass door. Grinning, delirious. Tongue out, breath fogging the pane. You were drunk, or maybe just buzzed. I can never tell anymore. I still wanted you, even then. Even knowing you didn’t want me like you used to. Your desire for me had shifted, hollowed out. It was something else now. Something distant.

I remember the first time I caught you drinking again. Early afternoon. A can half-finished, perched beside your keyboard. I asked about it. You just shrugged and said, it’s nice. Like it was perfectly normal. Like you hadn’t fought so hard for two years of sobriety. The meetings, the sponsor, the steps. All of it quietly evaporating out the window with your cigarette smoke.

Then the nights started. Long absences. Hours that stretched into morning. No calls. No texts. I stopped asking where you went. Your answers, when you gave them, were slippery things. But I could see what you were doing to yourself. Shadows deepening under your eyes, skin going gray, your cheeks emptying out like the cans gathering on your desk.

I asked, once, if I could come out with you. Just to be part of your world again. To feel included in your chaos. You brushed it off, said you preferred to be alone. Later, I understood, you were just protecting your using. You didn’t want me to see you like that. You wanted privacy, for the parts of yourself that were collapsing.

This afternoon, I sat in the recliner while you smoked another cigarette at your desk. I let the second-hand fill my lungs. I said nothing. I didn’t need to. It was already clear. You’d you’re your choice. You’d chosen the using over loving me. The lease was all that tied us together now. A flimsy tether. And it’s ending soon. We both feel it. The unraveling is imminent. Now, in bed, you shift. Your arms fall away from me. Cold air rushes in where your body was. I shiver at the absence. I don’t reach for you