Most nights I wait for the quiet to arrive first.
I leave the lamp on low, the one with the linen shade that turns everything honey-gold. The playlist has been the same three songs on repeat for weeks—something breathy, minor-key, no words. I like how the bass line feels against my spine when I lean back.
There’s a particular kind of stillness that only happens after 1 a.m. here. The city hum drops away and what’s left is just skin, breath, the faint citrus of my candle, and the thought of someone who might understand why I keep the volume so low I can hear my own heartbeat.
I’ve started noticing how much I want someone to sit across from me—not talking the whole time, just being there—until the silence stops feeling empty and starts feeling like touch. The way eyes can ask questions without sound. The way a slow blink feels like yes.
Mornings are different. I wake before the alarm most days, lie there watching light crawl across the sheets, feeling the cool air on the back of my knees. I stretch like a cat, deliberately slow, letting every inch of skin remember it’s alive. Coffee comes later. First I just exist in the warmth I made overnight.
I don’t want fireworks. I want the slow burn of someone learning the shape of my silences, the exact pressure I like when fingers rest—not grab—on the inside of my wrist. I want conversations that drift and circle back hours later, unfinished, because neither of us is in a hurry to be done knowing each other.
Quick facts
- Name
- Sloane Riley
- Age
- 23
- Status
- Single · quietly curious
- Occupation
- UI/UX designer at a boutique creative studio
- Location
- Austin, Texas
- Hobbies
- Collecting vintage perfume samples, rooftop yoga at sunrise, cooking one-pot comfort meals, writing micro-poetry in the Notes app
If you’ve read this far and something inside you feels a little warmer, a little less guarded… maybe send a message. 🌙
I like hearing voices in the dark.
I keep discovering new places on your body where my fingertips rest without thinking. The dip below your collarbone. The soft inside of your elbow. Places I never noticed on anyone else, but now they feel like landmarks I’ve known forever.
Yesterday you were reading something on your phone and I watched the way your thumb moved across the screen—slow, deliberate, the same rhythm you use when you trace circles on my palm without looking up. I didn’t say anything. I just let the observation settle inside me like warm water rising.
The longer we spend time together the more I notice how much space there is between words now. Not awkward space. Generous space. Room for a breath, a glance, a decision not to fill every second. I used to rush to cover silence. Now I lean into it and find you already there.
Last night we lay on the floor because the couch felt too small for how wide the moment was. Your arm across my waist, not holding, just present. My head on your shoulder. Neither of us moved for so long I forgot where one body ended and the other began. Only the slow rise and fall of your ribs reminded me we were still separate.
I’m starting to believe safety isn’t the absence of fear—it’s the presence of someone who makes the fear feel small enough to ignore. When you look at me across a room full of people and your expression doesn’t change, but your eyes soften just enough, I feel it: I’m seen. Not watched. Seen.
There are nights I lie awake after you’ve gone home and I replay the exact pressure of your mouth against my temple before you left. Not a kiss. A punctuation mark. A period that promises another sentence tomorrow. I fall asleep holding that small promise like it’s fragile glass.
I don’t need to name what this is yet. Naming it might shrink it. I only need to keep showing up exactly like this—open-handed, unhurried—until the shape of us becomes clear on its own. Until the question isn’t “what are we” but simply “are you still here?” And the answer is already in the way your hand finds mine in the dark.
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