If you were mine

If You were mine, I would wake to the taste of rain on your shoulder blade, trace the salt-paths sleep leaves on your temple, and let morning spill through the crack beneath our door. When you turn toward me in lamplight, I would memorize how shadows collect in the hollow of your throat, how your pulse drums against my palm— a Morse code spelling what I dare not say. But some nights I forget you are not mine to hold, that tomorrow you might choose another door, another morning. So I press my ear to your chest, count the spaces between heartbeats, and wonder if desire tastes of grief. Still, here in this stolen hour, when your breath writes questions across my collarbone, I burn steady as a pilot light— not the flame that devours, but the one that waits, quiet as a held breath, for your whisper: *stay.*