She wakes at three with her mouth dry and reaches past him for the water on the nightstand. His hand closes over the glass a half-second before hers does.
"Thirsty," she says, not quite a question, reaching for it. He doesn't let go.
"I've got it," he says, and brings it to her mouth himself, the rim cool against her bottom lip, and tips it so slowly that the first mouthful is barely anything at all — a taste, a promise of water, gone before she can swallow.
"That's not how a glass works," she says, but she's already tipping her head back for the next one, the radiator ticking somewhere behind him, a band of streetlight laid flat across the blankets between their bodies.
He tilts it again, same unhurried angle, and watches her throat move instead of the glass.
She stops arguing. She lets her head fall back into the pillow and her eyes close and takes what he gives her a swallow at a time, the sheets warm where they're pressed together, the glass the only cold thing in the room.
A drop gets away from her on the fourth tilt — slips past the corner of her mouth, down her chin, and sits for a second at the hollow of her throat before it decides where to go.
He sets the glass on the nightstand without looking at it, already following the drop down with his mouth, unhurried the way he'd been with the water, like there was no reason on earth to finish one thing before starting the next.
"You're slow tonight," she says, to the ceiling, to him, to whichever one is listening.
"On purpose," he says, and doesn't move any faster, and neither of them reaches to turn the lamp on.