What it says about your relationship when your partner sleeps with their back to you

I stared at this boy I had watched grow up two houses down. Seventeen years old. Bitten fingernails. Holding a notebook like it was a contract.

“Eli, you have never made a dress like this in your life.”

That night, I stood at my kitchen window and watched the light in Eli’s bedroom burn long past three in the morning.

“No, ma’am. I haven’t.”

“Then how—”

“I just need you to say yes.”

I almost said no. I had every reason. But there was something in his eyes that did not belong to a seventeen-year-old. Something steadier than I had felt in a year.

“Yes,” I whispered.

That night, I stood at my kitchen window and watched the light in Eli’s bedroom burn long past three in the morning, and I wondered what on earth I had just agreed to.

His mother called me on day three.

The light in Eli’s bedroom window became my new clock.