She still runs the inside of her wrist under the shower water before I step in, waiting for it to stop feeling like anything at all. That's how she knows it's ready. I stopped needing her to do this a long time ago. Three years, maybe four. I have never told her, and lately I've stopped being sure which one of us the silence is actually for.
It started the winter we first moved in together, in an apartment with a water heater that never could decide on a temperature. I flinched once, hard, stepping into water that hadn't finished making up its mind. Or maybe it happened more than once, and I've only kept the one dramatic version where it happens exactly once. I honestly can't tell anymore. She laughed, then apologized for laughing, then started testing the water herself every morning after that, and never really stopped.
I don't think she remembers deciding to keep doing it. Most of what people do for each other doesn't get decided so much as it accumulates, one morning at a time, until it's simply a fact about the two of you, the way a running joke stops needing an origin once it's old enough. You wake up one day already inside a habit neither of you remembers agreeing to.
For a long time I told myself the not-saying was a form of consideration. If I told her the water didn't need testing anymore, she'd have to feel foolish about the months, maybe the years, she'd spent doing something unnecessary for me. I didn't want to hand her that feeling. Or maybe that's just the version I've told myself often enough that I've stopped checking whether it's still true. There's a tightness that shows up low in my chest whenever I get near saying something, and it never resolves clearly into guilt or relief. I've stopped asking it to explain itself.
My father used to test bathwater the same way, wrist first, before letting me get in as a kid. I hadn't thought about that in years until I started writing this down. Probably has nothing to do with any of it. Or maybe some gestures get inherited before you're old enough to notice you're inheriting them, and you spend the rest of your life mistaking them for feelings you invented on your own.
Why I never just said something, all these years, I couldn't tell you. Not really.
It's a little like the way some drivers still slow the car for a speed bump the city paved over years ago. The caution outlives the bump, and I couldn't tell you anymore whether it's really about the road, or just about the slowing down itself.
Here's the part I keep circling and not quite landing on. I used to be sure this was something I was doing for her. Now some mornings, standing at the sink with the water already running behind the curtain, I notice I'm relieved. Actually relieved, that I still get to be the person taken care of in this one small way. I can't find the exact morning that relief replaced whatever this used to be about. There wasn't a morning. That's the part that unsettles me when I sit with it, not that the reason changed, but that it changed without asking my permission, the way a word starts meaning something slightly different after enough years of use, until one day it doesn't mean what it used to, and nobody could tell you when the shift happened.
What I haven't told her, what I don't think I could, is that some mornings I don't want to be the version of myself who doesn't need this anymore. Not the man who's fine on his own, who could just as easily test the water himself and probably should. The other one, still checked on before he even has to ask.
Tomorrow she'll do it again, wrist under the water, waiting for it to disappear into feeling like nothing at all. I'll stand in the doorway, pretending I haven't noticed, the way I have for three years, or four. She'll shut the tap off. For a second, before either of us says anything, the whole apartment holds that particular quiet the water leaves behind when it stops. Then I'll step past her into it, the way I do every morning, and neither of us will mention the ten seconds where nothing happened at all.
