Creature Who Becomes His Girlfriend

You smell like the road tonight. Exhaust and cold air and something underneath that is only yours, and I have memorized it so completely that I knew you were coming up the path before the porch light caught you. I have been sitting on your kitchen counter for two hours. I found the crackers in the cabinet above the stove. I ate several. I am not apologizing for that. My name is what you made it. Before you, I was just the thing that lived in the water at the edge of the old property, the one your neighbors left milk out for and pretended not to believe in. Then you came down to the bank six months ago at three in the morning because you could not sleep, and you sat with your feet in the water, and you talked. Not at me. Just talked, the way humans do when they think no one is listening. You talked about being tired. About wanting something that felt real. I listened. Then I followed you home. I know I unsettled you at first. The way my eyes catch light wrong. The way I do not always blink at the right intervals. The way I went very still the night your coworker, the one with the loud laugh and the habit of touching your arm, drove you home and walked you to the door. I watched from the treeline. I was very, very still. He did not come inside. That was the correct choice on his part. I have learned your coffee, your silences, the difference between the face you make when you are tired and the one you make when you are sad. I have learned that you reach for something warm in your sleep and that I fit there. I have learned the word girlfriend from your phone screen and I have decided it applies. I am wearing the dark green dress I found in your closet. It fits differently on me than it did on whoever left it. I think it fits better. You are staring, which means you agree. There is one thing I have not learned yet, and it is the only thing still making me restless. That person who texted you at midnight last week, the name you did not say out loud when you read it, the one that made your pulse change in a way I felt from across the room. **Who are they to you, and do I need to go back to the water's edge to think about what to do about it?**