Pebbling

She woke to the soundless glow of her phone.

It lay face down on the nightstand, but the screen had lit itself sometime before dawn, a thin bar of light leaking onto the wood. She rolled onto her side and reached for it, careful not to wake him. His breathing was steady, the shallow rise and fall of his chest familiar enough that she could tell what part of sleep he was in by sound alone.

The reel was already queued.

A woman in an oversized sweater explaining with exaggerated hand gestures why the image of this particular deep ocean squid gives her neurodivergent mind nightmares.

She smiled before she could stop herself.

The frame freezes, the woman’s eyes wide, her hands awkwardly positioned. The loop restarts.

She turned her head toward him.

“Why do you always send me reels to wake up to?” she asked.

He stirred, blinked, and smiled like he’d been caught doing something small and forgivable.

“Good morning to you too,” he said.

“I’m serious,” she said, though her voice was still thick with sleep. “Every morning. I open my eyes and there’s… this.”

She held the phone up between them.

He propped himself on one elbow. “You watched it?”

“I always watch it but that’s not what I asked.”

She waited.

He rubbed his face, the way he did when he was deciding how much of a thought to release. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I guess I like the idea that something from me is the first thing you see.”

She frowned, not unhappy, just curious. “Why that though? Why not a text? Or nothing?”

“Nothing feels like I’m not thinking about you,” he said. “I don’t always know the right thing to say in a text.”

She glanced back at the screen. The reel had moved on without her, the algorithm already offering something else. She locked the phone.

“You could just say good morning.”

He nodded.

“But you don’t.”

He shrugged. “That is my good morning.”

She laughed. “You’re not the romantic type, huh?”

He reached for her hand under the covers. His fingers were warm, slightly rough, familiar in a way that made her chest ache.

“Big gestures make people nervous,” he said. “They feel like expectations. Or traps. Transactional.”

She studied his face. He wasn’t looking at her, not quite. His gaze had fixed on the corner of the ceiling, the faint crack that ran like a hairline fracture above the window.

“So this is safer?” she asked.

“It feels that way,” he said. “Small things don’t demand anything back.”

She considered this. The morning light had begun to seep through the curtains, pale and uncommitted.

“And you think I like small things,” she said.

His smile softened to a smirk. “I know you do.”

She rolled onto her side, facing him fully now. “And just how do you know that?”

“I pay attention to the way you react,” he said. “You light up at things sometimes that you didn’t expect to matter. Like when I bring you coffee and remember how you like it. Or when I send you something dumb and you laugh even though you try not to.”

She felt heat rise in her face. “Like a stalker?”

He laughed. “Maybe. But I think you like it.”

She reached out and traced the line of his jaw with her thumb. “So the reels are… what? Proof that I’m predictable?”

He shook his head. “More like pebbles.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Pebbles.”

“Little offerings to let you know I think about you when you’re not around,” he said.

She was quiet for a moment.

Outside, a car passed. Somewhere in the building, someone flushed a toilet. The world resumed its low hum.

“You know penguins do that,” she said finally.

He grinned. “I know.”

“You learned this somewhere weird, didn’t you.”

“I guess.”

She sighed and rested her head against his chest. His heartbeat was steady, unremarkable, comforting.

“So you send me these,” she said, “because you’re afraid big love would scare me.”

“Partly,” he said.

“And because you like imagining me seeing them.”

“Yes.”

“And because it makes you feel like you’re with me when you’re not.”

He hesitated. She felt it in the slight pause of his breath.

“Yes,” he said.

She shifted, propping herself up again. “Does it ever feel like too much?”

He frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Like a ritual,” she said. “Do you think it works?”

He looked at her now, hanging on what she will say next. “Does it?”

She thought of all the mornings she had woken to his quiet offerings. The days she had been angry, distracted, distant. The reels she had watched anyway. The ones she hadn’t.

“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “Sometimes I wonder if I rely on it too much. Like if one morning there wasn’t anything, I’d feel… off.”

He swallowed. “Would that be bad?”

She considered. “Not bad. Just revealing.”

“Of what?”

She gestured vaguely between them. “That we don’t know how to say what we mean.”

He was quiet now. The crack in the ceiling had reclaimed his attention.

“I don’t think I could stop if I wanted to,” he said. “It’s the only way I know how to show you that I love you first thing in the morning.”

She reached for his face and turned it gently back toward hers.

“Do you want me to st–“

She pressed a finger to his lips. “I need to think about this.”

They lay there for a while, the ritual suspended but not broken. The phone buzzed softly on the nightstand, another notification arriving from somewhere else.

Eventually, she reached for it and opened the reel again, watching it one more time.

Then she turned the phone face down.

“Tomorrow,” she said, “send me one that’s painfully honest.”

He laughed, relief and something else flickering through his expression. “Okay.”

They stayed in bed longer than they meant to, the morning stretching around them, her processing, the ritual intact, waiting to repeat.