"There are three things I won't do in life: smoke a cigarette, sleep with a stranger and get married to you." 

He smirked. His kind of smirk, a cynic's smirk with an ingrained sense of reckless abandon.

"The last two are pretty much the same." 

She lied there without a reply, allowing the distant blares of 2 AM parties to sweep away the teasing silence. With eyes fixed on the stillness of the ceiling fan and lizards darting across cobwebbed corners, she memorised his presence.

Fingers that drew whimsical circles on her palm. Breaths exhaled in exhaustion, smelling of mint and coffee. The drumming toes against her thighs, under the worn-out comforter. The heat of him, the smell of him, bringing back a handful of crisp April mornings and empty Dhaka streets. The rhythm of his breathing, ragged with asthma and corporate demands. 

She knew all this, she had burned them into her mind.  But she worries that one day he would be no more than an empty space in her world, a he-shaped hole that would take away her April mornings and imaginary circles. There is a constant foreboding of oblivion, a permanent end that storms in a corner of her head. Persistence and constant, like his drumming toes.

So she lay there, her nakedness covered by his heat and a shared comforter and she memorised.

Collecting years in hours, counting infinities in moments.

"Years haven't changed you," he said. His voice as light and dreamy as the circles he drew on her skin.

"Neither you. Except for that receding hairline," she spoke, masking the human ambiguity of heartache and happiness with humour.

He laughed, "You're beautiful."

She smiled, "I know, right."

He went back to drawing circles. She kept on gathering infinities.