As she lay sleeping

She needs me.
She never says it, but I see it in her too-bright smiles, her lingering embraces, her pleading, empty eyes.
It's in the way her soft voice echoes in my ear when it's past what can even be called late and is heading into the realm of very, very early. I'm desperately tired, but she won't let me go, sleep-roughened whispers asking me not to leave, begging for me to stay with her, talk to her, just a few minutes longer.
(I always do.)
It's in the way she clings to me, the way she keeps our hands linked until the last possible moment, our fingers touching, stretched between us, linking us like fraying rope, the way she stares after me when I leave.
I want to turn around, to run to her, to sweep her off her feet and make her fall desperately in love with me, because she doesn’t care. She thinks I don't know, that I don't notice the way she turns away when those three damn words bubble to my lips, the way she worries her bottom lip between her teeth for a few precious seconds before she repeats them (I will not say "return," because those seconds tell me truly how she feels).
I know I'm being used.
But I don't mind.

I like to pretend. I like to pretend that someday, I will come home and find her waiting for me, her clear green eyes telling me how much she missed me while I was gone. Maybe she'll have done something special for us, like make dinner or plan a romantic outing, breaking us free from the sort of don't-ask-don't-tell, I-won't-care-if-you-don't, let's-keep-our-independence cohabitation/codependence deal we have going on. I would like to pretend that she knows I love her, and that she loves me. But sometimes, in the face of reality, it's hard to pretend.

Sometimes it feels like she wants to see how far I'll follow her. She pulls farther and farther away until I have to stop chasing after her for my own sake, for hers, for ours. Something in me wants to keep running for as long as she does, keep gaining on her until she stops or slows and I can pick her up and whisk her away. She wants to know how far I'll follow. I'm scared to tell her: into death.

When I wake at night and turn to her, she looks like a goddess in the soft pale moonlight. Her skin is rosy, still flushed. She is splayed beneath the covers, the smooth pale columns of arm and neck and thigh lying like glass flowers or cut crystal in a bed of soft petals, luxurious brown curls spread on the pillow in a gentle halo.
She is beautiful and kind and generous, but I know that it is not love we shared early in the evening, early when the sun was beginning to set and the rose-gold light caught in her hair as she came to me, her arms open, her mouth soft-- and her heart closed. I had hoped once, years ago, that she would come to care for me, but that hope is buried now, a persistent ember smothered under the ashes of time and subtle rejections. And when she lay in my arms afterward, her body pliant and giving, I lay staring at the ceiling, knowing I made love, and she made like.