A hush had settled over the little hotel room, the kind that makes even the streetlights outside seem to whisper. They lay beneath a quilt still smelling of new linen, bodies warm from the day’s celebrations, hearts drumming with the odd thrill of finally being wife and husband. Moonlight slipped through the curtains and painted silver bars across the bed, a gentle reminder that the night itself was curious about them. After the laughter and the toasts and the endless photos, this was the first moment that belonged only to the two of them, and it felt both fragile and enormous.
He rolled onto his side, the mattress creaking like it, too, wanted to be part of the conversation. Words had always come easily to him—he was the one who chatted with strangers in elevators—but tonight his tongue felt thick with wonder. Propped on one elbow, he traced the curve of her shoulder and let the question slide out before he could weigh it, soft as a secret: “How many men have you slept with before me?” The moment it left his lips he wanted to pull it back, but the room was small and the question bounced off the ceiling, landing between them like a third person no one had invited.
She didn’t blink. She didn’t frown. She simply stared upward, as if the answer might be written in the plaster. A minute stretched into two, then three, the quiet growing heavier than any quilt. He tried to read her face—eyelashes motionless, breath steady, lips pressed in a gentle seam—and found nothing there but calm geometry. Panic fluttered in his chest; maybe he had broken something sacred. He reached for her hand, gave it a small squeeze, and whispered again, “Hey, it’s okay. I just want to know you, all of you.” Still, she offered no sound, no tilt of the head, no squeeze back.
A ceiling fan turned lazily overhead, counting revolutions the way a metronome counts time for a song that refuses to start. He listened to the blades, to the hum of the mini-fridge, to the distant ding of the elevator, searching for any rhythm that might explain her silence. Then he heard it—faint, almost imaginary. Her lips were moving, barely parted, shaping numbers instead of words. One… two… three… the smallest puffs of breath, like someone walking barefoot across a long, dark hallway, feeling for the light switch. The realization crawled up his spine: she wasn’t ignoring him; she was still mid-calculation, adding up years and faces and moments he had not been part of.
He felt the room tilt. Each silent number was a tiny mirror held up to his own past, reflecting the girlfriends he had already folded away into memory. Jealousy flickered, then died, replaced by something humbler: awe at the long road she had walked to reach this bed. He lay back, stared at the same blank ceiling, and waited. When her lips finally stilled, she turned to him, eyes shining with tears that had not yet fallen. “I’m done counting,” she said, voice steady. “From tonight forward, the number starts at one.” She took his hand and placed it over her heart, and in the hush that followed, the question curled up like an old newspaper and drifted away, leaving only the soft beat of tomorrow beneath his palm.
