Corpse

The sound of her laugh is excruciating. Her dark eyes gather beautiful lines on their outermost corners as her face creases with the force of her large smile. Sitting beside one another on her bed, watching an episode of Friends we must have seen respectively about forty times before; I smile, not at the show, but at her child-like amusement.
"Hold my feet?" she asks, "They're freezing!"
So I do, and we sit in comfortable silence, smiling intermittently at the television, until her eyelids grow heavy, and gently close; and I am left alone with Joey Tribbiani, her graceful corpse-like figure, and her mobile phone. I reach over carefully to lift it from her lap, and feel the warmth of her skin through the light cover. Her chest rises and falls rhythmically, silent breath filters out of her full lips, eyes remain closed. As I lift the handset with my right hand, my left rises to balance the phone, but as it does so, my fingernails graze the sole of her foot and her lips morph into a smile, those lines appear again at the corner of her eyes.
"Don't tickle me!" she kicks the uppermost part of my inner thigh, and is suddenly awake again.
She grabs her phone, and checks for messages. Plan B shall have to wait another day.