My partner told me to ask for a thing a day. That was after I'd confessed I sometimes felt like a fault line.

"You never ask for things," they said.

"You can begin with something small," they said.

"Just as long as it's something you want," they said.

Their bottom lip—normally cushioning their crooked front teeth—wobbled like the coconut agar jelly we'd had for breakfast until I agreed.

I spent the day on the couch watching nature documentaries. The soothing cadence of David Attenborough's voice did nothing to mend my tectonic fissures. Then after my partner came home from work I joined them in the bath: a balancing act on the tub's rim, cool porcelain against the backs of my thighs.

Weeks earlier I had implemented the a-fact-a-day rule to keep things interesting between us.

"Did you know elephants comfort other elephants by touching their trunks to each other's mouths and genitals?" I asked.

My partner considered this from within the steaming water. "I did not."

"I want," I said, then stopped.

"Yes?"

"To be comforted."

As they sat up, their mermaid tail of lavender bubbles burst and dissolved. They rinsed one hand clean of soap, then placed it around my jaw. Their thumb was careful and a little coarse as it stroked my tongue. My partner's other hand came to rest between my legs. Not moving, just cupping, cradling. It was the least sexual experience we'd ever shared while both naked. The safest I had felt in a while, too.

In a way, it reminded me of that time after my partner's top surgery: the cuts had healed into scars, but the birds and vines weren't yet tattoo ink but pixels in an Attenborough documentary. My partner had taken my hand and placed it flat against their bare chest. They kept it there for the longest time, their breath rumbling in and out like tiny earthquakes, tinier aftershocks. I had even offered to paint my nails a nice color so they could take a picture.

They said, "No need."

They said, "Just this."

They said, "Just you."

In bed after our bath I asked, "Will you hold me?"

"Like an elephant?"

They brought their chest to mine. Their twin crescent scars—nestled within their brightly-inked vine jungle—pressed up against my invisible fissures. Not mending them, exactly, but keeping them from opening up and engulfing me.

"No," I said, because I wanted to. "Hold me like yourself."