Adrián Louis Esparza

You are standing in a dead man's kitchen, which is to say Kevin's, which is to say yours for one minute and some seconds more. Atlanta is asleep. The refrigerator hums. You open the laptop on his counter and the page is already there, the wheel, a pale disc waiting.

You have been Kevin for a minute. His shoulders are good. His knees do not complain. You wanted something, and the wanting arrived anyway, the way it does, a hunger at the back of the jaw that a good body does not touch. On the table by the keys sits a hard hat with a name inked inside the band, and a text on his phone from a crew that expects him at six. None of it is yours. You pay. You spin.

The click of the wheel is the last thing Kevin hears.

Then: foam. Mint, sharp and sweet, thick on your top lip. A brush in your right hand stopped mid-stroke against the front teeth, and water running in the sink, loud in a small tiled room. Your eyes are on nothing, on the drain. Your stomach pushes soft against a cotton shirt. Your feet are bare on a mat gone stiff with years of damp.

You start brushing again, because the hand wants to. The other side now, slower, working the back molars, and the hand knows the angle without you.

The shirt is the first thing that opens. It is olive, washed thin, and it hangs from the shoulders the way it has hung since a cousin handed it over in a cardboard box. You feel the cousin's laugh, not hear it. You feel him say, *it's too big for me anyway.* The cotton at the collar is worn soft as skin.

The plaid pants at your hips: a Christmas, a drugstore aisle, his mother holding them up and saying something in Spanish that made him blush at nineteen. The drawstring has a knot he retied a hundred times. The tile is cool and gritty under his heels. A lawn comes up behind your eyes, a laptop on his knees in the sun, grass pressing prints into his calves, a deadline, a girl two rows over he never spoke to. The yearning is a small warm stone he carries. You did not ask for it. You hold it anyway.

The tap. You lean and rinse once, the cold sharp on the molars, and rinse again. The cup is paper-thin plastic, and the memory in it is a nothing: four a.m. thirst, standing here in this same light, thinking about rent. Twelve hundred dollars in an account. His chest tightens around the number, familiar as a handrail.

You stand the brush bristles-up in the holder. It has always sat in grey water at the bottom. You leave it there.

Your belly, your thighs, the heat that never leaves this city even at night, wet at the nape. Twenty years old and already tired in the lower back, a student's tired, from the chair and the bag and the walking.

You look down at your hands. Broad, warm, pink at the knuckles from the water. You turn them over. They are not yours. They are yours.

You look up into the mirror, at the dark mole high on his cheek, and say, quietly, "Okay. Hi."

The tap drips once. You wonder how long this one holds, and whether the wanting is already waking, small, under the mint.