Adrian Salcedo

You have been at the screen too long, and the evening has been nothing. Work is done, the scrolling is done, and the house is quiet in the way that makes you restless. You have wanted this for as long as you can remember: the films where someone wakes up in another man's hands, the threads at two in the morning, the stories read twice. Until tonight it was never for sale. Then a page with a wheel on it, and a payment you do not let yourself think about. You press the button, the wheel spins, and it stops.

Hum. A buzzing under your skin, bright and mean, and the sharp sting of a needle dragging along the inside of a forearm. The light went out a second ago, and now it is back. You are sitting on a padded table with your arm braced on a rest, and the green soap is cold where it pools. Your head is turned away, and your jaw has been clenched so long that it lets go the moment you arrive. You turn and watch the needle work. It is happening to furniture.

The pain is real, but it belongs to someone else. It reads as pressure and heat, a hundred small bees, and you let it.

Your own hand moves before you ask it to. The fingers of the left drum on your thigh, a restless tapping that cannot hold still. They have always done this. A flash comes through the cotton of the shorts under your palm: a kitchen table, a laptop, listings that all say the same thing, and the tired shame of reading *no longer accepting applications*. Then you are standing at that table in these same clothes, tugging the black shirt over a head that has not slept well. This morning he turned the shirt right side out, checked the neck for the tag, and decided it would do for a Sunday. His feeling is what you get, a dull pride in being clean when there is no one to see.

The ring on your finger turns under your thumb. It is not a ring, only a pale band of skin, and the touch opens a door. A courtyard, late sun, a woman's laughter that cuts off. He stood there with the band in his fist for an hour before he put it in a drawer. You do not get her name. You get the ache, the sense of a house with one set of dishes.

Your boots creak. The laces he tied double, a habit from a father who did the same. A crucifix, a small one on a nightstand, a rosary he does not say but cannot throw out. He is Catholic the way he is tired: without noticing. He has never drunk, not once, not even when it would have been easy, and the sober clarity of that is in the boots, in the stance.

The sleeve is on your right arm, black and patterned, the old work under the new green. It was done in pieces, each one paid for in cash he barely had. Under the needle, the thing he is getting today is a promise he made himself, for no one. The scar through your eyebrow tingles. A cut from a fall, a bicycle, a boy, a curb. The grit is still in that memory.

You are strong, and your shoulders are loose. Your knees ache a little, the ordinary ache of thirty-nine. The room smells of ink and antiseptic.

You lift your hand and turn it over, the pale line on the finger catching the window light. Then you look up.

"Okay," you say, in his voice. "Okay. Keep going."

The needle hums on. How long does this one last? You already feel the wanting stir, patient, somewhere behind his ribs.