Aidan Boudreaux

You are Declan Mercer, and you have been Declan Mercer for twenty-six minutes. That is long enough to know what's wrong with him. He is easy. Everything in him is easy: the long legs, the shoulders that never ache, the Miami light coming through the blinds in clean white bars. The mornings here hold no weight. You sit on the edge of a bed you did not choose, in a room that smells of someone else's laundry, and you find that you want nothing. There is nothing in him to press against. His body does everything before you ask it, and the asking is the part you came for.

Even his hunger is polite. The coffee is good and goes down like a receipt. You think of the wheel, the page with its patient colors, and your thumb is already moving. You tell yourself it is just to see. You always tell yourself that.

Then the wheel stops, and there is rain.

It is in your mouth first, in your eyes, running cold down your throat past a collar. You are standing out in it. You have stepped off the concrete into the runoff, and your hood is shoved back, and your face is turned up into the water. Your heels are soaked. Somewhere at your shoulder a board glows 3 MIN, and behind it a bus is a long way off yet.

The body is not tall. It is five-eight, and the ground feels closer, the world nearer to the chin. It is lean and a little hollow in the belly, and your shoulders are tight from standing a long time in the damp. Your jaw is clenched, and you let it go. Water slides into the thin, patchy beard and along the gaps in it. The top of your left ear is cold and aching where a ring of metal sits in the cartilage.

Then your hands do it on their own. The right one comes up and the thumb finds the zipper pull of the jacket, rubbing the little rubber tab. Something opens.

The jacket is the black one. It is a Tuesday in an earlier winter, and you are fourteen weeks into the job, standing in a store aisle with a box cutter and a pallet of paper towels. A woman older than your mother has told you that you are too young to be in charge. You said *yes ma'am* and meant *watch me*. Pride is hot in the chest like a swallowed coal. You bought this jacket with the first paycheck that had *manager* on the stub, and you wore the tags in the pocket for a week to remember.

The jeans are heavy with water against your thighs. In the pocket there are keys. You close your hand around them and the memory is the heavy brass one, the key to the stockroom. You are alone in the building before dawn, lights humming on one row at a time. You are twenty years old and you own nothing, and for ten minutes the whole store is yours. You walk the aisle slowly with your hand out, brushing the shelves, the way a man touches a horse.

Your sneakers squelch. The left one has a loose lace, and the feeling that comes with it is small and ashamed. The girl is in it. *Maren.* She laughed at those shoes once, kindly, on the steps of a porch off Dauphine, and said you would be buried in them. You had been about to say something true. You said something clever, and the moment closed like a door. You have not said it since. It sits behind your sternum, unspent.

The rain finds the neckline of your shirt. Underneath the jacket the work shirt is damp, and you remember buttoning it in a dark kitchen at five-fifteen. You did the cuffs first, then the collar, with your mother's old rule in your head about the top button. The tie is in the bag. You never wear it at the bus stop. You put it on in the stockroom, like armor, so no one sees you reach for it.

There is a bigger thing, down under the rest. It is not a memory of any one day. It is the savings account with its number, more than any twenty-year-old should have, and the secret of where it came from: a grandmother's house, a settlement, a silence. He tells no one. He stands in the rain feeling rich and frightened of it, as though it could be taken by being noticed. It is a good feeling to carry. You carry it carefully.

The wet has soaked through to your skin, and it feels like being washed. You understand why he stepped out.

Down the street the bus lights swell, blurred and gold. You lift your hands from your sides and hold them in front of you, palms up, filling with rain. Freckled, pale, the knuckles reddened by cold. Small hands, quick ones, still learning what they are for. You turn them over. They are strong and they are not yours.

You look up, and say, to the street, to the rain, to whoever is listening, "Well. Hello."

The bus is coming. The cold is a clean thing. And already, somewhere under your ribs, small and bright and patient, the wanting stirs. You do not know yet how long you have him.