Brett Halvorsen

You have been Levi Hartsock for one minute, and already you know what is wrong with him. He is a good body. Strong across the back, easy in the shoulders, a man who has lifted feed sacks since he could stand. The house is asleep around you. A fridge hums. Somewhere a dog turns over on a porch. You are standing in his kitchen in the dark with his boots by the door, and you cannot stop thinking that you spent your whole minute noticing that nothing in him wants to be looked at. He has no mirror in the house. Nothing in you answers him. So you go back to the page with the wheel on it, and you pay, and the wheel turns, and you let go of the kitchen the way you let go of a rail.

The blue light is on your cheek.

You are on your side, and the phone is six inches from your face, and your thumb has stopped on something. You do not know what. You start it again, faster, steadier, flicking past whatever he had stopped on, a face, a caption, a name, gone. The room is dim and brown. Behind a dark curtain the window is going pale, the color of an early morning not yet decided. Your eyes are dry. He has not blinked in a while, and you make yourself do it.

The sheet is tangled around one leg. The T-shirt against your ribs is thin and soft from washing, and when you shift, it gives you something unasked: a hand pulling it from a drawer last night, the drawer sticking, a girl's voice from the other room saying keep it down, she's sleeping. Her. Not the one asleep beside you now. Another one, the recent one, her name still lodged somewhere under his tongue, and the feeling comes with it, a dull pressed-thumb ache he has been carrying for weeks and has told no one about.

Your arm is under the pillow, and the ink on it is warm from your own skin. Black tribal lines, a half sleeve. The memory is a chair, a buzzing, a friend laughing, eighteen and certain. Then, right behind it, the church lobby and an older man looking at the arm for one second too long and saying nothing kind or unkind, and the heat in his neck. He kept the arm and kept going anyway. Sundays, folding chairs, a hymn he knows all the words to and half believes at 3 a.m. and fully at noon.

Your fingers are tapping the back of the phone. You did not tell them to. Index, middle, ring, index, a small restless drumming that has run through every exam, every sermon, every waiting room of his life. You let it go on. It is the most him thing you have found.

The glass on the nightstand holds water, never anything else. He has never wanted the other thing. There is a laptop somewhere on a campus lawn in his future, a loan, a tab he is behind on, a number in his account he checks and then stops checking. Scraping by. The pickup in the driveway is not paid off. The house is a new build, all drywall and echo, and he loves it anyway, because for once it is his and hers.

The mattress presses your hip. Nineteen years in this body, and it feels like a promise nobody has broken yet. Your jaw is rough with three days of stubble. Your scalp is cropped to the skin at the sides, and when you press your head into the pillow you feel the hard line of the cut.

You put the phone down on the sheet. You turn your right hand over in the blue light. The ink runs up past the wrist. The knuckles are scuffed. You close it, open it.

"Huh," you say, in his voice, low, a little rough from sleep. "Okay."

The window is lightening. Somebody breathes in the next room. And you lie there already wondering how long this one holds, whether the wanting stays quiet or comes back before the sun is up.