Brett Sandvik

You are standing in Colin Mullaney's kitchen in Philadelphia, deep in the night, with a cold mug of tea going slick in his hands. The house is asleep. The refrigerator hums. His shoulders ache from the dock, and his freckled forearms are red where the strapping bit him. He has been yours for less than a minute and already you know the trouble: he is twenty-three and he is nothing you did not already have. A body that lifts, a body that sleeps. You wanted a man who has something, a door that opens onto a room with weight in it, and you stand at his laptop reading your own want like a bill.

The wheel turns. You do not remember pressing anything.

Then there is foam on your lip and the brush is halfway across your teeth. Water runs in the sink. The stroke stops mid-motion, because you have stopped it. A stranger's breath pushes in and out of a chest that is wider than the last one, softer at the front, heavier everywhere. The tile is cool under bare feet. Your left hand is flat on the counter, bearing weight it is used to bearing.

You start brushing again, on the other side, slower, working the back molars. His jaw knows the pattern, and you let it.

The shirt comes first. Grey cotton, washed thin, worn to sleep in. It clings under the arms, and a memory arrives that is not yours: a drawer pulled open in the dark so as not to wake her, the girlfriend, the sound of her breathing, and a small flat relief, because the bed has been wrong for weeks. Not wrong between them. Wrong since the other one left, the recent ex, whom he still half-thinks of when the house goes quiet. He pulled this shirt over his head tonight with that thought sitting in him like a swallowed stone.

You rinse once, twice. The grey water goes down. The plaid of the pajama pants rasps against his thighs, and the flannel brings a Saturday: a church parking lot, the glare off a hundred windshields, his own voice reading a verse aloud, steady, and a deep pleased hurt at being a man whom people trust with the keys. Manager. The glass-walled office, the door left open on purpose so nobody can say he hid. You feel how carefully he built that, one open door at a time.

Your right hand will not stay still. It drums the counter, taps the faucet, finds the cap of the toothpaste and spins it. Habit, from the years when it held a cigarette. The fingers reach for a pocket that has not carried a pack in a long time, and the reaching comes with craving, a thin bright wire behind the teeth, and with pride in not answering it.

Under it all runs the money, quiet, a number he never says aloud: a house, a paid-off thing, enough. He does not feel rich. He feels watchful. The knees ache a little at the stairs. The belly rests warm against the counter edge, and the mole high on his cheek itches where the steam has touched it.

You set the brush upright, bristles up, out of the grey water where it has always sat, and you turn off the tap.

You look at your hands. Broad, pale, restless, the knuckles dry. You turn them over. Then you lift your eyes to the mirror and the stranger there, blond, clean-jawed, with a face that has never once expected you.

"Well," you say, in a voice that is lower than you planned. "Hello, Brett."

Nothing answers. Somewhere down the hall a woman turns over in her sleep, and you wonder how long you get to keep her silence.