Calvin Rodgers

You are leaving Devontae because of the stairwell.

It's the first thing you know, standing in his kitchen in Seattle with the window still blue and his phone lit in your hand. Seventy minutes in him, and he is a good body: twenty-two, heavy, knees that don't complain. But there was a stairwell on the way to the corner store, six flights, and the man you are wearing stopped at the third landing with his heart going like a fist on a door. You could have kept going. You did not want to. The wanting had already gone somewhere else, and you stood there with a stranger's lungs, thinking *this is all it is*. A body that works and a street that is the same street. So you thumb the page open. The wheel is already turning, and you do not decide, you only stop holding back.

Then nothing, and then weight.

You are face-down. Cotton against your cheek, sheets knotted under your ribs. One arm hangs off the mattress and the blood has pooled in it, heavy and ticking. Your breath is ragged, wet in the beard, and then it evens out, in one pull, as if someone smoothed it. You roll. The hanging arm draws itself up, and your hands fold on your chest. A streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across your knuckles. Somewhere a lamp is still on.

The sheet under your palm is cheap, washed soft. A flash comes: a Sunday in a rented room, the sheet bought in a two-pack because he meant to buy the other set and never did. Then the T-shirt, gray, thin at the collar. His thumb finds the hole in the hem and knows it. Under it a day opens, a Saturday on the lot, balloons knocking on the mirrors of a hundred cars and a woman in the lane saying *I just want to look*, and him smiling, truly, because looking was how it started. He does not push. He lets people circle. His whole career is patience, a man who stands in white light and waits.

You press your hand to your chest and a name comes with it. Not yours. The script on your inner forearm is warm under your other palm, and the letters rise up in him: a name, a date, the needle's burn, the long quiet afterward in a parked car with the engine off. He did not tell anyone what it was for. He touched it when he lied, when he didn't. Now your thumb does it, and you do not know what you are touching, only that it hurts the way a held breath hurts.

The mattress is firm, a little sagged at the hip. Your back remembers a good chair and a bad one, forty-six years of both. Your shoulders are strong, your lower spine is tight, and your jaw is sore from clenching in sleep. He never slept on his back. You are the first.

You lift your hands into the streetlight and turn them over. The palms are broad, creased, and steady. You look into the dark of the room, past your own fingers, and say, to no one, low and rough with his sleep:

"Okay. Let's see how long you last."

You mean the body. You are not sure you do.