Calvin Wong

You are standing in Isaiah's kitchen in Las Vegas, and the phone in his hand is warm from his thumb. He has been yours for three minutes. His body is lovely and loud. It wants things quickly, and it is twenty and has never once been tired on purpose.

The reason is small. Ten minutes ago you picked up a guitar from the corner, because there was a guitar, and his fingers did nothing. Nobody had left you anything in them. They touched the strings like a stranger's mail. You stood there with all that height and those dimples, and you could not play one chord a boy had spent six years learning. Now you are tired of being a locked house. The wheel is on the screen and you pay.

Then it is dark and heavy, and you are face-down.

Cotton against your cheek, a sheet crushed under your chin. Your breath is ragged, wet at the back of the throat, and then it is even, in one breath, because you have made it so. One arm hangs off the mattress and the blood has gone out of it. You draw it up. You roll, and the belly comes with you, soft and warm and settled. You fold your hands on your chest. It is a way he has never slept. You know that without knowing how.

A thin orange line stands in the curtains. Streetlight. Nothing else moves in the house.

The T-shirt is under your fingers, thin from washing, and it gives you something unasked. A hand on a big flat wheel. Wet leaves pasted to the windshield at the end of a route, a long, tired ease as the doors sigh open and no one is left to get on. He liked that part best, the empty bus, the heater ticking. He would sit a minute before he took the keys out. It was the only quiet he trusted.

The waistband of the shorts, soft and stretched. Then a flash of a different drawer: a woman's laugh in a car, her feet on his dashboard. She is the ex. He still has the hurt of her somewhere low, like a stone he swallowed years ago and learned to walk around. It is not yours. It sits in you anyway, and you let it.

The sheet under your palm is cold where he has not lain. Your jaw is smooth, freshly shaved, and you feel it with your knuckle. There was a morning on this body's calendar: the blue uniform shirt, the buttons done from the bottom up because he always did them that way, sleeves squared, the pen into the pocket, the sunglasses pushed up into the blunt fringe. His hands knew all of it before he did. A man who is good at small things and has nothing to show for it. Rent, a drink or two at night, a cigarette he does not smoke anymore but still reaches for at red lights. You can feel the reaching in your fingers now.

Your back aches in its low, honest way, from years of seat. Your hands are thick-palmed and calloused across the base of the fingers from the wheel. They would know how to steer a forty-foot machine round a wet corner without you.

You lift them in the orange dark and turn them over. Strong. Square. Yours, for now.

You look up and say into the quiet, "Okay, Calvin. Show me."

You do not know whether this is the one you keep until morning, or only until you want more.