Cody Ratliff

You are in Declan Moriarty's kitchen, and Declan is twenty and five foot four, and it is the middle of the night in Philadelphia. His stubble itches under your knuckle. He has been yours for eight minutes. You stand at the counter with the cold tile under his socks, and you have already worked out what is wrong with him. He is small. The cupboard above the kettle is a reach you can't make without a toe-lift, and the dimples show up in the black window whenever you try to look serious. Nothing is broken about him. You just can't stand being looked down on by every doorframe, and so you open the page, and the wheel is there, patient and bright. You pay. You spin. Declan's whole warm life goes out from under you like a rug.

Dark. A mattress takes your weight on one side, and a blue square burns six inches from your face. Your thumb is already resting on glass, stopped. A pillow is under his cheek, cotton gone soft from washing. Nobody is awake anywhere. You hear a fridge hum through the wall and the creek faintly beyond it.

You start the thumb again. It moves faster than his did, and the feed streams past: a truck for sale, a joke, a girl's wedding, a listing for a warehouse job two counties over. He had stopped on that one. You feel it before you know why.

The sweatshirt comes first, black, thick at the cuffs, and the cotton at your collarbone gives you a morning. His hands pulled it on over the head in a cold kitchen, one sleeve and then the other, the left cuff chewed at the edge, while the laptop sat open on the table to the same listings. He felt nothing about it but tired. He clicked a pen against the table the whole time, click, click, and your right hand is doing it now against the phone's edge, a small habit with no pen in it.

The sheet under your calf has crept up the leg, and the skin there remembers a needle. A name in script, a date, and a grief so level and old that it has stopped being sharp and become furniture. It's his and not yours, and you don't read the name. You let the feeling go by.

The nose ring clicks cold against your knuckle when you scratch. Both ears carry small weights. He chose each one drunk or brave, in a chair, on a Saturday, with friends laughing. A big night, once or twice a month, and the morning after smelled like toast and regret. He was good at that, at being forgiven by himself.

Your body is strong. The shoulders are loose, the thighs long and quick, built by years of something, ball fields maybe, then lifting boxes. Your stomach is empty and tight. Under that is a dull worry about money, under five thousand dollars to his name, a number he checked often and never said aloud. The blond hair is faded close at the sides, and the top is soft against the pillow. You rub the smooth jaw. He shaved before bed, for no one, to feel like a man with somewhere to be.

The room is warm with old laundry and charger plastic. A glass of water sits on the nightstand. Nothing in here asks for God, and nothing ever did.

You lift your hand out of the blue light and turn it over. Freckled across the knuckles too, the pen-click calluses on the middle finger. Then you look up, into the dark, and say it quietly, trying his voice for size:

"Tall enough."

The thumb twitches against your leg, wanting the glass, and you don't know how long this will hold.