Colin Mullaney

Samir Khoury's thumb is still on the trackpad, and the apartment around him is asleep. A radiator ticks in the Boston dark. The kitchen smells of the cardamom his mother left in the cupboard, and the white streak in his hair keeps catching the light off the screen. You have worn him for less than a minute. He is a decent body: stubble, soft middle, shoulders that ache from a van seat he has never sat in. He works, and he would work tomorrow. Nothing is wrong with him. But you stood at his window just now and watched a man across the street fold a towel, slowly, as if folding it were the whole of his life, and you wanted to be that person, whoever he was. You wanted to be someone whose towel mattered. So the wheel turns, and the click is small.

Then you are face-down. The mattress holds your whole weight, and the sheet is hot and damp against your mouth. Your breath is ragged, and then it is even, all in one pull. One arm hangs off the bed, and the blood has gone out of the fingers. You draw it up. You roll. Your hands fold on your chest, and some part of him, deep in the muscle, wants to object to that.

Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across your ribs. The gray T-shirt is worn thin at the collar, and its cotton gives up the first thing. A morning, the shirt's own: his fingers pulling the hoodie over it in the dark, the navy work pants, boots with the left lace frayed. He is tired in the memory, but it is a decent tired, the tired of someone who is good at something. The orange vest comes off a hook. He stacks boxes into a trailer until the stack is a wall he built.

The sweatpants are soft at the knee, and under them something older opens up. A woman on white marble steps worn hollow in the middle, a rowhouse door behind her, the first sun coming down the block. She is laughing, and he is trying to memorize her while she does it. He memorizes badly. Then the steps are empty, and the feeling is plain and large, a thing he never said aloud: she was the one who got away, and he let her.

You lift your hand to look, and your thumbnail is already at your teeth. His habit, bitten to the quick. The fingers are rough with calluses across the pads, and the palms are scraped from pallet wood. Your back is strong and your shoulders hurt pleasantly. There are freckles on the forearm, and you do not know whether the skin remembers the sun. You have been here for seconds.

You sit up into the streetlight and turn your hand over. Nothing on it is yours. You look up at nothing and say, quietly, "Okay. You're mine."

And already, under the words, the question: how long.