Colin Patrick Dunleavy

You are standing in Gregory Pohlman's kitchen in Anchorage, and it is the middle of the day, flat white light off the snow at the window. His body is heavy and warm and good at its work. The birthmark itches when you sweat. You have worn him for a day and twenty-three hours, and this morning he ate eggs with a competence you could not match, and his knees told you every stair.

Nothing is wrong with him. That is the part you would not say aloud. At the sink you ran his tap, and his hand, which knew a thing yours never would, reached for the cold without being asked. You stood there thinking: he is somebody's. His mother's number is on the fridge. Something in you could not stand being so thoroughly lent to. You went upstairs and opened the page with the wheel on it.

You pay. You spin.

The road is dark and the car is moving. Both hands are at ten and two, and the dash glow lies on the knuckles. The car has drifted a foot toward the line. You pull it back in one smooth stroke, and your hands come off the wheel and settle lower and wider, because you want them there. The signal ticks on for an exit that is not his. You do not know whose it is yet.

The body is thin in the wrong places and soft in the middle. There is a tired ache behind the eyes, the end of a day, and a pouch of nicotine sits against the gum, sharp and peppery. The shirt is cotton, dark, soft at the cuffs, and when the sleeve slides on your wrist it opens something. He stood in a rowhouse bedroom at first light, buttoning it on a cold morning, left cuff then right, thinking about a slide deck, about a partner named Aldous who says "circle back" like a verb. His feeling is a low hum: be good, be fast, be unnoticed. Then the steering wheel, worn leather under the thumbs, and a flash of the marble steps outside his door, worn hollow in the middle by two hundred years of feet, and how he always steps in the hollow. He is twenty-two. He thinks of the lounge this afternoon, the laptop on the ledge, the flight delayed, and a pride so private it embarrasses him, the number in the account that he has not told his father. It is more than he ever thought he would have. It has not made the house any less quiet.

The seat holds his back. The belt lies across the chest. The freckled face is warm in the dash light, the jaw freshly shaved and smooth, and the exit sign comes up green and bright.

You lift your right hand off the wheel and look at it. You turn it over. It is pale and unmarked and not yours, and it is faintly shaking.

Then you look up into the mirror, and you say it aloud: "Hello, Colin."

How long, you wonder, before the wanting comes back? You are not asking yet. The exit is coming, and the signal keeps ticking.