Colin Reese Brennan

You have been awake since the morning's first coffee, and the screen has been nothing much for an hour. A Thursday with the light flat in the window. You have read the threads at two in the morning for years: the man who wakes up in another man's hands, the mirror that gives back a stranger. Always the same hunger, never anything to buy. Then a page with a wheel on it. You pay. You do not believe it. You spin.

Dark. A pillow under your cheek, and the weight of a phone held six inches from your face. Your thumb is stopped on the glass. Then it moves, faster and steadier than whatever had stopped it. Everything he had paused on slides away under it. It is evening here, late enough that the house has gone quiet around him.

The sheet is cool under your calves. Your socks are bunched at the ankle. The shirt is soft with washing, and the moment it shifts against your shoulder blade you get his morning: the left sleeve first, pulled down over a forearm that was already half asleep, the drawer sticking where it always sticks, a woman's voice in the next room asking if he has seen the small shoe. He had said yes, under the bed. He had been pleased to know.

The sweatpants drag at the knee and you are in a garage under a house, a steep driveway outside, the cold white light on a standing desk. Two monitors. Cold coffee he forgot to finish. He is good at the work. You feel it as a quiet pride with an ache in it, the way a man feels about something that pays him well and asks for everything. Money sits in him like a floor he stopped noticing years ago.

The phone is warm against your palm. The case has a groove where his thumb rests, and the groove opens a name he has not said aloud in a long time. A woman who got away. He doesn't look for her. He only slows down when something might be her. His chest tightens around it, and then, under that, two small voices at the top of the stairs, a bath, wet hair, a child's whole weight falling asleep on his shoulder. The girlfriend's laugh. A Sunday pew, hymn book, the plain Protestant hush he still keeps for himself.

The pillow smells of someone else's shampoo. The back of the shirt presses on the ink across his spine, a cross and praying hands, and you feel it as a slight heat, a history. Your stomach is flat and strong. Your legs are long and loose. He is twenty-nine and nothing hurts but his neck, from the angle of the phone.

You lower it. You turn your hand over in the blue light, and it is his hand, square and warm, the nails clean. You look up.

"Okay," you say, in his voice, low. "Hello."

The room doesn't answer. How long do you get? You flex the fingers once, and wait to feel the wanting come back.