Colt Hargrove

You are Tevita Faleolo for less than a minute more, and you are tired of how the line hums in him. Twenty-nine years of a body built to stand and bolt and torque, and the first thing it did was teach you the shift whistle. You stand in his dark kitchen in San Francisco with a glass of water, the fog against the window, and you could do this for years. That is the trouble. He works. He is good at it. Nothing in him argues back, and something in you has started to want an argument. You put the glass down. The cleft chin, the goatee, the brown eyes in the black window: they are fine. You open the page with the wheel.

It turns. There is no falling.

Blue light on your cheek. Your thumb is already moving, flicking the screen, and the thing he had stopped on slides away, a photograph of a woman at a lake, gone before you can read it. The phone is six inches from your face. You are on your side, an arm folded under you, the mattress soft and sagging toward the middle. Your eyes have not blinked in too long, and now they do, wet and stinging.

Then the things around you start talking.

The sheet under your palm is rough from too many washings, and with it comes a Sunday: the woman who owns this bed, laughing, snapping the fitted corner over the mattress, her hair tied up in a rag, and him, not helping, happy. Her name rises up as a warmth rather than a word. The ring on your left hand is a small cold band, and when your thumb rubs it, you get the day he bought it, the pawn counter, the cost, the way he counted bills twice.

The shirt is cotton gone soft, a gray tee with a pocket, and it smells of dish soap and old grease that never fully leaves. It gives you this morning's shirt, the work one, the buttons: his thick fingers pushing each through a stiff hole, the name patch he never reads anymore, the rag stuffed into the back pocket the way his father did it. Then the boots by the door, laces knotted, the left lace frayed. Then the cold coffee, the gravel road, the water tower standing on the horizon like a pin.

Your feet are bare on the blanket. The soles are rough and hot. Under them, the dark fleece is cool, and the cool gives you something else: a different woman, years back, a truck bed, a county fair, the one who got away. She never wrote. He still checks. That is what he was scrolling for, and you feel it sit in his chest like a swallowed stone. It is not yours. You carry it anyway.

Your body is long and soft in the middle, a belly that rests on the mattress, shoulders that ache from reaching under hoods, forearms stubborn with strength. The beard scratches the pillow. A can on the nightstand sweats a ring. One or two beers, most nights, and tonight was no different. Your hands know how to hold a wrench without a thought. They know nothing else about you.

You stop. You lower the phone.

You hold up your right hand in the glow and turn it over: freckled knuckles, a callus along the finger, grease in the creases, the plain ring. You look up, past the screen, at nothing, at the dark.

"Well," you say, in a low Texas voice that isn't yours. "Hello, Colt."

Somewhere the wheel is already waiting, patient, and you wonder how long his hands will feel like a coat you can wear.