Connor Reilly

You have spent years on the threads at two in the morning, the films you could recite, the stories where someone wakes up in a stranger's arms and stranger's hands. It was always a thing for other people to write. Tonight is the end of a dull day, nothing on, the feed gone stale under your thumb, and the page is just a wheel. You pay. You do not believe it. You spin.

Dark. Then weight, all of it at once: a mattress under your chest, a cheek pressed into cotton, an arm hanging off the edge with the blood gone sluggish in it. His breath was ragged and you smooth it into one long even pull. The arm draws itself up. You roll onto your back and your hands fold at your chest. He has never slept like this, and you do not know that yet. Orange light from the streetlight falls through a gap in the curtains and lies across the ceiling.

Then the sheet, cool under your shoulder blades, and a flash that is not yours. A boy of ten in a church basement, a paper cup of juice, a man in a short-sleeved shirt saying his name like a blessing. The feeling is plain and warm, and it belongs to him.

The ring on the hanging hand, now against your sternum, is cold metal. It gives you a girl laughing in a car with the heater ticking, her thumb pressing the band into place. He was nervous and sure at once. Under it comes an older ache, an ex, a hallway, a door closed gently, and he still carries that.

Your back is on the mattress, and the ink in his skin throbs faintly against the sheet. A name and a date. The letters give you a grief all at once: November, a funeral suit that was too big, his own hand gripping a rail. He was a child. He chose the script at eighteen and sat through four hours of the needle with a piece of gum going in his jaw, because his jaw is always working. Your jaw works now, on nothing, wanting it.

Your mouth tastes of mint and a nicotine pouch left from the evening. His tongue knows where it sat. His body is tall and lean, with clean young muscle, and the soreness in his shoulders comes from a backpack carried across a campus. A laptop open on a lawn, the sun on the keys, forty dollars in his account and a prayer said anyway, over a sandwich, with his eyes shut. He has never had a drink and never wanted one.

The hoodie on the chair, a couple of feet away, is not on you, but you smell it. Yesterday he pulled it over his head, the buzz of his scalp catching the fabric, his fingers snapping the cuffs straight, the stairs of the rowhouse, the worn marble steps, the first sun on the block.

You lift your hands into the streetlight. They are broad across the knuckles, with bitten nails and a ring. You turn them over. They are his, and they are yours now.

"Okay," you say, in his low voice, still thick with sleep. "Okay. Hi."

You do not know how long this lasts. Your thumb finds the ring and turns it, and somewhere past the screen the wheel is waiting, as patient as it was when you started.