Curtis Bellamy

You leave Wyatt standing at the pass-through of his own kitchen, one hand on a counter that is too low for him, the window going orange over a dead field in Kentucky. Twenty-one hours and six minutes. He is a good body. Six-six, door-filling, a chin the girls at the bar touch with one finger. But he is a body that is always being asked for things, a man people move to the other side of a room to be near, and you have spent a day being looked at instead of looking. Tonight the bar wants him again. You find you do not want to be wanted. You want to be unnoticed in a man who is quietly doing well.

You pay. You spin. Wyatt is gone before the wheel stops.

Now there is iron in your palms and the bar is two inches wider than any grip you have ever had. Your forearms are on your knees, then they are not, and the weight is moving. You grind it out slow. Your face does none of what a last rep does. Your leg is bouncing, you realize, the heel hammering the floor, and you let it, because the leg knows something you don't.

You rack the bar. Cold concrete under your shoes. A water bottle sweats by the bench.

The flannel is against your back, soft from a hundred washings, and it gives you a morning: a kitchen with gray light off the water, a woman's voice from the next room saying you'll be late, his thumbs working the buttons from the bottom up because that is how his father taught him. Sleeves rolled twice to the forearm. Jeans that have learned his knees. He laced the boots on the back step with the lobster traps stacked beside him, and he felt, lacing them, only a plain gratitude, the kind he never says aloud.

The ring turns under your thumb. Heat in the chest. A woman at a church supper in a green coat, years before the wife, laughing so that he forgot his plate. The one who got away. He does not think of her often. He thinks of her exactly as often as his leg bounces.

His knees ache in the old measured way. His shoulders are strong. His jaw is smooth, freshly shaved, and when you smile at nothing, the dimples cut in deep.

You turn your hands over. Not yours. Brown, broad, the band catching the light.

You look up and say, quietly, "Well. Hello, Curtis."

How long, you wonder. Years, or four minutes, or until the wanting comes back.