Danny Pruitt

You are in the chair in the corner office, and Gregory Hallahan's knees ache. It is the first thing you notice about being fifty. The window gives you the bay, the bridge standing in its own fog, and a calendar that is all his, full of other people's names. A man you're supposed to call Marcus has just spent twenty minutes explaining a number to you. You nodded, and your jaw did it well. The voice that said "let's circle back" was rich and low and used to being obeyed.

You have worn him less than a minute and you already know what he is. He is a very good coat with nothing in the pockets. Every room hands you its attention, and none of it is anything you want. You look down at his big, clean, strong hands, and they bore you. The wanting is back, and it is not about him. You will not say it aloud.

You pull the site up behind the quarterly deck. The wheel turns the way it always does. Click, click, click, slowing.

---

The table is hard under your fingertips, and the planchette is cool and light, a little tacky with someone's sweat. It is a beer-and-wood-polish afternoon. Your first breath comes up short and smoky, a pack-a-day breath with a rasp at the bottom of it. The planchette sits dead on YES. The hand you shoved it with is already moving.

It slides past GOODBYE, slow and even. Something that is not your wanting is spelling with it, one careful letter and then another, and you let it go and then it's just a hand.

---

Everything about him is smaller, and you like it at once. You are low, hunched on a couch that sags, and the floor is nearer than it ought to be. Your shoulders are narrow and there is no weight on you at all. The body is light, wiry and quick, a body that has always had to look up at the room.

The hoodie is soft at the cuffs. Your thumb finds a worn place at the hem, and he comes up through it. A cold morning. Pulling it from a hook by the door while a small voice behind him says *Dada, shoes*, and he is laughing and crouching with a tiny sneaker, and a tiny heel pushes into his palm. That is the good one, the whole morning of it. Oatmeal on the stove, a spoon rapped on a pot lid, her up at the door with the keys and her mouth set, not saying it, and him kissing the top of the kid's head instead. He had been so tired. He had been so happy. You didn't know a man could be both at once.

The flannel at your ribs is another day. He buttoned it wrong and fixed it with his chin down, and he did it in the dark so as not to wake anyone. Sleeve by sleeve, the cuffs rolled twice. His hands knew how, and yours now do too.

Your fingers press the wood and the board is gritty under them. The beer bottle sweats a ring on the coaster. You don't touch it. A drink is a few times a year for him, and today was supposed to be one of those, a joke, something to laugh about later. You can feel the laugh in his chest still, unspent.

Then the jeans. They are stiff at the knee, and your knee remembers the stairs outside, the old marble steps worn hollow in the middle. He sat on them the night she said *recent* in a flat voice, the other woman, the one before. Not guilt exactly. A knot he never undid. He is still carrying her in his pocket like a key to a house he left.

Your nose is wrong. It is a little crooked, and it whistles on the left. You press it and a flash comes, a boy's fist, a schoolyard, a bright white sound. Nothing in him blames anyone for it.

Your forearm itches. Your pulse is quick under the cuff, and something in your lungs wants a cigarette badly. It is a thin, true craving, and it is the first thing in this body that is simply his and not mine. Money is thin here. He counts it in his head, pocket to pocket, rent and shoes, and he has never once complained.

---

You lift your hand off the board and look at it. It is small, with calluses where a spoon and a mop live. You turn it over and over. Nobody has ever called these hands powerful, and nobody has ever needed them as much.

You look up. The window is full of white afternoon light.

"Hello," you say, in a voice you've never heard, and you stop to hear it again.

How long does this one last? You don't know. The wanting is quiet for now, and it could come back at any time.