Darnell Octavius Greer

You are standing in a kitchen in Western Kansas, in a man who is fifty-two and five foot four, and the refrigerator is the only thing humming in the house. Calvin Ridley. Five minutes old to you, and already you know where he keeps the spoons, because you opened the wrong drawer twice and the right one third. His wife is asleep down the hall. His thermostat clicks.

You don't want him. It isn't that he's bad. The freckles on the back of his hands are fine. But you stood at his counter with a glass of water and tried to feel the thing you paid for, and you felt a mid-level manager's lower back and a man's quiet dread of Monday. You wanted to be taller. You wanted to be a body that had been used for something. A man could do a day of hard work in a body like that, and this one has never been asked to. So you take the phone from the counter, and the wheel is already on the screen, patient, ticking. You press.

Humid dark. Cotton against your cheek, damp with someone's breath. A streetlight lies through a gap in the curtains and across your shoulder like a hand. You are face-down, one arm hanging off the mattress, and the breathing in this chest is ragged, and then in one pull it is even, because you are in it. The arm lifts itself. The body rolls onto its back, and your hands fold at the sternum, a posture he has never once slept in.

The sheet under your palm is rough from too many washes, and it gives you something unasked: a woman's voice, easy, saying *you're gonna sleep in your work pants again.* His wife, his feeling, warm and tired. The pants are on him now, canvas and stiff at the knee, and you feel the knee remember a trench wall. Cold clay to the shin. A mini excavator ticking as it cooled, spoil piled high and drying pale. Pride he would never say aloud, in how straight the bottom of the cut ran.

His fingers go to the ring on his left hand, and they turn it. They do it without you. Round, round, a small worn habit. Under the thumb: a flash of a parking lot at dusk, a woman who is not his wife leaning on a car, her laughing at something he said, and the old ache of it, kept shut like a drawer. The recent ex. His feeling, not yours: shame, and something that isn't quite regret.

The shirt on his back is damp at the collar. You feel him pull it over his head that morning, sleeve by sleeve, the left arm first because of a stiff shoulder, and the reflective vest after, and the boots by the bed laced tight because a loose lace once cost him a week. A church hymn comes up from nowhere, his grandmother's pew, the fan with a funeral home's name on it. The house is underwater, up to twenty-five thousand, and he does the number in his head every night like a prayer that doesn't work. He quit smoking and still reaches for his pocket.

This body is thirty-three. Shoulders heavy and warm, thighs strong, a dull burn across the lower back. Calluses along the palms like a second grain. You flex, and the hands know how to close on a shovel.

You lift them into the streetlight. A plain band. A dark mole you can feel high on the cheek when you frown. You turn the hand over and look up.

"Well," you say, in his voice, low and rough with sleep. "You'll do."

How long, though? Tonight, a month? The wanting is quiet now. You wait to hear it come back.