Declan Moriarty

You are standing in the dark kitchen of a man named Wayne Teague, and his tongue keeps finding the gap where the front tooth was. Nine hundred and some spins ago you would have called that a wound. Now it is only a habit of the mouth, and you have had it for less than a minute.

The linoleum is cold through his socks. The refrigerator hums. The call-center headset is still hooked on the chair where he left it, and you can feel the shape of eight hours of other people's anger lodged in his jaw. You didn't come back for that. You came back because of the window over the sink. Out past the glass there is a whole flat black county and no light in any of it, and the thought arrives in his voice and yours at once: *this is all there is of him.* A bald head you can feel the draft on. Two eyes that don't match, one of them watching its own reflection in the glass. It is a good body. It works. It is already finished being new.

So you go back to the page with the wheel on it. Your thumb, his thumb, is steady.

The wheel clicks down through its names.

Then there is a mattress under your whole front, and the air is warm and smells of someone else's sleep. Your breath is ragged and then, in one pull, it is even. Your arm hangs off the edge of the bed, and you draw it up, roll onto your back, and fold both hands on your chest. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lays one gold bar across the sheet. You have never slept like this. He never once did. You can tell, because the body strains slightly against the posture, like a coat hung on the wrong hook.

You lie still and let him arrive in pieces.

The shirt is first. It is soft from a hundred washes and twisted at the ribs, and it carries a morning: his hands pulling it off the floor pile, sniffing it, deciding it would do. A phone buzzing on a drawer. A name on the screen he did not answer. *Mara.* Something low and sour went through his stomach at the sight of it, the plain ache of a man three weeks out from a girlfriend, still turning to check the other side of the bed. You feel it in his chest like a swallowed stone.

The jaw next. Your tongue finds gum there, mint gone to rubber, and your teeth keep working it though you never told them to. His hands do this when he isn't thinking. They are always at something. Under the sheet his fingers drum a rhythm that is not yours, and a memory slides in with it: a studio desk, a drawing tablet, color swatches pinned in rows, the stylus held between his fingers like a cigarette he never lit. He loved the hour before anyone else came in. He loved choosing a red. He once spent a whole afternoon deciding between two reds that no client would ever tell apart, and it was the best afternoon of that month.

Your forearm itches against the sheet, and you lift it into the streetlight. The ink there is bold and old-fashioned, the colors faded, a swallow, a dagger, a rose gone dusty. Touching it brings a chair in a loud shop, a needle's hot buzzing line, and his own laugh cracking out of him at nineteen because it hurt more than he'd bragged. His mother on the phone afterward, sighing, saying she'd pray on it. A Protestant sigh, mild as a casserole. He loved her for it.

He is small. Five foot four. You feel it in the way the mattress seems wide and the ceiling seems near. He has spent twenty years being underestimated at doorways, and he has made himself charming about it. His face remembers this too, and the dimples press into your cheeks without being asked, deep even now, even at rest, even with nobody to smile at.

Your heart is quick and young, and the ache behind your eyes is the kind a big night leaves. There was one, then, a few days back. Beer, a friend's roof, the city spread below. The stubble on your chin is rough against your palm. There is the faint warmth of money too, a savings account he checked like a pulse. He was careful with it, and he was lonely, and he was fine.

Then you take your hands off your chest and hold them up against the gold bar of light.

They are narrow, quick, a little ink-stained. You turn them over. Palm, then back, then palm. You sit up, the springs complaining, and you look toward the dark window and the gray glow past the curtain, a whole sleeping city.

"Okay, Declan," you say, and his voice comes out lighter than yours should, rough with sleep. "Okay. Let's see how long you last."

Your thumb is already twitching toward a wheel that isn't there.