Devontae Marquis Holloway

You are leaving Imran Siddiqui, and you are leaving him at his desk. His reading glasses are pushed up into the black hair, and the scar through his eyebrow itches the way it does when he's tired. The house is asleep around him. The spreadsheet is still open on the screen. Forty-three years in this chest and a knee that clicks, and in under a minute you have learned all of it: how he sighs, what he'd say to the quarterly numbers. He would be fine. That's the trouble. Whatever it was, a quiet in him, a door he wouldn't open, was not the thing you wanted at three in the morning. You wanted something you hadn't been yet. You open the page, and the wheel is already turning under your thumb.

It stops.

Dark. A bed. Blue light six inches from your face, and your thumb, his thumb, is already moving, flicking past whatever he had stopped on. Your eyes don't blink when they should. You are lying on your side with one cheek hot from the screen, and the mattress is soft under your hip.

Then the sweatshirt-soft cotton of the sleeve brushes your wrist, and it opens.

Gray, washed so many times it's gone thin at the cuff. He bought it in a campus bookstore the first fall, the one with the arched letters, and wore it on the drive out through the stubble fields, the sky yellow before a storm. His mother's voice on speaker saying *call when you get there.* He didn't call until the next day. The guilt is still in the fabric.

The sheet under your knee. Cool, rough, a cheap set. A memory comes up through it: counting what's in his account on the same bed, $212, the rent due, and his thumb at his mouth. You lift the thumb now and the nail is already ragged. You've been biting it. He always does. The edge catches your lip, and with it comes a night on a bench outside a library, a woman laughing at something he said, her scarf, her name sitting in his throat like a swallowed stone. She got away. He never told her he'd have followed her anywhere. It hurts in his chest, a flat ache, and it isn't yours, and it is real.

The twists against the pillow, too tight at the scalp, freshly done. He dyed them jet black on a dare from himself, a Sunday, a bathroom, a chemical smell, and the color came out too even. You feel his embarrassment at it, and under it a small pride. Your fingers find the thin beard along the jaw, patches where nothing grows, and he hates it and keeps it anyway.

His body is good. Twenty-two. Long muscles loose from a day of walking between buildings, shoulders easy, no knee clicking, no ache anywhere. Breath goes all the way down. You could run. You could run across a field right now.

You lower the phone to your chest. The screen light slides off your face. You turn your hand over in the dark, the bitten nails, the palm lined with some other life's weather, and then you look up.

"Hi," you say, and his voice is lower than you expected. "Hello, you."

Outside the window the dark is total. You wonder how long this one lasts. You wonder when the wanting comes back.