Devontae Mitchell

You are Terrell Hargrove, and you are leaving him because of the tooth.

It has been two minutes. You stand in a stranger's kitchen in Detroit before the light is up, and your tongue keeps going to the gold cap, the small cold shape of it, and you keep thinking it was never yours to be proud of. Freight handler. A back that knows pallets. You could have stayed, and there was nothing wrong with him. But the wheel is a page, and the page is open, and your thumb knows the way. Paid. Spun. The picture of the man in Seattle arrives for half a breath and then you are not Terrell. He is just a coat on a chair.

Now there is a couch under you, cracked leather, cool through the sweatpants. Your thumb is on glass. The glass is white, then dark, and the arm that holds it, heavy and warm, lowers slowly, as if it has been waiting for you to give the order.

The room is dim and yellow. A lamp, a window gone black, rain somewhere beyond it, which you hear before you understand it.

The hoodie comes first. Soft, washed gray, thick at the cuffs, and you press the cuff between finger and thumb and the morning rises: him standing at the closet in the dark, pulling it over his head because it was the one that didn't need deciding. He had stopped deciding things around the third month of no work. Left arm in first. The hood bunching at his neck. The relief of it, being covered.

The sweatpants are worn thin at the knee. Your palm flattens there and you get the kitchen table, the laptop open to listings, forty tabs, a cover letter that begins *I am excited*, and the particular shame of writing that sentence with nothing in him that was excited. Eleven rejections, and three that never wrote back at all. He counted the silence too.

The sneakers press the carpet, and the carpet gives you his mother's voice on the phone, Sunday, light and careful. *You eating?* He always said yes. Under that, the money, the number he does not say aloud, the debt that sits on him like a second hoodie. Underwater. He has been breathing through it.

The body: broad, heavy, a belly that rests against your thighs, shoulders that ache from sitting too long hunched. Your braids tug faintly at the scalp, tight, newly done. A soreness low in the back. Your breath goes deep and slow, like a big engine idling. It is a strong body, tired in a way sleep hasn't touched.

Your thumb remembers the app. A friend sent it, laughing: *try this, man, it's wild.* He was only killing time, awake because nights were when the worry got loud. Nobody would call at this hour. Nobody has called at this hour in a long while.

You lift your hands. They are wide, the knuckles dark, the palms creased and warm. You turn them over once. The lamp lies in them.

You look up, into the black window, into the face there, and say, quietly, "Okay. Hello."

The rain keeps on. Somewhere a clock you can't see is counting, and you don't know whether it is counting for an hour or for four minutes. You flex the fingers closed and open, and wait to find out how long you get to be his.