Douglas Pruett

You are leaving Vikram Chandran, and he is barely warm. Less than a minute in him, and already you are standing in his kitchen in the high desert, the refrigerator ticking, the whole house asleep. His beard is under your fingers. You have been rubbing it like a man looking for a coin. It isn't the beard. He had a way of walking to the window that took the whole length of the room, and you did it twice, and then you understood that there was nothing out there you wanted. The dark and the dry cold were fine. The want was somewhere else. So you open the page and the wheel is already turning under your thumb.

Then the tap is running and your mouth is full of mint.

Foam sits on your lip. The brush is in your right hand, mid-stroke, and your jaw is already working. The floor is cold under bare feet, tile with a rug that has gone stiff. Your belly rests against the lip of the sink. The light is yellow and tired. In the mirror's side panel a gray-haired man is watching you from the edge of the glass.

You stop. Then you start again on the other side, slower, working the back molars, because they ache a little, and he knew they did.

The shirt is soft and thin, washed a thousand times. The cotton lies against your back and you are suddenly in a church basement, his own folding chair, a paper cup of bad coffee, his wife laughing across the room at something somebody said, and he is thinking *she still does that with her whole face*. It's gone before you can keep it.

The pajama pants are flannel, plaid. The drawstring is knotted, double. A flash: this morning, no, a different morning, his daughter at the foot of the bed holding them out, *Dad, these are Christmas, you can't wear them in March*, and his warm, stubborn pleasure in wearing them anyway.

You rinse. Cold water in the palm, a mouthful, spit. Rinse again. The counter edge is damp under your left hand, and the ring on it is a plain band, worn smooth. You press your thumb to it. A desk outside a corner office, a stapler, a phone ringing, forty minutes of someone else's urgency, and under it a long patient pride that nobody has ever asked him about. A boss's coffee order known by heart. Eighteen years of knowing where everything is.

Your knuckles crack. You didn't do it. They did, the right hand folding into the left, a small private pop, and with it comes a rush of him at fifteen, behind a garage, a cigarette, a boy's terror of getting caught.

Your lungs know the vape in the drawer. A pull of wanting rises in your chest, specific, sweet, like a name on the tip of the tongue. His back hurts low on the left. His knees are good. His heart is slow and steady, and a hundred things in him are fine and unremarkable and *his*.

You set the brush bristles-up in the cup, out of the grey water it has always sat in. The bathroom goes quiet except for the tap, and you shut it off.

You look at your hand. Turn it over. The palm is broad and warm, a thin pale band of skin under the ring. Then you look up into the mirror, into hazel eyes that are, for now, entirely yours.

"Well," you say, in his low voice, soft so you don't wake the house. "Hello, Douglas."

The house breathes around you. Somewhere down the hall a floorboard ticks. You wonder how long this one holds, whether the wanting comes back at breakfast or at the top of the stairs, and whether you'll still be him when the light comes up.