Dylan Cheung

You are standing in a kitchen in London before the light, in a body that is five foot five and all of it earned, and the kettle has just clicked off behind you. Sanjay Rathore. Forty-four. You have had him for less than a minute. The gap in his front teeth is under your tongue, and the barracks smell is in his shirt, and none of it is the trouble. The trouble is that his shoulders are built for carrying other men's weight and you wanted something light. You wanted to be a person nobody leans on. You set the mug down untouched. The site is already open on the phone in his thick hand, the wheel waiting like a held breath, and you press it with his thumb.

Dark. Then a mattress under your whole front, pressed against your chest, your cheek, your thighs. Breath going ragged and wet into cotton. Your arm hangs off the edge and the blood has left it; it is a dead, tingling weight. Then your breath evens out in one pull, and the arm draws itself up, because you tell it to. You roll onto your back. Your hands fold at your chest. He has never once slept like this, and you can feel that in the body's complaint, the ribs unused to lying open.

A streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lays a pale bar across the sheets.

The first thing that reaches you is the sweatshirt. Gray, washed soft, the cuffs stretched. Your thumb finds a loose thread at the wrist and it opens: his hands pushing through these sleeves at the end of a Saturday, his feet aching, a floor still scattered with other people's clippings. He pulled it on over the black shirt without taking the shirt off, because the apartment is cold and the girlfriend keeps the thermostat low, and he was too tired to care. He lay down in his work trousers. He meant to take them off. That tiredness is in your legs now, a dense, sweet ache in the arches from ten hours on a hard floor.

You turn your head and the pillow gives you the smell of her shampoo, and with it a flash: a bathroom, a hand on a doorframe, her laughing at his hair, the bleach, the way the dark roots grew in. He bleached it himself the first time in this bathroom and it came out the color of straw, and she said it was perfect. He felt chosen. It was the best he had felt in a year. Your palm drifts up and runs over the scalp, short and rough at the sides, full on top. It does that on its own. It is a habit, a way of checking he is still here.

The sheet under your fingers is thin and twisted. Memory: a lease signed on a hood of a car. A number he does not say aloud. Chairs rented by the week, a chair he is still paying for, a student loan, a card he hides from her. The debt is a low note under everything, like a refrigerator hum. He carries it into sleep. You feel it sit on his sternum, heavier than anything in the soldier's arms. Tens of thousands, and he cuts hair for forty dollars a head and tells her it's fine.

Your thumb finds the calluses at the inside of the finger joints, shaped by shears. The hands remember a fade before you do: the comb angled up, the clippers walking the nape, a client's head tilted gently under his palm. Twenty years old, and he is good. Nobody in the shop has said so. The ache of that is in his chest too.

Somewhere in the apartment a floorboard ticks. Another body breathes beyond the wall, asleep, trusting. The streetlight bar crosses your wrist.

You lift both hands into the light and turn them over. Smaller than the soldier's. Fine-boned, nicked, strange, warm. You hold them there and look up.

"Okay," you say, quietly, in a voice that is higher than you expected. "Light one."

Already the question is under it, patient as the debt: how long, and when the wanting comes back.