Elijah Runningwater

You are Caleb Marsh, and Caleb Marsh is tired of being a man who waits. Three minutes in him, and already the apartment in Houston is wrong: the kitchen smells of someone else's coffee, the phone on the counter holds a job he was supposed to call about, and the gray eyes in the dark window look back like a lease you can't read. Nothing is wrong with him. He works. He would do for years. But you stood in his bathroom with his thumb on the faucet and felt nothing come back through the water, nothing at all, only a man who had never been interesting to himself. So you sit at the laptop in the blue before dawn, and the wheel is already turning under your finger, and you stop being Caleb in the middle of a breath.

The mattress takes your whole weight at once. You are face-down, cheek in a pillowcase gone warm and damp from his mouth, and one arm hangs off the bed, the blood pooled heavy in the fingers. Orange streetlight leaks through a gap in the curtains and lies across the carpet. His breath is ragged, a snore catching on itself. Then it evens out. That is you.

You pull the arm up. It comes slowly, thick with sleep, a long muscle in the forearm complaining. You roll onto your back, and the whole heavy body rolls with you, the belly settling, the mattress sighing. Your hands fold on your chest on their own, or on yours. He never slept like this. You can tell by how strange it feels to him, a faint wrongness in the muscles.

The shirt comes first. A soft old T-shirt, charcoal, thin at the collar, and as it drags across your chest a morning opens: the same shirt in a dim hallway, his thumb on a light switch, a brownstone stairwell smelling of radiator dust and someone's frying onions. He was not tired then. He was whistling through his teeth, the way he does, the dimples cutting in even before the smile did. A route, a satchel, the strap pressing a groove he has worn into his shoulder for eleven years.

The sheet is under your fingers, and the sheet gives you Sunday: a church basement, folding chairs, a paper cup of bad coffee, a pastor's hand on his shoulder, and a prayer he said quietly for a thing he never told anyone. He wants somebody to come home to. He is thirty-four and the apartment is quiet. He drinks a drink or two most evenings so the quiet has something in it. The wanting is his, and it sits behind your ribs like a swallowed stone.

Your fingers drum against your sternum. You didn't tell them to. They know a rhythm, a tune from the radio of a truck, from a stoop, from waiting for a door to open. The small silver hoop in the left ear presses against the pillow, and you remember the afternoon he got it, laughing, nervous, his cousin holding the mirror. The bed frame creaks. The carpet under the edge of the mattress is rough where you dangled your toes. Your jaw is smooth and your hair is a close fade, prickling on the pillow.

You lift your hand into the streetlight. It is wide, the knuckles brown and scarred only by ordinary use, the nails blunt. You turn it over. The palm is creased and warm. The fingers drum once, twice, and you stop them.

You look up at the dark ceiling, then past it, to something that isn't there.

"Okay," you say, in his low voice, and the dimples show even now. "Okay. You're mine."

The streetlight ticks off the window. You don't know yet how long.