Esteban Cordero

You are standing in Anand Prescott's kitchen with his coffee going cold in his good hand. The light over the water is gray and the day has not started. He has been yours for less than a minute, and already you know the moustache itches and the knees are not a thing to trust. Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. He is a man with a pool and a quiet street and a whole retirement of mornings, and you stand in them like a coat that fits and says nothing. You want to be hungry again. You open the page.

The wheel turns. You pay.

Then the dark. A room lit by one lamp, and the blue of a screen on your face. You are standing, thumb down, and the thumb has just pressed. The glow lingers a second too long on your skin. Then the phone goes dead against your fingers and the arm lowers it.

Your breath comes in short. The chest is dense, packed with muscle, and the center of gravity sits low, because you are small. Five-three. The floor is carpet under black shoes, thick and cheap, and your weight settles into your heels the way a soldier's does.

The shirt is a dark henley, cotton gone soft at the cuffs. Your thumb finds the third button and the morning arrives, not yours: his hands, tired, pulling it over his head at some hour before dawn, the washing machine hum from the girlfriend's side of the wall, the small voice down the hall asking for water. The sleeves push up over forearms that have carried rucksacks for fourteen years. Under the left sleeve the ink on the upper arm warms, a cross and praying hands, and the feeling that comes with it is not pride. It is a promise he made on a bad night, the day he poured the last bottle down a sink in a parking lot, and kept.

The jeans are stiff at the knee. In the back pocket your fingers meet a folded paper, a crayon drawing, two stick figures and a bigger one with a flag. A flash: a small boy's weight on his shoulders in a rain-slick street, outside a coffee shop with a yellow window, and the laugh buried in his neck. Two children. The ache of it is so exact you nearly drop the phone.

The jaw is smooth, shaved last night so the morning would not cost him anything. His cheeks are warm with freckles you cannot see. On the folding table is a can of something sweet and a lighter he never uses, because the habit never took. The room smells of laundry and old coffee. Somebody sent him this app. He was curious. He was lonely in the way that a barracks makes you. That is all he was, a man with a thumb over a button.

Rain ticks at the window. Somewhere a girl sleeps down the hall and has no idea.

You lift your hand into the lamplight. Square fingers, a scar-less palm, calluses along the base of each finger from bars and rifle slings. You turn it over. It obeys. You raise your eyes to the dark glass and then past it, and you say, low, in a voice that is not yours yet:

"Okay. Let's see how long you last."

Under it the question is already there, and it is not about him. It is about you, and how soon the hunger comes back.