Evan Kowalczyk

You are standing in Liam Kearney's kitchen with the light going orange on the tile, and you have already decided. Eleven days and ten hours. His body is fine. It runs, it sleeps, the freckled forearms are brown by the end of every week. But this evening his roommate's girlfriend laughed at something you said in his voice, a warm easy laugh, and you understood that everyone in this apartment likes Liam. They have been liking him for eleven days and they do not know it is you they are liking, or that nobody is. You set the phone against the fruit bowl. The page is open. The wheel is already turning.

Then the restaurant. A chair under you, wood, hard at the back. A water glass cold in both palms, beaded, slipping a little. Your mouth is halfway through a word. The bread basket sits untouched between two place settings, and across from you the other chair holds a silence with a person in it.

You finish the sentence. Your voice carries to the next table, deeper than Liam's, and the glass turns a quarter in your hands and stays.

Now the memories, because your hands are on things.

The glass first: condensation, and under it a flash of Evan at his standing desk, cold coffee by the keyboard, jaw tight over a bug that will not die, teeth grinding until his ears ache. Your own jaw is clenched now. You loosen it and it creeps back, a habit the muscle keeps for him.

The shirt against your back is soft denim-blue cotton, washed thin. This morning comes up through the sleeves. He stood in the bedroom, two monitors dark in the next room, and buttoned the cuffs, then unbuttoned them, then rolled them to the elbow because buttoned looked like trying. The gray tee underneath, pulled from the clean pile. Jeans that were slightly too snug since the winter of delivery food. He gelled his hair up into spikes at the mirror and the dimples showed while he practiced a face, and he hated that they showed even when he wasn't smiling, because people always thought he was happier than he was. The girlfriend, the real one, Dani, had texted good luck, which was the strange part, because this date was a favor to a coworker, a thing he said yes to and could not say no to. He is not a cheater. He is a man who cannot refuse. Guilt sits in his stomach like the bread he has not touched.

The table edge under your forearms is cool and slightly sticky. A memory: nine years old in Sugar Land, his father's bar-mouth apology at a dinner, the family trying not to look. Evan swore he would never be a man who left a silence standing. So tonight he began to apologize, for the silence, for being bad at this, and lost it halfway, and you came in.

The body: heavy in the middle, soft belly pressing the table, thin arms, a back stiff from ten hours of sitting. His thighs ache from the chair. Beard coarse against your lip, two inches of it, and you rub it without thinking. Humid evening presses on the window glass. Somewhere behind you someone's fork rings on a plate.

You lift your hand off the glass. You turn it over. Palm, fingers, a callus along the side of the first finger from a lifetime of keyboards and one summer of lawn work. Not Liam's. Not yours. Yours now.

You look up at the woman across the table and say, "Sorry. I'm here now."

The wheel is still there behind your eyes, patient, and you wonder how long before the wanting comes back, and whether you will still be him when the bread goes cold.