Gavin Reilly

Conor Whelan's body has a bad habit at night: it listens. Six minutes in him, and I am standing in a dark kitchen in Queens with a child's cup in my hand, the dishwasher ticking as it cools, and the whole apartment breathing in its sleep. A small voice down the hall has said "Daddy" once, not even waking, and every part of this body went toward it, the way a plant goes toward a window. I love none of it. It all loves me, and I have not earned any of it.

That is the whole reason, and I would not say it aloud. His body works fine. It is the wanting in it that is somebody else's. So I set the cup down gently, so as not to wake what I am leaving, and I open the page with the wheel.

I pay, I spin, and the kitchen is gone.

Dark. Blue light on one cheek. A phone six inches from my face, and my thumb stopped mid-scroll on something I have already stopped caring about. I am lying on my side with one arm folded under a pillow gone warm and flat. My jaw is working: gum, a small sweet wet pulse of it, spearmint gone to rubber. The thumb starts again, faster and steadier than it was, and flicks past everything he had stopped on.

Then the things touch me, and he comes.

The hoodie first. The cuff is rolled soft against my wrist, and the cotton has that washed-thin give at the elbow. I remember him pulling it on this evening, not for warmth but because it was on the chair. Left arm, then right, head through the neck, hair caught in the collar and freed with one hooked finger. A boy putting on the only thing that smells like himself. Under it comes a wave of tiredness that is not sleep, an ache of being twenty and counting money. The account has a number, and the number has a floor.

The phone is warm. It is cracked at one corner, though I cannot see it. My thumb knows the crack and steers around it. The memory is of a girl's name on the screen, and a feeling like swallowing a stone, then gladness, then the awkward fear of being loved by someone who expects you to become something. Beneath her is a smaller light, a child's, though he has not told me how. He carries it like a coin in a shoe. He pays for it in sleepless hours and in a prayer he says without words, flat on his back: *let me be enough for this.*

The sheet under my leg is cheap and gray and smooth from washing. My knee presses the mattress, and the springs underneath remember a year of him turning over. Long bones. Six foot four folded onto a bed built for someone shorter, my feet hanging off the edge into cold air. My back aches in a straight line along the spine where I have lain on it too long. My shoulders are narrow with youth.

Marble steps, worn hollow. A rowhouse door. Early sun coming down the block, and him on the stoop with his laptop in his bag, chewing gum against the nerves. He used to drink, and then did not, and nobody made a speech of it. He just woke one morning and the wanting had gone quiet, like a neighbor moving out. He still has the habit of his mouth. I feel the gum go round again.

Church, folding chairs, a hand on his shoulder, a man saying *God has not forgotten you.* He believed it, and still does. It sits in his chest, a warm brick.

I lift the phone away. The screen goes dim and the room is real: the shelf of discs, a poster, wires on the floor, a can, clothes in a heap. I turn my hand over in the blue light. Long fingers. Short bitten nails. A thumb that knows exactly where it is going.

I look up at the dark, and I say, to whoever might be listening in a room with only me in it, "Okay. Hello."

The gum goes round once more. Down the hall a pipe knocks. I do not know how long this lasts, or when the wanting will come back and find the door.