Gerald Fontenette

You are Kevin Chao for two minutes, and it is not enough. You feel it the second you land in him: the smallness of these shoulders, the dorm room ceiling too close, the desk lamp still on from studying something you will never finish caring about. Nineteen years old and every inch of you restless in a body that has barely lived, that has nothing yet worth touching. You spun expecting weight, expecting age, expecting somebody's whole life waiting in his pockets, and instead you got a boy's unmade bed and a stack of textbooks and a phone with nothing on it. It is 5 a.m. in Sydney and the wanting comes on you like a hunger that skipped breakfast. You open the laptop. You do not even sit down first. The wheel is already loading before you've decided anything, because you decided it three spins ago, the moment you understood that thin men and young men bore you fast.

The site does what it does. No countdown, no ceremony. Just the wheel spinning through faces too quick to read, and then it isn't.

The light on your cheek is blue and it does not blink when it should. Your thumb — heavier now, a ring catching faint against the phone case — picks up speed on the scroll, flicking through a feed some other man had stalled on, sports scores, a grandchild's photo, an ad for blood pressure medication he'd have laughed at an hour ago. You are lying on your side in the dark. Steam is coming off a street outside that you cannot see yet, but you feel the mugginess of it in the air of the room, close and thick even with the fan going. There is a body around you now, considerable, warm, tired in the joints already, and it takes the scroll and does not slow.

The shirt is what gives it to you first — not this shirt, the t-shirt he's sleeping in, soft from a hundred washes, and through it comes a Tuesday morning three weeks back: buttoning a blue oxford in a bathroom mirror with bad light, dimples showing even though he wasn't smiling, just concentrating, top button always the fight because of the neck he's put on since fifty. Gerald Fontenette buttons from the bottom up, always has, some habit from his father who sold insurance out of a Buick in the seventies. The lanyard goes on last, over the collar, and it sits crooked and he never fixes it because nobody at these hotel conferences is looking that close.

The wedding band is next — cool metal against your thumb as your hand keeps moving on its own, and it opens wide, a whole day: Darlene in a yellow dress at Our Lady of Guadalupe, 1987, sweat under the collar of a rented tux, his mother crying not from joy exactly but from something more complicated that he understood only years later, watching his own daughter get married in the same church. One child. A girl, grown now, living in Baton Rouge, who calls on Sundays and calls him Daddy still though she's thirty-four. He remembers the smell of her hair when she was small, and the specific ache of the folding chairs at her graduation, his back already going even then.

The mattress under this heavy hip gives you the shotgun house whole: one room after another in a straight line, no hallway, so that from the front door you can see clean through to the yard if every door stands open, which they do in summer for what breeze there is. Darlene at the stove. The particular creak of the floor by the icebox. A stack of unpaid parish bulletins on the counter he keeps meaning to read.

The body itself speaks last and loudest — the wide gut settled against the sheets, the ache low in the back that never really left after forty, blood pressure medication on the nightstand he takes with orange juice most mornings and forgets some, the dry mouth of a man who had two bourbons last night and a cigarette on the porch after, which he only allows himself when he's been drinking, a rule he made for himself and mostly keeps. Big hands, competent ones — decades of gripping a car door, a hotel room key, a stranger's hand across a conference table, closing sales with a smile that shows those dimples even when he's bored out of his mind and thinking about lunch. Catholic guilt sits low and permanent under all of it, a hum more than a thought. He believes, mostly. He worries about it, some.

You feel his want to sleep another hour before the lobby, the meeting at one, the whole ordinary machinery of Monday afternoon in a city that steams after rain.

You stop scrolling. You bring the hand up in front of your face — the phone still lit in it, throwing that same blue wash across knuckles that are not the knuckles you left behind an hour and a world ago. Thick fingers. A wedding band. A scar you didn't put there and can't place because it isn't yours to know, only to wear.

You turn the hand over once, like you're checking it's real, and you look up into the dark of the room like there's someone there to tell.

"Well," you say, out loud, in his voice, dimples pulling even though nothing in you means to smile, "guess I'm up."