Hector Olivares

You were Caleb Nordstrom for less than a minute, and it was enough. The desert night ticks against the window of a house you have never learned the rooms of. His network cables are coiled in a drawer you opened once. His dimples ache when you try to smile at the monitors. Everything in him works, and nothing in him is the problem. The problem is that you stood in his kitchen with a glass of his water and found you wanted a different weight. Someone with a different way of carrying himself through a doorway. So you open the page with the wheel on it and pay with his card, and the wheel turns, and you let it.

The dark of the bedroom lands on you with the blue of a screen on one cheek. You are on your side. The phone is six inches from your face and the thumb has stopped mid-scroll. The air is thick even at this hour, heavy and wet, and the sheet under your forearm is damp where the skin has been lying on it. Somewhere past the wall a window unit shudders. Next to you, a warm shape breathes slow and does not wake.

The thumb starts again. You do not tell it to. It flicks past a photograph of a child at a birthday table, past a recipe, past a name that seems to catch on something and then slides free. Faster and steadier than whoever was holding it. Your eyes are dry. You realize you have been not blinking.

The sheet under your palm gives you the first of him. A hand pushing a swinging door with the flat of the palm, the roar of a kitchen, a hot plate in each fist and a third balanced up the forearm, and the pride of that: the tray never tips. Twelve years of it. The forearm remembers the weight and the wrist the angle.

The T-shirt against your ribs is soft with washing, and it brings the morning he put it on, the cotton dragged over his bald head, the cool of it on his shoulders, a boyfriend's laugh from the hallway because it is the shirt with the thin neck. Gray sweatpants, the drawstring knotted twice because it frays. His thumb remembers the knot.

Then the phone itself, warm and slightly greasy, with a crack in the corner of the case that his thumbnail always finds. It opens a daughter. Not on the screen: in him. A small girl asleep across his chest on a couch, the sour-sweet smell of her hair, and under it a flat stone of guilt, because she is mostly at her mother's, the old girlfriend, whom he still loves in some tired, unfinished way, and each handoff at the curb costs him something he never says. He is Catholic in the way of a man who still crosses himself passing a church, and he does it in the car, without thinking, for her.

Your hand drifts to your face. The beard is thick and joined to the moustache, coarse under the fingertips. The bridge of the nose, when you press it, bends a little to one side. A memory arrives with the ache: a fist, a parking lot, years back, the hot blood in his mouth, and him laughing at the ER because the doctor said it would make him distinguished. Quit drinking not long after. He doesn't miss it. He misses the person who needed it.

The body underneath is solid. Shoulders heavy with muscle, calves tight from the floor, a low steady throb in both arches from a double shift. Thirty-eight years in the knees. Beside you the sleeper shifts and a hand finds your hip in his sleep, and the body answers before you do. It softens. It knows this hand.

You lift your own hand in the blue light, broad, rough at the pads of the fingers, and turn it over. Calluses across the palm. Then you look up, across the dark room, as if there were someone there.

"Okay," you say, low, in his voice. "Okay. Hello."

The phone dims against your chest. Beside you, someone breathes. You wonder how long you get, and whether you will still want him by morning.