Hector Valdivia

You are standing in Raymond Eng's kitchen in Houston, before the sun, with his coffee going cold in his right hand. The stubble on his jaw itches. His knees complain on the tile. He has been yours for less than a minute, and already you know the trouble: he has a quiet house and a good chair and a mortgage that is nearly paid. Everything about him works, and none of it is anything you want. You watched his daughter's name light up on the phone on the counter and felt nothing move. You open the page. The wheel is already turning.

Then the kitchen is gone and the dark is a different dark.

You are face-down. Your cheek is pressed into a pillow gone warm and damp, and one arm hangs off the mattress so the blood has drained from it. Your breath is ragged, caught on something, and then it smooths out in a single pull. The arm comes up by itself. The body rolls over onto its back and the hands fold on the chest, a posture he has never once slept in. Light from the street cuts through a gap in the curtains and lies across the ceiling.

The shirt is the first thing that speaks. It is a soft black work tee, worn thin at the collar, and it carries him up through the cotton. He put it on at the end of a double, in a kitchen, with a small person asking for cereal at his knee. The tiredness was a physical thing then. His eyes burned, and he left the shirt on to sleep because taking it off felt like one decision too many.

The navy trousers are still on his legs, stiff at the knee. Under your fingers the cargo pocket holds a shape, and the shape is a corridor. Painted cinderblock, the gate that sticks, the long buzz of the lock. He has stood at that gate for six years and could count its seams blind. He learned to keep his voice level there. He learned that being kind and being careful are the same skill.

The pillow smells of someone else's shampoo. The other side of the bed is cold and empty, and the feeling that comes up with it is not yours: an ache, a recent thing. A woman he used to come home to before this woman. He still reads her name when it appears on his phone. He turns the phone face-down when his girlfriend is in the room, and he hates that he does.

Your right hand is already moving, with no instruction from you. The thumb and forefinger are rolling a ring that is not there. They do it on the blanket, a small circling worry. He does this at the gate and in the truck and at the table, and he has never known he does it. The fingers are blunt and calloused along the edges from keys and cuffs, and they are warm.

The keys on the nightstand throw a little sound when the bed shifts. The ring of them is a weight you can feel without touching it, the weight of other people's doors. Down the hall a child breathes in sleep, and something in his chest turns toward the sound before you have thought anything. It is a fear that he is not enough and a love that is bigger than the fear. You are not ready for how much of it there is.

The body is heavy and soft at the middle and strong in the back and shoulders. Your scalp feels the cool of the room high at both temples where the hair has left. His jaw is smooth, freshly shaved, and you have not shaved it. Your mouth tastes of sleep.

You lift both hands into the streetlight and turn them over. Palms, knuckles, palms. They are his, and they are yours, and you are the only one in the room who knows it.

You look up and say, low, so you won't wake the house: "Okay. Hello, then."

The wheel is still somewhere behind your eyes, and the question under everything is how long this one will hold.