Imran Farooq Siddiqui

Hugo Brandt's goatee is damp with the sweat of a Mexico City night, and I am standing in his dark kitchen with the refrigerator door open, eating cold tortillas out of the packet and tasting nothing. He has a good life. Salary, a view of Polanco, a body that takes stairs without complaint. It is the third night I have stood here like this. Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. Everything he is has already been opened, and the wanting has come back like a tide. The fridge light hums. I close the door, and the dark is total, and I go to the page with the wheel on it.

The thumb is already moving.

It was stopped, and now it is not: flick, flick, flick, past everything he lingered on, steadier than he ever held it. Blue light lies on one cheek. The phone is six inches from my face. I am on my side in a bed that is not mine, in a room that is not Hugo's, and the weight of my own belly lies against the mattress, warm and heavy. My breath comes slow and wide. My eyes have forgotten to blink, and I make them.

Cotton against my ribs. The black T-shirt is soft from a hundred washes, and the touch of it brings a morning: he stands at a closet door in the dark so as not to wake her, and he pulls this shirt over his head because it is the one she says smells like him. A wife's sleeping shape under the blanket. A feeling like a hand opening in his chest.

The phone is cold glass. Under my thumb it gives me an office, large prints pinned to the wall, a bridge or a tower in blue lines, and him standing in front of it with rolled drawings under his arm while younger engineers wait for him to say yes or no. The lanyard's weight at his neck. Pride, and under it a tiredness he never names.

My left hand rises on its own and touches my face, the jaw, smooth. He shaved tonight, though no one would see it; it is a habit, a small discipline. Then my fingertip finds the eyebrow and the pale scar cutting through it. Heat comes up, a childhood: a cricket bat, a cousin's laugh, blood in his eye, his mother's dupatta pressed to it, her voice reciting something I do not know and he does. Safety. The smell of cardamom.

The ring on my finger is warm metal, loose with sweat. It brings the years: a stoop on a wet street, sodium light on the bricks, her laughing as he fumbles keys. A cigarette he gave up for her, and still the ghost of wanting one in the evening, a taste at the back of the tongue. No beer, ever; a quiet pride in that.

Under my bare heel, the sheet. My back aches the way a forty-three-year-old back does, low and honest. My knees are stiff. My thighs are strong from the stoop.

I set the phone down on the dark sheet. I turn my hand over, the brown palm, the ring, the lines that are his. Not mine. Mine, now.

I look up and say, quietly, "Hello, Imran."

The house is silent. Somewhere under the quiet, the question has already begun to hum: how long, and when does the wanting come back.