Imran Hussain Qureshi

You are standing in Paul Hendricks's kitchen in San Francisco with the refrigerator humming and his mug going cold in a hand you have worn for an hour and some minutes. The scar through his eyebrow itches when you frown. You frown a lot in him. He is fifty-four, and his knees knew it the moment you came down the stairs.

Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. You stood in his garage this evening with the hood of a Tacoma up and his hands knew every bolt, and you felt nothing in them but competence, a grey, comfortable nothing. Then his phone lit on the counter with a message from someone called Dani, who loves him, and you read it and felt only that it was addressed to somebody else. You do not want to be loved by mistake. You want to be surprised by your own wrists.

So the laptop is open and the page is up, the wheel waiting in its small bright circle. You pay. You do not say goodbye to Paul. Nobody does.

The wheel slows.

Blue light on your cheek. A phone six inches from your face, a thumb stopped mid-scroll. You are lying on your side in the dark, and your thumb starts again on its own, then yours, faster, flicking past everything he stopped on, a face, a joke, a face. A mattress sags under a hip. Someone's cooking smell is gone from the room and in its place is warm dust and cheap deodorant.

Then the cotton. The T-shirt is thin at the collar, and the moment it touches your throat, it opens.

Six a.m., a different six a.m. He is sitting on the edge of this bed, because he works days, the sun already white behind the blinds. He pulls the shirt over his head. No, that was the night. The morning is the overalls: the left strap, then the right, the brass clip stiff, his father's voice from Karachi on the phone saying *wear the good boots, beta, they are watching how you carry yourself.* Nobody was watching. A homeowner in Scottsdale gave him a bottle of water and called him *buddy.* He crawled under a sink with his knees on tile that held the heat of the day, and the pipe wrench was heavy, and when the slip-nut finally gave he laughed alone in a stranger's cabinet, because it was clean work and it was his.

The sweatpants under your thigh, soft from washing. A drawer of the nightstand sits open, and you do not need to see in it: pills, a vape, a folded paper. You know it is the church bulletin, because the paper's grain gives you the pew, the plastic folding chairs in a converted warehouse, a hundred voices rising, and him in the back row at nineteen, mouthing the words, wanting to believe he belonged to the sound.

His thumb is still on the glass. Under it, a thread of messages. One name, Daniyal, last text months old. *I'm not mad. I just can't keep being your secret.* The ache that comes with the name is not yours and it is enormous, in the chest, under the sternum, like a swallowed stone. He never answered. He opens the thread most nights, as tonight, and closes it.

You close it.

The body: five-five, compact, a coil. Forearms hard as rope, shoulders sore in a way that is almost pleasant, the burn of a week of crawlspaces. A small bright pinch where the stud sits in the cartilage of the ear, pressed against the pillow. Twenty years old. Everything in him is fast and unfinished, the beard patchy on your jaw when you drag a palm across it. The savings, thirty thousand and some, he guards like a pulse.

You lift your hand into the blue light and turn it over. Scarred knuckle, grit still in the creases, a plumber's nails.

You look up, into nothing, into the dark, and say, quietly, in a voice higher than Paul's, "Okay. Hello."

Somewhere a wheel is already waiting. You don't know how long his hands stay yours.