Isaiah Marcel Landry

Ethan's thumb is still on the trackpad when I decide, and the thumb is a good one. Twenty-five years old, a student's thumb, chewed cuticle, a callus from the pen he holds too hard. Six minutes I've had it. The apartment ticks around me, the whole building asleep, a refrigerator humming in the kitchen, and the paper on the desk is a problem set I cannot make myself care about. His handwriting is neat. His mother's number is on the screen, lit up and unanswered. Everything in him leans toward that call. I don't want a man who has someone to call back. I want to be nobody's son for a while.

I press the wheel. It turns, ticks, slows.

Then I'm face-down in sheets, and the breath going in and out of me is ragged, wet, a snore caught halfway. One arm hangs off the mattress and the blood has pooled in it, heavy and prickling. A gap in the curtains lets in a streetlight, orange on the carpet. My mouth tastes of sleep. Something small and cold presses my lower lip from inside: a ring. I pull one breath, long and even, and the ragged man is gone.

I draw the arm up. The body rolls over by itself, onto its back, and my hands fold at the chest like someone laid out. He has never slept this way. I can feel that the shape is wrong for him.

The sheet is under my fingers, worn thin, and it opens something. A girl's laugh, close to his ear, her feet cold against his shins. Dani. He loves her in a plain, steady way that costs him nothing, and it is the ease of it I feel, like warm water. Then the sharper thing behind it: the other girl, the recent one, her name still a bruise when he presses it. Her toothbrush is in a drawer he has not opened in three weeks.

The shirt is a gray T-shirt, soft, shrunk at the collar. I feel the morning he pulled it on: left arm first, always, the hem tugged down over a soft belly he is not proud of. Skinny arms, soft middle. He stood at the mirror and touched the ring with his tongue, then turned his head to check the cornrows Dani braided Thursday, straight back from the hairline, tight at the temples. They still pull. His fingers went to the beard to square it. Freckles across the nose. He looked at them and thought, as always, that they made him seem like a boy.

Under my heels the blanket, under my back the mattress sagging toward the middle. A heap of clothes by the bed gives off the smell of rubber and sun-cooked canvas, and the satchel behind it is already in my hands, the strap rough and gray. The leather flap is cracked. Memory: a long path, wet street steaming, heat coming up through his shoes, a screen door, a dog behind it. Five hundred and twelve steps to the end of the route. He counts them. Under the counting, a number he never says aloud, the debt, deep as a well, loans and a car and his mother's roof, and the way he prays for it sideways, not to a church, just to the air, asking to be let through.

He doesn't drink. He never has. His body is clean and tired and wants nothing from me.

I lift my hands into the streetlight. Brown, long-fingered, a pale seam of paper cut on the thumb. I turn them over. Then I look up, at nothing, at the ceiling that is his.

"Hello, Isaiah," I say, and his voice is lower than I expected, warm with sleep.

Already there is a small hunger under his ribs, mine, patient. How long, I wonder. Until morning. Until the first time the wanting comes back.