Isaiah Marcus Delacroix

You have been at the screen a long time. It is a Monday, the work of it behind you, the scrolling behind that, and nothing is on. Somewhere past midnight in the small hours of attention you are back in the old threads, the ones you have read for years: someone wakes up in another man's bed, someone looks down at borrowed hands. You have always loved this. You have never told anyone how much. And tonight there is a page with a wheel on it, called vessel.cards, and a price, and you do not believe it. You pay anyway. You spin. The wheel ticks down and slows, and stops.

The room is dark and the television is bright. You are sunk into a couch with your weight settled deep, and the show cuts to a white frame, and in that half second your spine lifts you upright. The remote leaves your fingers and lands on the couch arm with a small plastic knock. There is no travel and no warning. Your breath is already going in and out of a chest that is not yours, slow and wide. You do not laugh when the room expects it.

The couch is nubby under your palm, and the fabric opens something. It is this couch, bought secondhand with his wife, the two of them carrying it up the stairs, and she is laughing at him because he is walking backwards and won't admit it. His pride at it. His tiredness is under the pride, the tiredness of a man in school at twenty-seven with the loans stacked up and the account underwater, always a little under, and he never says the number aloud.

Your thumb finds the ring on the left hand and turns it. A kitchen, years ago, a small cheap ceremony, his mother crying, and the plain gold band, and the fear he felt then, which was good fear. Then the other kitchen, the first marriage, the ex-wife standing with her arms folded, and the long quiet of that ending that he still carries like a stone in a shoe. She still matters. She is the mother of nobody here and everything somewhere, and he sends her messages that start and stop.

Your right forearm is warm against the cushion. The script of the half sleeve sits there, a name and a date, and you cannot read it as memory yet because you are not touching it with the right thing. Then your fingertips cross it and the ache comes up, his daughter's name, the needle on the soft inside of the arm, the hum of the shop, and him not flinching because he had decided not to.

The sweatpants are soft and worn. The cotton shirt is thin at the collar. They give you the morning. He pulled the shirt from the drawer in the dark so as not to wake the kids, one sleeve and then the other, the hem catching on his ribs, and he stood a moment over the small beds listening to them breathe. He does not drink. He never has. There is a pouch tucked under his lip in the memory, the sting and the flat mint, a habit he promised to quit and has not.

The body underneath is solid, thick through the shoulders and thighs, built by years of lifting that his hands know without being asked. His hair is long over the ears and down the neck, and it itches. His jaw is smooth and freshly shaved. A dull ache sits in the lower back from the hours at the desk, and his socked foot is warm on the table's edge.

You lift your hands into the screen's light and turn them over. The wedding band catches the white glow. They are strong and steady and entirely his, and now they are yours.

"Okay," you say, and his voice is low and quiet in the dark room. "Okay. Hello."

The television murmurs on. Somewhere the wheel is waiting, and you cannot stop yourself from wondering how long this one lasts, and when the wanting will come back.