Isaiah Whitfield

You leave Rafael Ochoa in a kitchen that smells of someone else's coffee. He has been yours for under a minute, and already you know what is wrong with him. His knees are fine. His green eyes are fine. The dimples are fine. But a body that cannot make you want it is no use to you, and he is a quiet man with a quiet stomach and nothing in him that hungers back. A student, and he has not once been startled by his own life. You stand at his window while New York gets light, and your thumb is already on the trackpad.

Pay. Spin. The wheel clicks through its names like teeth.

Then dark. Weight, a great deal of it, pressed flat against a mattress. Your face is in a pillow that smells of cocoa butter and warm cotton. Your breath is ragged, the sound of someone arguing in his sleep, and then you take one breath and it comes even. The arm hanging off the bed draws itself up. The body rolls onto its back and your hands fold at your chest, a posture he has never once slept in. He does not know. He never will.

Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains. Somewhere close, a train goes over steel, and the floor hums with it.

The sheet is under your palms, and it gives you the first thing: a girlfriend's laugh at the foot of this bed, and his own unease that he is happier than he deserves. Then the T-shirt, soft and washed thin at the collar. He bought three. The cotton at your ribs gives you a Sunday: a meetinghouse, a folding chair, a hymnal held in these same wide hands, a child's shoe squeaking in the hall. Faith sits in him like a plain wooden chair, and he sits in it every week. He has never tasted a drink. At a client dinner he once ordered sparkling water and watched a man's face decide something about him.

The pillow brings the beard against it. His jaw is clenched even now. Your teeth are locked and aching at the hinge, and when you let go it is like setting down a bag. This is what his hands and mouth do when he is not watching: hold on.

Your legs are heavy and warm, the thighs thick and strong under the softness. He was built by years of lifting and years of desks. Your shoulders ache pleasantly. The mattress dips under you toward the side where someone else's warmth has been.

Now the chair, the desk, the empty client seat across from him, charts glowing on a screen. Four o'clock, winter dark already, the L rattling the glass. He had a client who never showed, and he waited anyway with the numbers open, because he believes people deserve to find someone waiting. He is comfortable, not rich. He is good at telling frightened people the truth slowly.

The blue blazer comes back through the weight of its shoulders on a hanger: the gingham shirt buttoned from the bottom up, the belt, the black shoes he oils on Saturdays. The morning he put them on, he stood a moment and said a short private prayer over a tie he did not wear.

You lie still, breathing his breath, and you lift one hand into the streetlight. It is broad, brown, and creased across the knuckles, with a pen-callus on the second finger. You turn it over. It does not feel borrowed yet, only new, and already you are listening for the wanting to come back.

You look up into the dark and say, quietly, "Okay. You're mine. For now."