Jalen Pruitt

You are standing in Colin Maguire's kitchen in Chicago, and the refrigerator is humming in a key you have already stopped hearing. His bare feet are cold on the tile. His reading glasses are on the counter next to a glass of water he poured and did not drink. Three in the morning, a Tuesday, everyone in the building asleep. You have been him for less than a minute and already you know what he is: a man who does his taxes in January. A man whose redheaded freckled forearm, lit by the stove clock, has a pale sleeve-line where a watch sits. He has a brief due Thursday and a mother who calls on Sundays, and none of it has reached you yet. His shirt is soft with washing. You touch nothing that would tell you more.

He worked. That is the trouble with him. He could do the thing you needed done, and you did it in forty minutes, quietly, with his good hands, and then you stood here with nothing left to want. The wanting does not wait politely. It came up your spine like a tide, the way it always does, and you opened the laptop on the counter, and the wheel was there, patient, turning its little colors.

You pay. You spin. Colin goes out of you like a held breath.

Now there is a mattress under your ribs and your cheek is pressed into a pillow gone warm and damp. The air is close and smells of laundry that never made it to a drawer. One arm hangs off the bed, and the fingers are numb, tingling toward the carpet. A thin stripe of streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across the wall. Your breathing is ragged, then, in one pull, it is even. You draw the arm up. The body rolls onto its back and your hands fold on your chest, a way of lying this man has never once slept in.

The shirt is what comes first. It is cotton, thin, black, worn at the collar, and it still has the shape of the day inside it. Under your palms it gives you the morning: a hand yanking it off a chair, a girl's voice from the bathroom saying you're going to be late, Jalen, and his answer, that tired, fond, put-upon sound. The vest hangs on a hook in the hall. You do not have it, but you have the weight of it, the zipper that sticks halfway, the name tag that never sits straight. The trousers are on you still, stiff at the knee, and when your thumb finds the seam you get the aisle: a pricing gun in his right hand, the click of it, rows of boxes he squares to the edge of the shelf because nobody else will. Cables, chargers, a television he will never afford. The pay is a number that never grows. He pays the rent in two halves.

Your heel finds the sheet and it gives you another thing, older. The ex. Her name is a taste, not a word. A summer, a car with a bad door, her laugh in the passenger seat. He still has not deleted the thread. Beside you the girlfriend breathes, or the place where she should be is warm, and what he feels is gratitude with an ache behind it, because he is not sure he deserves to be forgiven for how long it took him to choose. You flex the fingers. They are strong, the knuckles calloused from box-cutters, the thumb quick and sure. His back hurts low, from lifting. His mouth tastes of nothing; he quit drinking, and the quitting still feels like a coat he is wearing carefully. Something in him believes there is more than this room, though he would never call it God. You feel it like a draft under a door. He is twenty-two, and he is tired, and he is kind.

You lift both hands into the stripe of light and turn them over. Brown, broad, a little chapped. Not yours. Not anyone's you have worn. You look up at the ceiling, then toward the dark where the window is.

"Hello, Jalen," you say, and his voice is low and warm in your mouth.

Somewhere past the curtain a stoplight changes for no one. You wonder how long this one lasts.