Jaxon Pettigrew

You are standing in a kitchen in Dallas, in the middle of the night, in Farid Mansour's socks. The refrigerator hums. You have been him for less than a minute, and already you know what's wrong with him: nothing. He works. His knees don't hurt. The goatee is the right length. He is a good body, and that is the trouble. You stand there with a glass of water you poured and did not drink, and you think of the page with the wheel on it, and the thing you will not say out loud is that a good body is the one that makes you want another. The glass is cold. You set it down. The laptop is already open on the table, because you opened it before you finished deciding.

You pay. The wheel turns. It is a small sound, like a coin on a plate.

Then the ceiling is low and the dark is blue-gray, and your face is pressed into a pillow that smells of someone else's sweat and laundry soap. One arm hangs off the mattress and the blood has gone out of it. Your breath was ragged a second ago and is now even, because you have made it so. A line of streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across the sheet, and under it, faintly, from somewhere down the block, a bass line and a girl laughing. You draw the arm up. You roll onto your back. Your hands fold on your chest, and you feel the strangeness of it: this body has never once slept this way.

The shirt is the first thing. It is soft and thin at the collar, a gray tee washed a hundred times, and the cotton against your back brings it up unasked. A morning in the firehouse locker room, the shirt pulled over his head, his arms through the sleeves left and then right, the hem snapped flat against his stomach. He was twenty and was proud of the stupid hours, the way the others called him kid. The feeling is pride with a sore spot in it.

Your left hand finds the sheet and twists it. Under your fingers there is a hot memory, a girl's laugh in this same bed, and then her duffel bag by the door, a zipper going, and his voice saying okay, okay, like a man agreeing to a thing he has not understood. That is the ex. It sits under his ribs like a swallowed stone. You turn your forearm in the light and see the insignia inked there, the chevrons of a sergeant major, and the touch of your thumb on it brings his grandfather: a porch, a pressed uniform, a large dark hand on the back of his neck, and a smell of Old Spice. No one has told him he is brave since. He misses it more than he'd say.

The mattress is cheap, and your hip tells you so. Your shoulders are heavy from hauling hose. Your thighs hum with the day's stairs. Your hand drifts up to your face and finds the moustache, the freckled cheek, and the gesture is his, a habit done without thought. Your fingertips come away knowing the small bristle of his lip and his habit of worrying it when afraid. Under that, a fire in a kitchen, last spring, a pan of grease, and the roar of the hood. He ran in first. He has not told anyone his hands shook after.

You hold them up in the streetlight, and turn them over. They are broad, scarred at the knuckles, strange and entirely yours.

You look up, into nothing, and you say, low, "Okay. Hello, Jaxon."

The bass thuds down the alley. You wonder how long. You wonder when the wanting comes back.