Jesse Kohlmeier

You stand at the sink in Kenneth Lau's kitchen, before the light, and the water runs over his wrists. They are thin and cold and they ache in the joints. He has been yours for less than a minute and already you know the fault in him. The knees complain on the stairs, and the breath stops short of the bottom of the chest. A man of fifty-nine who sleeps badly and has a pill organizer with the days printed on it. You did not mind that. What sends you back is the window. Through it a neighbor's sprinklers are ticking, a man is walking a small dog, and the whole street is waking up exactly as it did yesterday, and you stand there holding a cup you cannot taste. You wanted something to be hard. Nothing in him is hard, only slow. The phone is already open on the counter, and the wheel is turning before you have decided anything.

Then the kitchen is wrong, and you are sitting down.

A chair back under your shoulder blades, wood, hard. Newspaper crackling beneath a heavy bowl of brass, and the rag is in your right fist, going round the belly of a lamp. Twice more. The third pass is slow. Nothing pours out, nothing grants anything, and your arm just keeps on, the same circle, toward a shine he never had the patience for. The room is dark outside the window and everyone in the house is asleep. The air smells of metal polish and old pipe tobacco.

The flannel is soft against your back, and it gives you the first of him. His hands doing up the buttons in the dark bathroom so as not to wake her, the left cuff first, the ring clicking on a button, and a feeling of tenderness so plain it almost embarrasses you. The jeans give you a fence line and a day of wire, the stiffness in the thighs, a gravel road under his boots and a water tower blinking red on the horizon that he has looked at every evening for years. The boots give you more. He walked out in them to the porch last Sunday and sat with the pipe, and the smoke was cherry and sweet. He did not want the lamp. It was his mother's, or his wife's mother's, and he is fixing it because she said once that it was ugly and he said that it was not. You feel his stubbornness there, and his love, which are the same thing in him.

The scar through the eyebrow tugs when you frown. A flash comes: a bench, a soldering iron, a boy of nine, his own voice laughing as the blood ran into his eye. Then the oscilloscope's green light on his face at the lab, and a long gladness at a signal finally coming clean. Then something he has told no one, a girl from before, recently, a phone call he did not return, and the guilt of that sits low in him like swallowed stone. The ear piercing is cold when you touch it. At Mass he kneels with the knees that hurt, and he is good at it.

He is strong. The forearms are corded, the back loose, the lungs deep, nothing in the body says wait. You are six-one and wide-shouldered, and the room is small around you.

You set the rag down and turn your hand over. A plain band, a callus at the base of the finger, a faint burn scar that is not yours and is yours now.

You look up, into the dark window, into his blue eyes.

"Well," you say, in his low voice. "Look at that."

The lamp gleams between you. You wait to feel the old wanting stir, and you do not know whether it will come in a year or before the rag is dry.