Joey Larkin

You are standing in Lucas Barrientos's classroom, and the chalk dust has the whole morning in it. You have been him for four minutes. He is small, quick and bright, and his chin has a cleft you keep finding with your thumb. You like him fine. That isn't the trouble.

The trouble is the soldier. Fourteen minutes ago you were a man in London with a gap in his teeth, and for under a minute you knew where he kept his boots and what he'd say about a man like the one on this couch. Sanjay has a rival. You felt the hate arrive in your chest like a second pulse, and then you left him. You never learned why. Now you want the other side of it. You want the one he hates.

The wheel turns. It is the middle of the night there, and a Tuesday.

You are sitting. The cushion gives under your weight, and blue light moves on your face. A laugh dies in your throat, because the laugh was his, not yours. The show cuts to a bright frame and you sit up straight. The remote is loose in your right hand, so you set it on the couch arm.

The fabric is rough under your palm, worn pale at the seam, and it hands you something. Fall, this couch, a friend named Dev on the other end of it, both of them drunk. They carried it up three flights and called it theirs. His joy comes in, mild and stupid and warm.

You reach for the hoodie's zipper pull. Cold metal. A morning comes back, and he is pulling the grey hoodie on over the black shirt without looking at it, because nothing is waiting for him today. Laptop, listings, the same ten tabs. Between jobs, and the rent due. The cuffs are soft and the left one is frayed. He pushes both sleeves to the elbow, as he always does.

Your right hand is already moving. The thumb wants something. In the pocket your fingers close on a lighter, and it flips over once, twice, end over end. He never smoked. He just liked the weight and the small click. Under it comes a year, a night on a stoop, wet street, sodium light, someone's father's lighter, a thing he was given and never told anyone he kept.

Your thighs are thick and tired from lifting. The knuckles are scabbed and calloused from bar work, or from moving boxes, you can't tell which. Your jaw has three days of stubble. Your scalp prickles where the bleach has grown out, dark at the roots. Your stomach is sour with a big night two weeks gone and a small dinner tonight.

The rival, then. A flash arrives, unasked: a man in London's street light, a gap in his teeth, and a fight you were never in. Joey wasn't in it either. He only owed him. You can't tell more. You don't know if the debt was money or something that can't be paid in it.

You lift your hand and turn it over. Palm, creases, the callus below the fingers. It's a good hand. You look up at the dark window, which gives you back his face and nobody else's.

"Okay," you say, and his voice is lower than you expected. "Okay, Joey."

The show goes on without you laughing. Somewhere your wanting is already stirring, small and patient. A night, a year, four minutes. You don't know how long he's yours.