Jonathan Yoon

The man I am leaving is forty-seven and he is good at his job. That was never the trouble. His knees are fine and his hands are steady. He had been mine for less than a minute, in a janitor's closet that smelled of bleach and wet cotton, and I stood there with the mop handle in my grip and felt nothing under it. The wheel gave me a body that worked, and I found I wanted something that did not. I wanted to be surprised. I pay, I spin, and the mop handle goes out of my hand.

Floorboards, cold. A room the color of oatmeal, a window full of low gray light, and my fingers are at the top of a shirt. One button is wrong. I know it before I look, because the collar rides crooked against my throat. A tie hangs loose on either side of my neck. I reach for the button and stop, my palm flat on my chest, and under it the ribs go up and down, quick, nineteen years of quick.

The shirt is soft with washing. The cuff against my wrist gives me the first of him: a Tuesday, a thrift store on a wide gray street, his mother's voice saying gray goes with everything. He bought it for the interview. He got the job. It is a job he is not sure he wants. It pays the part of the tuition the loans do not, and the loans are a number he does not say aloud, a weight like a wet coat, always on.

The floor is cold through the soles of his feet, and he stands on it as he stands on everything, with his weight a little forward, ready. Athletic: the thighs know stairs, the shoulders know a bag carried across a lawn with a laptop in it. He is a student, tired in the early way, with sleep still in the hinges of him.

The tie slides against my fingers, silk that is not quite silk, and now I have the morning he learned to knot it. A video, his phone propped on the dresser, his own thumb pausing it. Again. Again. The embarrassment of being nineteen and doing a grown man's knot wrong. Then, behind it, a girl laughing in a doorway and reaching up to fix it for him, her fingers cool at his throat. He did not mind being fixed. That is his, that warmth, not mine.

There is something else, and it comes through the pocket of the trousers, a small hard circle under my fingertips. A ring. My thumb turns it over without being asked, around and around, and his hands know this the way they know breathing. It is not hers. It is older, thinner, and it belongs to the woman who got away. He turns it when he is not thinking, and he thinks about her more than he admits. I do not know her name yet. The ache has a shape anyway.

The dimples. I feel them before I see them, a pull in both cheeks as the face rearranges itself around my curiosity. Even at rest, they say. His face is made to look pleased. It is a kind of lie he has told his whole life without trying.

Stubble under my palm, three days of it, rough as a cat's tongue. Prayer, five times, a rug in the corner I have not looked at yet. No drink, never, and no smoke. His mouth tastes of mint and sleep.

I lift my hands and look at them. Brown, broad across the knuckle, a callus at the base of each finger from something he carries. I turn them over. They are mine now, and I do not know them at all.

I look up and say, in a voice younger than I expected, "Okay. Let's see what you were going to be."

Under it, the question is already there, how long, when the wanting comes back.