Karim Nasser

You were Paul Hendren for less than a minute, and already the silver in his hair annoyed you. Fifty years of a man's knees, and a house in the hills that smelled of lemon cleaner and somebody else's divorce. You stood at his kitchen island in the dark with a glass of his water, and the quiet in him was the problem. Nothing in Paul wanted anything. He had sold four hundred houses and wanted none of them. You had spent the whole minute waiting for a hunger, and it had not come. It would come for something else. The page was already open on the phone in your hand, the wheel waiting, and you pressed.

Dark. The pillow is under your cheek, damp and warm, and your thumb is already moving.

Blue light sits on one side of your face. The phone is six inches from your eyes and the screen slides past, a face, a dog, a stranger's kitchen, and your thumb is quicker than it was a second ago and does not stop to look. You are on your side with your knees drawn up. A window stands black behind you, and no thunder comes through it, only the dry sound of a Kansas night with nothing in it.

Your eyes burn. They have been open too long. You make them blink, late, and the lids come down like something you are learning.

The pillowcase goes first. Cotton, worn thin, smelling of his scalp and a laundry soap he buys in the big jug. A flash comes up through your cheek that is not yours: a girl's head on this pillow, dark hair across the case, and a feeling like a held door. Then gone. Another girl after her, not in the bed, in a car, saying *I can't keep being the only one who tries*. That one is recent. It sits in his chest like a swallowed stone, and you feel it now in the ribs, and you scroll faster to get away from it. Even that is his reflex.

The T-shirt, brown-gray, soft as old paper. He put it on this morning in the dark of his bathroom, no, not this morning, a night shirt, but he slept in it after the day, and the day comes: the standing desk, the two monitors of code, coffee gone cold beside the keyboard, a bug in a payment queue he chased for six hours. The pride of it opens in your shoulders, small and private. He told no one he fixed it. Who is there to tell? The sweatpants are damp at the knee where he tucked it. The studs in his ears press the pillow; you feel the small metal in each lobe and a memory of the day he got them, thirty, mortified, laughing with his cousin in a mall.

His thumb has a rough edge. Your other hand, curled against the phone, has already found it: the cuticle, picked ragged, the thumbnail working at the skin without asking you. It stings, clean and bright. He does this when he is afraid of the end of the month. Eleven thousand dollars is everything he has, and you feel the number as a tightness under the sternum.

The sheet under your shin is cool. The mattress dips toward the middle. His body is soft where he is soft, belly warm against his own forearm, thighs heavy, and under it a long stubborn strength in the back from carrying groceries up two flights. Your jaw aches from clenching in sleep. A cigar, once a month, on a porch, with his father's friends, and the taste of it is suddenly in your mouth, sweet and burnt, and your beard patches itch where the pillow rubs them thin.

You let the phone drop to the sheet. The screen lights the ceiling. You lift your hand into the blue and turn it over: the knuckles, the chewed thumb, the fine dark hair on the wrist. Then you turn your eyes up to look at whatever is looking.

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

You say it again to hear it hold. Somewhere in you the wanting is asleep, as Paul's was, and it is quiet, and you do not know how long it stays that way.