Kevin Tran

I am standing in Doug Fennimore's kitchen in New York, nearly midnight, with Doug's thumb working the edge of a mug. The mug is cold. Doug has been mine for less than a minute, and already I know what's wrong with him. His knees ache on the stairs. His mind is all spreadsheets and apologies, and he has never once wanted anything the way I want. It isn't that he is bad. It's that the wanting has nowhere to go in him. It goes round and round the freckled hands and comes back empty. I put the mug down. I open the page. The wheel is already turning, and I pay.

Then the fork is halfway to my mouth.

The kitchen is warm and yellow under one hanging lamp. Rice and something sweet and salty, steam on my chin. The window is dark blue and gives me back a man in a coat. My weight is on one hip against the counter. My chest is wide and thick, and my breath comes easy and deep. A plastic bag hangs from my left wrist, crackling.

The coat is first. Green canvas, stiff at the collar, and the cuff against my wrist gives me the morning: his arm shoved into the sleeve in the van's dim cab, a cold that surprised him, because Los Angeles is supposed to be warm. He zipped it to his throat and unzipped it again at the first stop, and he did this nine times today. The inside pocket has a lump. A pen, I think. He chews them.

The fork is light plastic, bent a little from use. My fingers will not stay still on it. They tap, turn it, tap again. Pressure along the pads of them, hard skin across the palm from the van's handle and the weight of boxes. They know the shape of forty pounds without being asked. Something comes up through the calluses: a stairwell in the afternoon, a woman at a door saying "you're always so fast," and him wanting, stupidly, to stay one more second in her doorway because nobody else spoke to him all day. It was not love. It was only his lonely, and it is warm and small in my chest like a swallowed coal.

The jeans are dark and soft at the knee. They give me the weekend: a bar, a loud one, his friends shouting over a game, a cigarette he only smokes when he drinks, the smoke bitter in the cold, and the sick regret next morning. His thighs are strong. His back aches low and dully, from lifting and twisting all day, and the ache has a memory too, of a ramp slick with rain.

The floor under my boots is cool through the soles. Underneath is the lease he signed, the money he keeps in a savings account and checks too often, the way he lies awake wondering whether anything bigger watches over him. He thinks so, without any name for it.

I look at my hands. They are his, broad and tan and restless, a fork in the right one. I turn the right over. The palm is rough as bark. Then I look up into the black window, at a face with a thin beard and gaps in it, and I say, quietly, "Okay. You're mine."

The rice is still hot. The hands will not be still. Somewhere behind my ribs the wanting is asleep, and I do not know how long it sleeps.