Kevin Tran Nguyen

You are standing in Warren Teague's kitchen, and the refrigerator is humming the only note in the house. Forty-eight years old, six-three. The linoleum is cold through his socks. His knees have an opinion about the hour. Two hundred and nine times before him you did this, and tonight he has the bad back of a man who sits for a living, a dull rod behind the belt line. The spreadsheet is still open on the laptop in the next room. You spent a whole evening in it. You were good at it, and it did not matter. You could not do the thing you wanted from inside him: his hands were slow, and his mouth did not know how to ask for anything. His mother's voice is on his phone, a voicemail he has not played, and you will not play it. Your thumb is already on the site. A wheel, then a click. Somewhere a man is standing in an ordinary minute, and he has no idea.

You land mid-word. Your lips are shaped around a name, and the third time comes out lower than the first two, a voice that is not quite his. The stairwell swallows it without an echo. Concrete block is cold against your shoulder. A phone glows in both hands, a forum post, white text on black. The air is thick and wet, even here at this hour, even in a stairwell, with summer clinging to the cinder block. A caged bulb buzzes beside the door.

Then his body starts giving you things. The hoodie first: cotton gone soft at the cuffs, zipper teeth against your ribs. You feel him pulling it on this evening, left arm, then right, his girlfriend's laugh from the other room, *you look like you're going to rob a bank*, and the warmth of being teased by someone he loves. The jeans stiff at the knee, a burn scar of dried mortar he never scrubbed out. Then the boots, heavy, steel in the toes, and the weight of them is a decade. Suddenly it is a morning at dawn, the steel frame going up against a pink sky, his crew waiting on him to say *go*. He likes being the one who says it. He is thirty-one and the whole building is his to hold in his head.

His right hand drifts into his pocket without you. It finds a lighter, brass, dented, and your thumb flips the lid open and shut, open and shut, a clicking you did not choose. The metal opens something older: his grandmother's church, a folding chair, a hymn in a language half-remembered, and a prayer he said at nineteen that he has never quite stopped saying. Then a girl, an old girlfriend, on a porch, laughing at the way he lit a cigarette wrong. A small ache for her, long since healed over and still there. The vape is in the hoodie pocket too, and you feel the craving in his lungs, quick and clean.

The séance was a joke. You can feel that in the way his shoulders sit: a friend's dare, candles, a forum thread, a smirk. He did not believe a word. The phone's glass is warm in your palm. His arm under the sleeve carries the old ink, bold lines gone soft, and it itches slightly, the way it does in heat. He is strong. The back is easy, the knees do not complain, and his breath goes down deep without effort. You are five-seven, and everything is closer to the ground, and quick.

You pocket the phone. You look at your hands, the knuckles, the faded color on the forearm, the lighter turning over once. They are not Warren's, and they are not yours. They are warm, steady, and entirely ready to work.

You lift your eyes to the dark window in the door, and you say, "Third time's a charm," in a voice that is still learning him.

How long does this one last? You take the stairs down two at a time, and you do not know, and the question goes with you.