Kyle Brandon Mercer

Victor's knees ache before the coffee is done, and that is not the reason. The reason is the truck. Fourteen hours and thirty minutes of him, and this morning I stood at the back step of the route with my lazy eye watering in the wind, watching the lid of a can I could not see the edge of. I misjudged it. The can swung, and nobody was hurt, and the other man laughed and said, "Depth, Vic." I smiled with a face that was not mine. I do not want a body that cannot judge a distance. So I am standing in his kitchen before the light, the street still wet and the first birds starting, with his phone open to the page and his thumb sore from the day before.

The wheel turns. Paid, spun, ticking down, and then it is nothing at all.

I am face-down. The mattress takes my weight the way a hand takes a coin. My breath is ragged, then it is even, because I make it even. My arm hangs off the edge, heavy as wet rope, and I draw it up and roll, and the whole long length of him turns over. I fold my hands on my chest. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across the sheet.

The sheet under my palm is cotton worn thin, and it gives me something unasked: a girl laughing in this bed, a recent one, the last of her things still in a drawer, and the ache of that drawer. The pillow smells of his scalp and of something sharp that never washes out of his hair, and I get a fume hood, glass clamped, a flask bubbling, and the pride of a clean yield at six in the evening when no one is left to see it. The bun at the back of my head presses into the pillow. I remember tying it, his fingers doing it without him.

The shirt is damp at the back. I am given a morning he put on a white coat over it, nitrile gloves pulled up to the wrist, and goggles pushed up into his hair like a second set of eyes. Then the mother's voice on a Sunday, a rosary in a dish by the door, the Mass he still goes to and does not talk about. The money comes next, a number that sits on his chest like a stone, more owed than owned. Under it, quieter, is the girlfriend's name, and the other name, the ex, and how he has not deleted a single message.

His body is heavy and warm, six foot two of it, soft across the middle and strong in the shoulders and thighs. My jaw is smooth. My back hurts where he lifts carboys wrong. My hands know how to hold a pipette without trembling.

I lift them in the dark and turn them over. They are big, steady, and mine, for now.

I look up and say, to the ceiling, to nobody, "Okay. Depth's fine."

I do not know how long this one lasts, or when the wanting returns.