Liam Gerard Hartigan

You are standing in a hallway in Miami with Rohan Deshpande's keys in your fist, and the scar through his eyebrow itches the way it does when you frown too long. He has been yours for less than a minute and already you know what's wrong. Everything in him works. His knees don't ache, his back is easy, his hands know the ratchet, and none of it is yours to want. A work order is folded in his shirt pocket. You read it twice and felt nothing. You would not say that out loud, even here, alone. So you let the keys drop onto the table, and you let the wheel turn.

Then the room is dark, and soft, and the air has moved. You are sunk to the hips in a couch that has given up its springs. Light slides over your face in blue and white. The remote is loose in your right hand, nearly slipping. A joke has just landed somewhere in the television, and your mouth is still open from a laugh that was not yours. The laugh is going out of you. The screen cuts to a white frame. You sit up straight, the remote goes down on the couch arm, and the room goes quiet.

His hoodie is soft at the cuffs, and when you pull the sleeve down over your knuckles, the morning comes. The hoodie is not what he wore to work. It is what he put on after, peeling off a navy shirt that smelled of coolant and hot metal. He hung the shirt on the doorknob and stood with his arms hanging, ears ringing from the line, shoulders full of nine hours of door panels coming down on the hook. Lift, seat, drive four screws, release. Again. Eleven hundred times, give or take. His wrists remember it as a hum.

You press your palm to the couch cushion and the fabric is rough and pilled. There is a crack in the arm where she used to sit. Her name comes up through the wool of the throw blanket, warm as a mouth, and goes. He hasn't moved the blanket since. He sleeps under it, badly.

The socks are thick under your toes, and you feel the carpet through them. He bought them for the cold floors in the winter, and they smell faintly of the smoke he carries. A pack a day. Your fingers go to the pocket of the hoodie and find the box already there, soft at the corners. A flash: him on the stoop in the wet, sodium light turning the rain orange, the first drag of the day shaking out of him like a held breath. His mother calls it a bad habit. He laughs, and doesn't stop.

Your thumb finds the stud in your earlobe, a small cold bead. He put them in at nineteen, on a dare, in a bathroom with a friend who is gone now to Ohio. Your hair falls over your ears and onto your collar and you push it back. He has never cut it short, because the first time someone told him to, he was sixteen.

You lift your hands into the screen light. They are broad across the knuckles, with a tight pale burn on one thumb and nails ridged from work. They are strong. They have been trained to do one thing, perfectly, all day, and they do not know yet that you are inside them.

You turn them over. The light moves across the palms. Then you look up, past the television, to where the lens would be if anyone were watching, and your voice comes out lower than you expected, a stranger's, entirely yours.

"Okay. Let's see how long you last."

Somewhere under the question there is a quiet, already turning: whether the wanting will come back tonight, or in a year, or before this show ends.