Liam Kearney

Jamal's thumb is cracked at the knuckle, and it is the first thing I notice, standing at a sink in a Chicago basement before the day has started. The mop bucket is gray with last night's floors. His left eye drifts toward the drain while the right one looks at me in the mirror. Eight days and sixteen hours I have worn him. He is a good body. Tired, honest, narrow in the shoulders, and the lazy eye makes every face across a counter look away first.

Then yesterday: a woman in the lobby, a clipboard held to her chest, and the way her gaze snagged on the eye and skated off, and the way Jamal's mouth, my mouth, said sorry like it had done a thousand times. I had not wanted to be looked past. I wanted to be looked at. That is all. I dry his hands on his coverall. The wheel is already open in the phone, its colors going round, and I press down.

Blue light. The thumb is mid-scroll and I am in it, the glass cold under the pad, a couch cushion behind my skull, my neck bent toward a phone six inches away. The room is dark. A lamp stands off in the corner with its head turned away. Everything here is quiet. The thumb flicks, faster than he would have, past all the things he had stopped on, and I let it.

The sweatshirt cuff first, no, the long sleeve of the dark shirt, soft and washed thin, rides up my forearm, and with it comes a morning: his hands pulling it over the pompadour, careful, the way he has learned to do it so the front doesn't collapse, a palm smoothing up and back, a dab of pomade he is slightly embarrassed to own. Her voice from the next room, a girlfriend's, teasing him about the hair. Warmth, and under it the small pride of being teased by her.

The phone case is rubbery and scuffed. Under my thumb it opens an afternoon on a campus lawn, a laptop hot on his thighs, grass printing his legs, a paper due and not started. His fingers drum the trackpad's edge, a restless tattoo. They are drumming now, against the back of the phone, and I did not tell them to.

The couch fabric rasps. Beneath it, the pack-a-day lungs: a faint tightness, a taste of ash at the back of the tongue, a craving that sits behind his sternum like a held coin. Nineteen years of long legs, strong and loose, thighs humming from running or wanting to. The studs in his earlobes are cool, small, and when my shoulder brushes the cushion I get the mall kiosk, his nerves, the girl who held his hand while the needle went in.

No money in any of it. A cracked rent split three ways, a bank app he avoids. And still he feels, lying here, like a person with a future.

I lift the hand off the phone and turn it over. Freckles run down past the wrist. It is a steady hand, long-fingered, and it is mine.

"Okay," I say, in a voice that is higher and easier than the last one. "Hi."

The light on my cheek hums. Somewhere a wheel waits, and I do not know how long this one lasts.