Lonnie Peebles

You are leaving Marcus Tillery after less than a minute, and he was fine. That is the insult of it. You stand in his kitchen in San Francisco with the fridge humming and the whole house asleep, and his body is lean-ish and soft in the middle and works perfectly. His knees do not ache. His phone shows a card that says you could be anyone, and you cannot say why that is not enough. You say nothing out loud. You tap the wheel, and the kitchen is gone between one heartbeat and the next.

Weight arrives first, all of it, low and settled. The mattress takes you. Your breath was ragged and now it is even, and you did not do that, the body did, startled into order. Your arm hangs off the bed and you draw it up. You roll onto your back and your hands fold on your chest, a way he has never once slept. Streetlight, sodium orange, cuts through the gap in the curtains and lies across the sheets.

The sheets come first. Cotton worn thin, washed a thousand times, and under your cheek the pillow still holds the shape of his head. A flash: a woman's laugh in a different bedroom, years back, and the particular ease of a man who believed that room was permanent. It goes. The shirt against your back is a soft navy tee, and its sleeves give you a morning, not this one. He stood at the closet. He pulled the shirt over his bald head, then the arms, left and then right, tugging the hem down over a belly he has stopped apologizing for. He did it slowly. There was a laptop waiting in the kitchen and he was putting off the listings.

Your fingers move without you. They press, and the knuckles crack, one by one, a habit older than the job he lost. With each pop comes a little of him: a boardroom where he was good, a handshake, a number on a letter. Then three children's names in his mouth, not spoken, just known, like the floor of a house. A daughter's school pickup. A son who does not call. An old girlfriend whose number he still has and has never dialed, and the ache is not romance now, only a door left unlocked.

There is a glass of water by the bed, sweating a ring. He quit drinking on purpose, you feel it, a decision with a date on it, and the water tastes of that pride before you have even sipped. His back is stiff. His body is short and heavy and fifty-nine, and it holds you the way an old coat does, tired and sure of itself.

You lift your hand into the orange light and turn it over. Thick fingers, creased palm, his. You look up past it at nothing, at the ceiling, at the dark.

"Okay," you say, in a voice lower than any you've had. "Okay, Lonnie."

And under it, quietly, the question that is always there: how long this one lasts, and whether the wanting wakes before the sun does.