Lonnie Prewitt

You are leaving Caleb Rourke because of the sawdust. It is in the creases of his knuckles and under the nails, and no amount of washing gets it out. Forty seconds ago you stood at his bench with a pencil behind his ear. You ran his thumb along a board and felt that the board was right and you were wrong. His hands knew what to do and yours did not. The wanting came back like a cough, so you sat down in his kitchen, paid, and spun.

Now the foil crackles and a corner lets go. A bar of light lies across a face that is not yours, and the face turns from it. Then it turns back, and you open his eyes into the glare and do not blink.

The mattress is on the floor, thin and lumpy under his hip. His mouth is dry and tastes of last night's rum and ice. The room smells of hot dust and laundry that never got folded. Your breath goes in slow and deep. This chest is used to holding air.

His trousers are the first thing to speak. The cargo cloth is stiff at the knee, and you are back at the closet, years ago, pulling them on in the dark. The pocket sags with a flashlight he does not need and keeps anyway. He is proud of the weight of it. He puts them on the same way every shift, left leg first, a superstition he would deny. Then the shirt, black cotton gone soft at the collar. He tugs it down over his belly, which is flat and hard from the gym he goes to at four in the afternoon, when no one is there. His right sleeve is rolled, and the ink under it is warm.

You lift the arm. The praying hands turn toward you, and your thumb finds the cross. A memory comes up under it. A chair, a needle, a church basement smell, and a feeling you did not choose: shame, then relief, then a quiet he has never told anyone about. He believes in it. He prays at the rope, in his head, over drunk kids.

Your tongue finds the gap in his front teeth, and the sound of his own whistling through it comes back to you. Someone laughed at it once, a man in a pastel kitchen with sun on the balcony and ocean haze. The laugh was kind, and he has kept it. Something in the chest tightens. There is a boyfriend, and an older ache behind him, an ex whose name he does not say.

The boots stand by the mattress, laces open. Your heel touches the floor and you know the wood. You know the rope, the velvet, the neon bleeding on wet tile at one in the morning, and the way you plant your feet and become a wall. You know the small money too, quietly stacked, more than anyone at the club would guess. He is careful with it, a millionaire who still drinks a drink or two at home and goes to church in a clean shirt.

Your jaw is rough under your palm, the beard clipped close. Your scalp is smooth and warm in the light. The knees complain a little. The shoulders do not.

You lift your hand into the bar of light and turn it over. Scarred knuckles, a thick wrist, the cross at the edge of sight. It is not Caleb's, and it is not yours.

You look up. Your voice comes out low and gravel-rough, whistling on the S.

"Well. Hello, Lonnie."

Somewhere under it the wheel is already turning. You don't know how long this one lasts.