Manuel Ortega Beltrán

You are leaving Harlan Wade Prewitt because of the stairs.

Nobody should leave a body over stairs, but this is the truth. Three minutes in him, and you stand at the foot of the staircase in his Dallas house, five foot four and heavy, and the first step looks like a cliff. His knee knows it before you do. It sends up a bright, particular complaint, and you understand with the whole of his freckled, fifty-one-year-old self that the bedroom is up there, the bed is up there, and that it will cost you every night. You stand in his hall with the lights coming on by themselves in the early evening and his breath going short on nothing. You paid for a man and got a negotiation with a staircase.

So you open the page. The wheel is already turning under his thumb, and you do not say goodbye to the blue eyes.

Then the hedge.

It is damp green close to your face, and the air is cold and tastes of leaf and exhaust. The light is low and orange, laid sideways along a sidewalk. Your arm is out in front of you, and a plastic grip is in your hand, and a thin cord runs from it down to a dog. The dog is gold and enormous, and her nose is in the hedge's roots. You are standing. You were already standing. His weight sits easy in your hips, level, nothing in the knees complaining at all. You breathe in and it goes all the way down.

The fleece is the first thing that talks. It is rough and warm at your throat, and when your shoulder shifts, the zipper's cold teeth touch your chin and you are somewhere else.

A truck stop, before light. Frost on the mirror arm of a rig, his breath standing in front of him. He is zipping this fleece to the top and thinking of nothing but coffee and the eleven hours ahead. The fleece was a gift. Someone's hand pressed it into his and said, you're always cold in that cab. He has never told her it fits.

The jeans come next, stiff at the thigh. He bought three pairs of the same cut so that he would never have to decide again. The belt is worn soft at one hole, and the hole is not the one it started on. You feel the weight he has put on and not minded, and the weight he has lost and not noticed.

You flex the hand that is not holding the leash, and the nails are bitten to nothing. Your thumb goes to the edge of the index finger on its own and finds the ragged skin there, and wants to bite. A habit with a whole childhood behind it comes up: a kitchen on the South Side, a mother's voice saying *Manuel, las uñas*, the smell of onions and bleach. He has not smoked in six years, and the want for it arrives right behind, a phantom ache between two fingers, a lighter's thumb-roll. You stand with it and let it pass.

The sleeve of the fleece rides up, and there is the arm. The tattoo is small and badly done, a thing he got at nineteen on a dare in a room that smelled of ink and cheap cologne. He has regretted it for twenty-one years. Every summer he rolls the sleeve down, and it is a quiet shame he carries. Your thumb covers it.

Your ear. A stud in each lobe, small, cold on a cold day. His daughter picked them out. Not the first daughter. The middle one, at a mall, saying *Dad, just try it.* Three kids. Their names come up in a row like a lit window, then their weight on him: one asleep on his chest in a truck cab on a video call, the screen too small, the road too long, the miles piling between him and a bedtime he is missing.

And then a woman. She is the one who got away. He sees her at a kitchen table under a yellow light, saying something reasonable, and he is not saying anything back. That silence is the thing he would undo if he could undo one thing. You don't know her name yet. You feel only the shape of the space where she sat, and it hurts in a place the body has no word for.

The dog looks up.

She lifts her head from the hedge, and her ears go back flat. She is looking at you and knows. The cord goes slack in your hand.

You wind the leash around your knuckles twice, the way a stranger does, and your stride is wrong for her. She trots to catch it.

You turn the hand over. The nails are ragged, and the badly drawn thing is on the other arm. You lift your eyes.

"Okay," you say, in his low, tired voice. "Okay. Let's see how long you're mine."

Behind it, quiet as the dog's panting, the question waits: how long, and when the wanting comes back, whether you are him tomorrow.