Marco Ibarra

You are leaving Travis Whitcomb because of the quiet.

It is the middle of the night in the desert and you are standing in his kitchen, twenty years old, with the groundskeeper's shoulders and the dust still in the creases of his knuckles. The refrigerator hums. Nobody is awake in the house. You have been him for less than a minute, and you already know what he would do with the rest of the night: nothing, and be content. He is easy to wear. That is what is wrong with him. Nothing in him pulls back at the wheel, nothing in him is hungry, and you stand there with a glass of tap water going warm in his hand and realize you wanted something to push against. You want a body with a bad nose, or a debt, or a wife. You open the page. The wheel is already turning.

The mattress is under you. You are on your side in the dark with a phone six inches from your face, and your thumb has stopped halfway down a screen of someone else's photographs. Blue light sits on one cheek. Your thumb starts again, faster and steadier than whatever was moving it before. Everything he had paused on goes past, unread.

The body is heavy and warm and entirely sure of itself. There is weight through the middle, thick and strong, a wide man's gravity pressing the mattress down. Your breath comes slow and a little congested. Something in the sinuses whistles faintly on the left, where the nose was broken once and set crooked. The jaw is rough against the pillow. Both earlobes carry a small hard stud.

The T-shirt is soft from a thousand washings, and it gives you the morning first. His hands are pulling it over his head in a bedroom with a window gone black at ten, and a woman's voice says something from the bathroom, laughing. He had slept all day, because he works nights, and the shirt was the first clean one. He pulled the sleeve down over the tattoo out of habit. You feel the habit in the bicep, a tiny flinch of shame. A badly done thing, a small bird or a blot, inked on a dare in a parking lot at nineteen. He has hated it for eleven years.

The ring is cold on the left hand. The band turns when you flex your fingers, and he is there at once: standing in a rented hall in a borrowed jacket, shaking so hard the ring nearly fell, and her fingers steadying his. Marisol. Her name arrives whole, and so does the way he says it, like something he does not deserve and has stopped being surprised by.

The phone is warm. His thumb knows its glass. Under the photographs there is a thread he has not opened for two years, an old girlfriend's name, and your thumb hovers there because his does, a long ache you can feel without a single fact attached to it. Snow ticks at the window. The blanket smells of vape, sweet and chemical, and the habit sits in his chest like a small hook: one more, then sleep, and he will not sleep.

You turn the hand over. It is broad, the knuckles thick, the wedding band dull gold, the thumb still lit blue at the tip. You lift your eyes from it.

"Okay," you say, in his voice, low and rough with midnight. "Okay. Let's see you."

Somewhere under the question is the next one. How long does the wanting stay away this time.