Marcus Dean Fitzgerald

Here is the story.

You are standing in Tyler Callahan's kitchen with a glass of water you don't remember pouring, and you are already bored of his knees. Twenty-two years old, and they click on the stairs like a man's. That isn't why. The why is a dispatch app on his phone, lit on the counter, offering a route at three in the morning to a gas station in Tempe, and you realized, thumb over it, that you had no wish to go. Not to the route, not to the road, not to any of the sixty minutes ahead. You had his whole body and nothing in it to want. So you put the glass down. Freckles, stubble, the dark hair. You open the page with the wheel on it and pay, and the wheel goes around, and you have the thought that you always have, which is that you are not leaving him, only setting him down.

Then there is no kitchen.

There is weight first. A great deal of it, pressing the mattress, pressing your own sternum, and your breath goes from ragged to even in one pull, as if someone has taken a hand off a throat. Your arm has been hanging off the bed. You draw it up. You roll onto your back, and your hands fold themselves on your chest, and somewhere under you the body objects, because it has never once slept like this. Light from the street comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across the carpet. It is the middle of the night, and everyone is asleep.

The sheets are the first thing that talks. Cotton gone soft and gray from washing, tangled at the ankle, and under your fingers it gives you a flash that isn't yours: the cold of a laundromat, quarters, a woman's voice from the next machine saying his name like a joke they share. Gone. His girlfriend, then. She is somewhere across town, asleep, and she does not know you exist.

The T-shirt rides up over his belly. You pull it down, and the fabric is thin at the collar, and the morning he put it on comes back in his hands: yesterday, yanked off a chair, sleeves turned the wrong way out and fixed with a thumb, the cubicle waiting. A headset that pinches the left ear. Forty-three years of a body that carries its weight in the middle, a low ache across the back from eight hours in a chair that never fit him, a warmth in the thighs where the denim still is, because he fell asleep in his jeans. You find the pocket against your hip. Keys. The edges press, and you get a gravel lot, an old Corolla, a cigarette he does not light anymore, the taste of one he wants. Six years, the memory says, with pride and grief mixed together. He quit. He quit drinking too, and the nights since are quiet in a way he is still learning.

You lift your hand to your mouth without deciding to. Your teeth find the thumbnail, already ragged, and the habit is so complete that your tongue slips through the gap between his front teeth and you taste salt. A call comes back, someone screaming about a bill, and he said *I understand, ma'am* in the voice that made his stomach turn over. Under it, another woman, older, an ex, a photo in a drawer he doesn't open. He thinks about her on slow afternoons. He never says so. Nobody knows.

Your chest rises and falls, enormous, patient. The pillow smells like him.

You take your hand from your mouth and hold it in the streetlight. Thick fingers, bitten nails, the pad of the thumb rough from the keyboard. You turn it over. Palm, lines, nothing of yours. Then you lift your eyes.

"Okay," you say, in his low voice, with the gap in it. "Okay. You're mine."

And under it, small, already asking: how long.