Marcus Delacroix

You are leaving the pastor because the pastor is kind, and kindness is a full-time job. Nathan Cruickshank has been yours for less than a minute, and already a woman in the front pew is waiting at the vestry door with her hands wrapped around her purse, ready to be told that grief has a shape. Her name is on a card in his pocket. His small hazel eyes keep sliding to the clock. His shoes are a half-size wrong for you, and every voice that says Pastor makes you want to turn around and check behind you. You are not bored of him. You are only certain that nothing in him is the thing you are hungry for, and the page is already open, and the wheel is already turning.

Then there is no vestry.

There is a bar of heat across your face, a white seam of daylight where something has peeled, and you are on your side with your cheek in a pillow that smells of someone else's sleep. You turn from the glare. Then you turn back into it, because you want it, and you open his eyes and hold them open, and they do not water, and they do not blink.

You breathe in. The chest is wide and slow and rises under no shirt at all. Your arm is pinned beneath you, pins and needles climbing it. The mattress dips under a hip bone. Work trousers, stiff at the knee, twisted around one leg. Your mouth is dry. Somewhere a window unit rattles. Past the foil, a parking lot hums.

You flex the arm and the knuckles crack on their own, one after another, unasked. His hands do that. Your hands, now.

The sheet is under your palm, and the sheet gives you the first thing: the ladder down from the hangar deck at the end of a night, helicopters chained to the deck like animals in the dark, the long walk to the car, the way the sky went pink and he hated it, because pink meant a day he had to sleep through. Tired like a stone in the stomach. Pride under the tiredness, steady as a keel.

The foil crackles and a corner lifts again. You reach up and touch the tape, and he is standing on a chair at six that morning with a roll of it in his teeth, smoothing each sheet flat with the side of his fist, careful, because he does everything carefully. The sun came up and he laughed at himself for building a cave.

The trousers on your legs are navy and coarse. You drag a fingertip along the seam and the memory comes up whole: the same trousers pulled on in the dark of the berthing, one leg and then the other, the belt pulled to the third hole, the flashlight clicked into the pocket, the small private pleasure of a crease. Before that, the boots by the bed, and his mother's voice on the phone saying eat something, baby.

You press the heel of your hand to your chest, where his heart is steady, and something older surfaces: a girl on a porch in the heat, laughing with her feet up on the rail. He had meant to call her. He did not. He still means to. It sits under his ribs like a swallowed coin.

His shoulder is sore from the wrench. His thighs are heavy and strong. A little money sits in an account he checks too often and spends too rarely.

You lift the arm into the light. On the forearm a woman's face looks up from the skin, grave and gray, an old woman's eyes lined by someone who loved her. You do not know her yet. Something in the chest flinches and goes quiet, and you let it.

You turn the hand over. Palm, scars of work, nails clipped short. You lift your eyes into the light.

"Well," you say, and his voice is lower than you expected, "hello."

You wonder how long he lasts. Four minutes, four years. The wanting is already there, small, at the back of the throat, waiting to see what it will do.