Marcus Delano Whitfield

You are Thomas Ryan Doherty for less than a minute, and already you hate the sound of the radiator in this Boston apartment. Twenty-one years old, a student, with a short beard you keep touching to check it is there. The coffee in his mug has a skin on it. His phone shows a message from a professor about a paper due, and it means nothing to you, and it has meant nothing for the whole of this minute.

He is fine. That is the trouble. He works, he is young, his knees do not ache. But the knowing sits in you like a stone in a shoe: you have been eighty-nine men, and you have just spent a minute being a boy who is afraid of a paper. You cannot carry his small fears. You need someone whose fears are larger and quieter. You open the page, the wheel is already turning, and Thomas Doherty is gone mid-sip.

Now you are standing, and it is evening, and the glass in front of you is full of a parking lot going violet. Your fingers are on a keyboard and your weight is on your left leg. A cursor blinks. One keystroke goes wrong under your hand. You do it again, slowly and correctly. Then ten more, each one checked, as if the job were new.

The desk is raised to standing height and the edge of it presses your hip. Your hand drifts and finds a pen, and your thumb clicks it, click, click, and with the click comes him: a night in a cold kitchen, quitting cigarettes, chewing the pen to the plastic. Eleven days in, he told himself, and he was proud. The shame of the old habit is his. The pride is his.

Under your palm the keyboard is worn smooth on the E and the spacebar. Four years of the same quarterly models, and a flash of a number he got wrong once, a decimal, and the cold sweat of the afternoon he found it before anyone else did. Nobody ever knew. That was the one time his hands checked themselves, and they have been checking ever since, quietly, in the dark of him.

The shirt is against your back, soft and unstarched, and it hands you the morning. His sleeves, one and then the other, rolled in two folds past the wrist. The tie, blue, looped around his neck and never knotted because the meeting was cancelled. The glasses pushed up on his scalp, which he shaved that morning with a plain razor, going slowly over the crown. He ran his thumb along the cleft of his chin to check the beard line, a habit from the mirror. Her laugh came from the other room, a girlfriend's laugh, and she shouted that he was going to be late. He wasn't.

Your shoes are brown leather and they have been resoled. Heat comes through the glass. A little money put away, and a modest pride in it. A Unitarian pew on Sundays, a hymn he doesn't believe in word for word and loves anyway. One drink, then a second, most evenings. At his collar the edge of ink itches, a face on his chest, and you do not look.

Your shoulders are broad and tired, and your back is tight from standing. His heart beats slow and steady under the shirt. You are thirty-four and it feels heavier and truer than twenty-one.

You lift your hand off the keys and turn it over. The palm is darker than yours was, the lines deep, the thumb still holding the pen. You look up at the glass, where a stranger's reflection stands with a cleft chin, and you say, quietly, "Okay. You're mine." The pen clicks once. You wonder how long before the wanting comes back, and whether you will still be him when the lot lights go out.