Marcus Dellinger Pryor

You are leaving Devontae because he was a good body and it did not matter. Twenty-two, quick in the knees, a beauty mark you kept touching in the dark of his bathroom mirror, and tonight in his kitchen in Western Kansas, with the whole town asleep and the refrigerator humming, you stood with his phone lit in your hand and understood that what you wanted was not in him. Nothing he could do was the thing. You had been him for less than a minute when you knew it. So the page opens, the wheel turns, and you pay.

Then the kerb is gone under his foot.

Wet street, two in the morning. The jacket hangs open and the air is warm and thick with salt. You pitch forward and your palm hits the roof of a parked car, cold metal slick with rain, and you hold yourself there. His breath comes up sour with rum and a little mint, and something packed under the lip, a pinch of tobacco gone flat. Six-one. You feel the extra height as distance to the ground. You feel the belly over the belt, soft and heavy, shifting his balance forward. The left shoe has been scuffing. You stop it.

The jacket is canvas, stiff at the cuffs. You close your fingers on the cuff and it opens a morning: him at a hook by a door, shrugging into it, a woman's voice from another room saying don't be late, and under that a flat gray tiredness about a floor of conveyor belts and a mezzanine where he stands above other men's work. He is the one who answers for it. Operations. He hates the walkway rail's cold, loves that nobody can see his face from below.

The plaid shirt sticks to your back. Buttoning it: a thumb pushing each button through, a mirror, and his own hair, dyed black too evenly, which he checked twice. He did it himself over a sink, gloves, the stink of the box dye, because he wanted to look like somebody who had not started to slip. The jaw is smooth. He shaved it before going out, a fresh blade, a nick he feared and did not get.

Your right arm is warm. You push the sleeve and see the half sleeve, script and a date. The ink opens a different room: a woman laughing with her head back, a door closing, an apartment that smelled of her shampoo. This is not the girlfriend. This is the one who got away. He has her name on his arm and a new woman in his bed, and he drank tonight to be neither. The grief is not yours, and it goes through you like a nail through a board.

Your knuckles crack. You didn't ask them to. The thumb rolls over each one, a habit older than the tattoo. Boots weigh on your feet. In his pocket is a small round tin, and your fingers know the lid.

You step away from the car. The scuff does not come. Forty steps, even and quiet. At the corner, the lit street goes left, and left is not home.

You hold your hand up in the neon, turn it over, and look up.

"Okay," you say, in his voice. "Let's see how long you last."