Mason Ruiz Delgado

Arjun Malhotra's body is good. That is the trouble with it. It is twenty-four and quick, and the cleft in its chin catches the light of a Tuesday afternoon in Los Angeles. I have been in it for less than a minute, and I am already bored with how little it asks of me. It sits at a laptop with a cursor blinking over the wheel, and I know what I want. I want to be somebody who is in the middle of something and does not know yet that it is the last thing he will do. Arjun's thumb is on the trackpad. It clicks.

Then I am standing.

There is a phone wedged between my ear and my shoulder, and a tinny song starts over at its first bar. My shoulder drops. The phone slides into my palm, and I catch it before it falls. A pen is in my other hand, stopped on the second digit of a number written on an envelope. It does not start again. Low sun comes through a window and lies warm across the counter and the side of my face.

Everything is a little heavier than I expected. This is a weight that has already been carried through a whole day.

The phone is warm and slick from his cheek. The case has a crack in one corner, and my thumb finds it and knows it. A flash comes with it. It is a girl's voice saying his name from another room, and he is laughing before he turns around. It lasts a second, and then it hurts, because it is not mine and it is already over.

The shirt is a thin black tee, soft and washed to nothing, and it lies against my back. It gives me the morning. His arm goes through one sleeve, then the other, and the tattoo comes out into the light. He had it done at nineteen, a cross and praying hands, and he does not pray, exactly. He means it as a kind of listening. He pulls the collar straight in a dark mirror and sees the dimples come up even when he is not smiling. He has stopped minding them. She used to put her thumb in one.

The jeans are stiff at the knee. They give me the old denim, the belt he does not wear, and the left sneaker with its heel crushed flat because he never untied it. Under my feet the floor is cool, and the boards give slightly near the sink. Something comes up with that. It is a cold kitchen the winter the diner on Main closed, and his mother's voice on the phone saying it was nobody's fault. It sits in his chest like a coin.

My hands know what to do before I do. The right one tightens on the pen. The left makes a fist, and the knuckles crack one by one, a small flat run of sound. He has done it since he was twelve. Behind it comes the receipts: shoeboxes of them, other people's lunches and gas and tires, and the quiet pride of making them add up. There is a pouch tucked against his gum, mint and burning, and a Saturday somewhere that ended on a lawn with the sky wheeling. There is less money in the account than a person should be able to live on. The numbers come up in him calmly, as if he had made peace with them.

His back aches low from the counter. His legs are strong and a little restless. His beard is a thin, patchy thing, and I feel the gaps when my jaw moves.

The music loops again.

I lift my hand from the envelope and turn it over. It is a stranger's hand, scarred only by use. The knuckles are pink from cracking.

Then I look up, at nothing, at the window and the gold light, and I say, out loud, in a voice that is too young and easy and not mine:

"Okay. Hi."

I wonder how long this one holds, and when the wanting comes back.