Mateo Ernesto Villarreal

You are standing in the dark in Jonathan Landry's kitchen, and your hands are still full of other people's drywall dust. Four minutes in him. His shoulders ache in a way that is honest and earned, a day of lifting sheets overhead, and still you can't stand it. It is not the ache. He is a man who knows exactly how much mud a seam takes, and you stood in the hallway just now and found you didn't want to know. You wanted a different weight. So you cross-checked the clock on his stove, the apartment asleep around you, and you open the laptop on his counter. The wheel is already waiting on the page. You pay with his card. You spin.

The thumb is moving before you are.

It stopped mid-scroll, and now it goes again, faster and steadier than whoever was doing it. Blue light on one cheek. A phone six inches from your face. You are on your side in a bed, in the dark, and the pillow is cool under your ear. Past the phone there's a window, a hard black sky with a casino's glow smeared along the bottom. Somewhere below, a building hums. Your eyes are dry. You have not blinked in a long time, and you make them.

The sheet is against your shins, and it hands you something first. A Sunday, a low ceiling fan, a mother's voice on the phone saying *mijo, did you eat*. He did not answer for two days afterward. The guilt of it comes in your chest, small and stale, his and not yours.

The T-shirt is soft at the collar, washed a hundred times. It gives you a morning: the blue oxford on a hanger, ironed badly on the left cuff, the lanyard looped over his head last, the badge flipping face-down so he turned it over with one finger. Khakis, belt-less. Black shoes with the heel crushed because he never had time to untie them. He dressed in the dark of the hall so as not to wake the roommate, and he was thinking about a boy named Dario who would not read aloud.

Then the classroom, the after-bell quiet, chalk and warm dry-erase smell, thirty chairs pushed crooked. He stood at the front and nobody was there and he loved it, truly, that ten minutes of nobody. You feel it settle behind your sternum like a held breath let go.

Your fingers curl against the phone and the knuckles want to crack. They do. A long, loose pop from the first two, and the relief runs up the wrist, a habit older than any of his reasons. Your body is twenty-seven. The lower back is tight from standing. The legs are strong, the stomach empty, the mouth sour with no drink in it, and a medal on a nightstand chain you can't see but know is there, a Saint Christopher he does not wear but does not move. Eight months of mornings waking clear. The sobriety is the heaviest thing in him and the cleanest.

He has almost no money. You know it in how the bed is made, in the unopened envelope on the dresser, in the way his shoulders learned to ask for nothing.

You set the phone face-down on the sheet. The room goes dark except for the window.

You lift your hand and turn it over. The palm is warm, the fingers narrower than the last pair, a pencil callus on the middle one. Smooth jaw when you touch it. Your hair is tied back, tugging at the nape against the pillow. You look up, to nowhere, and say it out loud, low, in a voice that rasps from disuse:

"Okay. Hello, you."

And under it, already, the old question, patient as a thumb over glass: how long before the wanting comes back, and whether you will still be him when the light turns gray.