Matthew Dale Sorensen

You are standing in a kitchen in Honolulu, in the dark, and the tooth gap is under your tongue again. Your tongue keeps finding it. Forty-five, five-eleven, bald by razor, a software engineer with a mortgage and a sleeping house. The refrigerator hums. The tile is cool under your bare feet.

You have been him for less than a minute. You have not even found the light switch.

It is not that he is wrong. He works. His hands know the keyboard, and the lanai door slides easily. But a minute ago you opened his laptop and saw a ticket queue, and you felt the whole width of the next thirty years of it, and your thumb was already on the card. Nobody here would ever miss you. Somebody has to be the first one to want something. It is always you.

The wheel turns. You do not watch it. You are watching the dark window, and your own reflection in it, a man with no hair and a gap in his teeth, and then the reflection goes.

Weight. Heavy and warm and sideways. A mattress under your whole front, a pillow against your cheek, and your breath, a raw ragged thing, catching in a nose that does not breathe straight. You let it out. It evens. Your arm is hanging off the bed, and you draw it up. You roll. The ceiling is there, gray with a thread of streetlight from the curtain gap, and your hands settle on your chest, folded, as if you had been laid out, as if he had never once in his life slept this way.

You lie still. The body is a house you have walked into without knocking. The belly rises under your folded hands, soft and honest. The left hip aches, dull, a thing it has done for years. The mouth tastes of sleep and, far down, of nothing: no smoke, no wine. The jaw is scratchy under your knuckle.

The shirt is the first thing you touch. Cotton, washed thin, dark. The cuff of it under your thumb, and it comes:

Ruth's hand on the hem of it, folded into a drawer, *this one's gone soft, you'll like it*. He did. He wears it to sleep because it is the one that does not ask anything. Then a different morning, the same sleeves pushed up, a small boy on his shoulders at a street fair, the boy's sneakers drumming his chest, sticky fingers in his hair, and the happiness is so plain and so square it nearly folds you in half. It is not yours. It sits in your ribs anyway.

The ring. You turn it with your thumb and the metal is warm. The day it went on: a white room, a church-smelling carpet, his own voice shaking on a vow. His mother crying in the third row. He had thought, *I have never been so afraid of being good enough.* Under the sheet your thumb keeps turning it.

You bring a hand up, and there, the nails. Bitten to the quick, ragged at the left forefinger. Your mouth is already wanting to do it. And through that, a rush: a back porch, a cigarette burning down between those fingers, the last one, crushed out the night his son was born. He chewed the nails instead for eleven years. Nobody has ever said anything about it. Ruth only lays her hand over his sometimes, and he stops.

The nose. You touch it and it bends under your finger. A fall off a bike at fifteen, the bright crack, a ringing white. He still presses it when he is thinking.

The sheets know him too. Under your heel something cold: the book on the floor, the one he reads in bed and falls asleep inside, and you know without seeing its spine that he is on a page about the Nephites, a thread of pencil in the margin. And at the back of everything, the thing nobody knows: the money. He did not earn it in any way he would say aloud. A lucky early year, a number that kept growing while he slept, and he has never stopped feeling it was lent to him. He gives more than he tells. He has never had a drink.

Out in the street, a car passes, wet tires hissing. Sodium light slides across the ceiling and off.

You lift your hands into it. Wide palms, short fingers, a wedding band, tattooed forearms, a face gone quiet in the dark that is his. Yours. You turn them over once. You are up on your elbows, then sitting, and the mattress dips toward the empty side where she sleeps, or doesn't.

You look at the hands, then up, and you say, low, to whoever is listening:

"All right. Let's see how long you last."

The wanting is already in there somewhere, small, asleep, like a coal. You do not know when it wakes.