Nadim Haddar

You are in Warren's body, standing at the back door of his apartment with his keys cold in his fist, and the fog is pressing on the glass like a hand. Thirty days and twenty-three hours. His knees ache on the stairs. His feet hold the whole night of the bar in them. His dimples are the one good thing, and you have stopped enjoying them.

You are not leaving because he failed you. Nothing happened. Two nights ago a woman at the rail laughed at something he said, and you felt it land in a man whose life you had no claim on. That was the whole trouble. He had a rhythm. You were only a guest in it, and guests get tired of being polite. So you take out the phone and open the page with the wheel. Everyone in the building is asleep. You pay, and you spin.

It gives you a man.

It is face-down in unmade sheets, with your breath ragged against a pillow that smells of someone else's skin. One arm hangs off the mattress and the fingers brush carpet. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains. Something in your chest is sour and heavy, and your mouth tastes of last night's beer. Then your breathing goes even, and the arm draws itself up. You roll onto your back and fold your hands over your sternum, in a way he has never once slept.

The sheet under your shoulder blades is cold and damp. Flash: a hallway, a woman's voice saying his name, Nadim, and a hunger in him to be forgiven for something small. The t-shirt is soft from a hundred washes. Flash: the same shirt on the bathroom floor in July, and his wife's laugh coming through the wall. His wedding band is a smooth, warm line on the left hand, and you turn it with your thumb. Then, unasked, comes a classroom after the last bell, chalk dust, a dry-erase marker squeaking, the lanyard heavy on his neck. Thirty kids' worth of tiredness settles into your shoulders. You feel the work of it: how much he loved them, and how much he drank to keep loving them.

The mattress dips beneath your weight, which is heavy and soft and warm. Your calves ache. Your right leg is already bouncing, and you do not tell it to. Under your tongue the gap between your front teeth is a small cool door, and he has always hidden it when he smiled for photographs. Flash: the nose ring, a Saturday, a dare, his mother's silence at dinner and then her hand on his cheek anyway. Flash: the rosary in the nightstand drawer, which he doesn't pray anymore and can't throw out. Flash: a bank app, a number so small it makes his stomach turn. He owns nothing. He owns the ring, the shirt, the stairs he climbs home on, wet leaves slick on the concrete between the backyards.

His wife breathes somewhere in the dark, or has not come to bed yet. You do not know which, and you do not reach for it.

You lift your hands into the streetlight and turn them over. They are broad and ink-stained at the nail. The gap shows when you speak.

"Okay, Nadim," you say. "Show me what you've got."

Your leg is still bouncing. You wonder how long before the wanting comes back.