Nathan Gallagher

You are Owen Fitzgerald, and Owen has been yours for three minutes. You stand in his kitchen in Seattle with the refrigerator humming and the cold floor under his socks. The whole building sleeps. You came to the counter to drink water, and you are holding the glass and not drinking it.

Owen's shoulders are good. His back is tight from lifting, and his knees are young. Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble, and you won't say it even to yourself: you thought his body would feel like arriving, and it feels like a coat that fits. There is a boiler tag on the table in his handwriting, and the sight of it already bores you. He is a man who fixes things. You have been fixed things for three minutes.

So you set the glass down and pick up his phone, and the wheel is already open, because it is always already open. You press.

Light. Then the dark of a bedroom, and a blue glow six inches from your face. You are lying on your left side. The pillow is warm under your cheek and the sheet is twisted around one bare foot. Your thumb is stopped on the glass, mid-scroll, and then it starts again, faster and steadier than he ever held it. You flick past everything he had stopped on.

The first thing you feel is your own heartbeat, slow and a little heavy. There is the faint dry ache of a man trying to quit nicotine, a hunger in the roof of the mouth. The beard is short and close along your jaw, and under the pillowcase the buzzed scalp feels like fine sandpaper.

Then the shirt. The cotton at your shoulder is soft and washed thin, and your arm slides against it. Memory comes up through it, not yours. It is a Tuesday morning, and he stood in the hallway in this same black shirt while a small voice behind a door asked if he could braid something. He couldn't braid. He had practiced anyway, on a shoelace, in the dark, ashamed, and the shame has a warm taste. A daughter. His. Her hair, and his clumsy fingers learning.

Your hand moves on its own. The thumb of your right hand finds the knuckles of your left and presses until they crack, one by one. Pop, pop, pop. Under that comes a classroom after the last bell, chalk dust, the sun in Phoenix like a white wall through the blinds, and the lanyard with the brass key cold against his sternum. It is the key to a room that is his, where thirty children's chairs are stacked and he stands alone at the front and is not lonely. He loves it. You feel that love like a stone in your own chest.

The sheet under your palm gives you more. A woman's laugh in this bed, her hair on this pillow, a girlfriend who is asleep somewhere else tonight, and the plan he has made to say something to her on Saturday. He has bought nothing yet, only rehearsed. In his glass on the nightstand the water has gone warm. An icon on the wall, small and gold, catches a bit of light. He crosses himself every night before he sleeps, and tonight he forgot because of the phone. Your hand lifts, wants to, and stops halfway.

The tattoo itches. A rose, bold lines, faded red. He got it at nineteen with a friend who is dead now, and you feel both the pride and the grief come up with the itch.

You raise your hand into the blue light and turn it over. The palm is broad and dry, with a callus at the base of the fingers from marker and chalk. You look up from it into the dark and say, quietly, in his voice, "Hello, Nathan."

Your heart is steady. The room is quiet. You wonder how long this one holds, whether the wanting comes back by morning or by the time the screen dims, whether you are still him when she knocks.