Octavio Benítez

You are standing in Adrián Quezada's kitchen in Denver, and the coffee is not made. Thirty-eight years old, five-seven, a scar through the eyebrow that your thumb keeps finding. He is not a bad body. The knees are good. The beard is thick and you have been scratching at it for the whole of a minute, which is how long you have had him. The light over the sink is the gray of before-anything. A mug with a store logo on it. His keys on the counter, which you have not touched, because you know what touching does and you don't want his mother's voice in your mouth yet, not again, not so soon.

Nothing is wrong with him. That is the trouble. Nothing is wrong, and you stood there with the cold tile under your feet and felt the wanting come up through them anyway, the old itch, patient as a tide. The phone is already in your hand. The wheel is already turning.

Then you are standing, and the floor is level, and it is dusk.

Glass on two sides, the city lit up behind it, violet going to black. Your right hand is flat on a stack of paper. Your left is turning a page. Something in the rhythm of the motion was wrong, a half second, and now your hands do it again, slowly, correctly, the way you check something you have done ten thousand times and have not had to check in years. The carpet is thin and rough through the soles. The left foot is not a foot. You feel the floor through a long carbon spring and a socket that grips below the knee, and the leg bounces, steady, a small tireless tick against the carpet, until you stop it and it starts again by itself.

Touch the paper and it comes. Not words, a feeling: the dull dread of numbers that are fine and might not stay fine. Then the shirt. Cotton, rolled at the cuffs, damp at the small of the back with heavy Atlanta air that followed him in from the parking structure. You get his morning, sleeve by sleeve: the left arm first because it always is, the buttons done from the bottom up with a patience his daughter used to tease, the cuffs turned twice, then the trousers, the left leg rolled to the knee so the carbon shows, because years ago he decided he would not hide it from his own staff. He sat on the edge of the bed to do the liner, the sock of gel rolled up over the stump, the click of the pin seating. Quiet in the house. A woman's sleeping shape under the sheet, the girlfriend, not the one he thinks about.

Her you get from the watch. The steel band is cool and heavy on the wrist and it opens a different year: a woman laughing in a kitchen, flour on her forearm, the one who got away, and the particular ache of a man who did the sensible thing. The watch was hers to give. He wears it anyway.

The pen in the shirt pocket gives you the first payroll he ever signed for, forty people, and his hands shaking. The cigar smell in the jacket on the chair gives you a porch, a Saturday, his father's Spanish, the rosary he does not say aloud anymore but still counts on his fingers in bad meetings. The frame on the desk gives you a child's gap-toothed grin, and love lands in your chest so hard and so unearned that you have to put the page down.

Mid-shift, hands moving, eyes not on them. All of that is gone now, and only you are here.

You lift your hands. Skinny, brown, the knuckles creased, calluses where a man who sits all day should not have them. You turn them over. They are warm and they are yours for now, and under the glass the city goes on lighting itself.

"Well," you say, and his voice is low and gravel-soft, "hello."

Somewhere under the breastbone, already, the question: how long.