Owen Kratzer

You are sixty-four and your knees have opinions about the stairs. Warren Tsuji's thumb is on the trackpad of a phone he has owned for less than a minute, and his scar-split eyebrow pulls up when you hit the button. He had a line's worth of years in his shoulders. A line of bolts, a line of doors, forty years of the same quarter-turn. You wore him through one stairwell and one cup of someone else's coffee and you are already done. He could not stop wanting to be home. You do not have a home to want. The wheel turns.

Rain. It is the first thing, before the cold: rain on your hood, loud on the shelter roof, and then your own breath going out in front of you, light and quick, a small chest. You are standing in a pool of gray morning with your hands in your pockets and a sign above you says 3 MIN.

You step out. You did not decide to. The body goes a beat early, hood falling back, and the water hits your face and runs into your open mouth, and one eye, the left, slides a little outward and lets the rain in sideways. You do not turn out of it. Whoever he was, he had not been cold in a long time, and neither have you.

The jacket first. Your right hand comes out of the pocket and pinches the wet nylon at the cuff, and it comes: a closet floor, an hour before light, this jacket on the carpet where he dropped it. He is twenty-three and his feet are sore from a double and he shrugs into it anyway, because the kitchen's warm and the walk is not. His fingers know the zipper's trick, the catch halfway, the tug.

The hoodie under it, soft at the neck. A girl's laugh in the hood's drawstring. She tied it once, to be funny, a bow under his chin. Recent. The feeling is a bruise pressed on purpose, and you let it go before it can become yours.

Pockets. In the left, a small round tin. You thumb it open without looking: nicotine pouches, the mint ones, and a flood of him tucking one under his lip at the walk-in's door, because he never drinks, never has, not after what the cooks at his first place did on Fridays, and this is the only vice he lets himself keep. The sting under the lip is a memory with a taste.

Your forearm, where the sleeve has ridden up. The tattoo itches in the wet. You press it. A night, a friend with a machine and a bad idea, a shape meant to be a bird, and the shame of it, how he pulls his cuff down at every new pass. It is small and crooked. He has never once been proud.

The earring is cold. A silver hoop in the left lobe, and when you touch it: sixteen, a bathroom, a safety pin, his own steadiness.

Shoes. The canvas is soaked through and the wet climbs your ankles, and with it, a tiled floor and the hiss of a flat-top, ticket after ticket, *hands, behind, heard*, a chef's voice and his own answering. He is good. He knows it in his wrists. The ache in the arches is honest, the narrow hips, the thin arms that carry a full hotel pan better than they look like they should. The money, though: the number comes up like a stone, the debt bigger than anything he's earned, the envelopes he does not open. Underwater. He still stands up straight in it.

The hair is plastered flat against the forehead and cold water drips from the fringe into the good eye.

The bus is a pair of lights down the wide street, past the brick houses and the low sky. Your breath is coming fast. Not his fear and not yours. Just a body, new, wet, and entirely awake.

You lift your hand out of the rain and turn it over. Thin fingers, a burn scar's ghost across the knuckle that the facts do not mention, so you do not trust it. The small bad bird on the wrist. You look up, past the hand, into the lights.

"Okay," you say, in a voice younger than your last. "Okay. Let's see how long you last."

You don't know if you mean the bus, or him, or whatever is already stirring in you, quiet, wanting.