Owen Mathers

You are standing in a kitchen in Honolulu before the sun, and your hands are Keanu Tolliver's hands, and they are wrong for what you want.

He left a truck key on a hook by the door. You have not touched it. You've had him for less than a minute, and already you know what you came back for: the coffee is on, the window is gray, and some part of you keeps listening for a pipe to knock somewhere in the wall. It is a good body. It could fix anything in this house. You stand in the quiet of it and want a stranger more than anything. You hold the phone in a thick-knuckled hand and press.

Then it is noon, and you are on a sidewalk with a hedge at your shoulder.

The leash is in your right hand. The plastic handle is warm and the spring in it hums. A beagle is nose-deep in the privet at the end of the line, tail up, wholly occupied. Your weight sits on your left foot. Your breath is slow. Something in your chest is waiting politely for the dog to finish.

The dog looks up past the hedge at you, ears back. You feel the line go slack.

You wind the leash twice around your hand, and your feet start off before you decide anything.

The hoodie is soft and washed thin, and it carries him in. It is gray, and he pulled it off a chair this morning in a room with a slanted ceiling. A girlfriend's laugh is in the cuff, and a lecture hall, and cold coffee. The jeans are stiff at the knee. He bought them in October and hated how long they took to break in. The backpack strap bites your shoulder, and inside it is a laptop with a cracked corner and a half-finished paper on something he cares about more than he admits. The watch is on your left wrist, brown leather, its band worn dark in one spot. It was a gift from someone, and when it ticks against the bone you feel a woman standing in a doorway, saying she can't. The ache is not yours, but it fits.

Your thumbnail is already picking at the cuticle of your forefinger. He does it when he is thinking about her. You let it.

Your legs are nineteen and quick. Your jaw is smooth, and the air on it is cool. You can feel freckles as a tightness when you squint at the light. There is a little money put away, a number he checks the way other people touch a pocket. He has never been drunk. He has never wanted to be. Some nights he sits on the stoop in sodium light, wet street, and feels something enormous and unnamed that he'd call God if the word weren't so crowded. Not churches. Just that.

The dog trots, then lurches, learning your stride.

You lift your free hand and turn it over. Pale, narrow, freckled across the knuckles, with a torn cuticle. You look up.

"Okay," you say, in his voice, light and young. "Let's see how long you're mine."