Owen Prescott

You are in Reginald Thorne's good shoes, in the corridor outside a conference room on a Tuesday morning, and the thing you cannot do is stop hearing the ice. Someone inside is pouring water from a pitcher, and each cube cracks against glass, and you know that sound. You have wanted nothing for forty seconds except to be somewhere it is not.

He is a fine body. Forty-seven, easy knees, a stomach that has begun to arrive before the rest of him. You have been him for less than a minute and already the quarterly review is waiting behind that door, and your hand, his hand, is wet on the folder. He is good at this. You are not here for this. Whatever it is that sends you back, you do not say it aloud, not even in his throat. You open the phone. The page is there, the wheel, patient as a held door.

You pay. You spin.

Foam. Mint, sharp and cold, and a bristle dragging across your gum. The brush stops mid-stroke in your mouth and you are standing, barefoot, on tile that is cool and slightly gritty. Water runs in the sink. Your eyes are on nothing, and then they are on the mirror, and a long tall boy looks back, mole high on his cheek, foam on his lip.

You start brushing again, on the other side, slower, working the back molars, because your own wanting has to move something.

The shirt comes first. Thin cotton, soft from washing, hanging off the points of your shoulders. It gives you last night: a dark room, the shirt pulled over his head and dropped, a laptop's blue light, job listings scrolling past until the words stopped meaning anything. He slept in it. The cuffs of the grey sweatpants are frayed where his heels catch them, and they give you a drawstring knotted twice, and a mother's voice on a phone saying eat something, and the shame of saying he had.

Your right hand grips the cold porcelain lip of the sink. The tattoo is on that arm, a woman's face in black and gray, a rose below her chin, and the skin there tingles faintly when you flex. It gives you a chair, a needle's hot scratch, a man named Dev talking about shading while he worked. Your grandmother's face, young, from a photograph in a drawer. He cried a little, in the chair, and was embarrassed, and Dev pretended not to see.

The nose ring is a cold pinprick when your tongue worries the air near it. The floor mat under your toes is rough, and it hands you a small flat in a house of other people's houses, rent due on the fifth, his account holding less than a man should say out loud. Faith comes through the soap smell, faintly: a small shrine on a shelf in his mother's house, incense, a bowl of water, his hands folded there as a child, not believing and not able to stop.

He is tall and thin. Your knees ache from bending to the faucet, the long spine complaining, and underneath it twenty-three years of simple strength, nothing broken, nothing spent. Your left hand has already risen and is touching your face, the cheek, the mole, the smooth jaw, without being asked.

You rinse twice. You stand the brush bristles-up, out of the grey water it has always sat in. You turn the tap off. The quiet is enormous.

You look at your hands. The long fingers turn over, and the woman on your forearm looks up at you.

"Hello," you say, and the voice is lighter than you expected. "All right. You'll do."

Somewhere the page is still open, the wheel waiting. You do not know how long this lasts, or when the wanting comes back.