Paul Delaronde

You are Liam Gorecki, and you have been him for ten minutes, and already you are bored of the way he stands. It is the middle of the night, a Tuesday, and the dorm hall hums with other people's sleep. His roommate's breath saws across the dark. You are at the window with his thin wrists on the sill, and you can't make them do anything you want. Twenty-four, skinny, red beard, green eyes in the glass. All of it works. Nothing in it is wrong.

That is the trouble. Nothing is hard, and nothing is missing. You are standing in a perfectly good body, wanting, and you can't say what for. So you sit at the laptop with the wheel already glowing and you let his finger come down.

The wheel turns. Then you are face-down in unmade sheets.

Your breath is ragged, a snore caught halfway, and you drag it even in a single pull. One arm hangs off the mattress and the blood has gone heavy in it. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across the carpet. Your body rolls on its own, the arm drawing itself up, and your hands fold on your chest. Some part of you notices that this is not how he sleeps. It is how you do it.

The pillowcase smells of him, and that is the first key. A flash comes: a screen door, a small girl on the porch of a triple-decker, shouting that he's late. He is, because the drop line at the last house ran long. The feeling arrives before the picture does, a warm, tired, guilty love.

The sheet is cool under your palms, the cotton worn thin, and the thinness opens something else. Washing it alone. Two sets of sheets bought once, and one now. The empty side of the mattress holds the shape of a woman who left politely. Your thumb finds the ring finger and the band's absence there, a pale band of skin that still feels like a missing tooth. You can feel him not looking at it.

The shirt is damp at the collar. You slept in your work polo, the navy one. The morning flares up through the cloth, sleeve by sleeve: right arm in, then left, the cuff snug on a thick bicep, the belly pushing the hem out, tucked in, tugged flat. Then the heavy leather belt with the pouches, the pliers, the strippers, the fish tape. Then boots, laced with the left foot up on the ladder's bottom rung. A toothpick comes out of his pocket and into the corner of his mouth, because his hands want something to do. You find your jaw working on nothing.

Your body knows things you don't. The shoulders ache from forty-eight years and twenty-five of ladders, but they are strong, and the grip in these hands is a vise. Your knees complain. Your gut sits warm and solid, a weight you can feel breathe. When you smile, even in the dark, the dimples cut deep. You feel them without trying. His daughter has them too.

You open your eyes. You lift your hands in the streetlight and turn them over, the wide palms and the thick fingers, and the pale line where the ring was.

You look up, past them.

"Okay," you say, in a low voice that isn't yours. "Okay. Hello, Paul."

The street is silent. You wonder how long he lasts, and when the wanting comes back.