Paul Hendren

You are standing in Mateo Ruiz's kitchen in the dark, and the linoleum is cold through his socks. The refrigerator hums. You have been him for under a minute and already you are tired of how he stands. He rocks onto his heels. He keeps his weight low, like a man waiting to be told no. You can still taste the gap in his teeth. Your tongue keeps finding it.

Nothing is wrong with him. That is what you would say if anyone asked. He works. His knees are fine. Twenty minutes ago you stood at the window and watched a porch light across the street click off, and you wanted, with a clean, specific hunger, to be a man whose house is quiet because he owns the quiet. Not this one, with the sales numbers glowing on the counter. You open the site. You pay. The wheel turns, and you do not say goodbye to him.

Blue light on one cheek. The pillow is cool under your ear, and the phone is six inches from your face with your thumb stopped on it, and the thumb is already moving again. It is faster and steadier than it was. It flicks past everything he stopped on. Your eyes have gone dry, because he had forgotten to blink. You blink. The room arrives around the light: a window gone black, a sheet twisted at your hip, and a breath beside you that is not yours. A woman, asleep, turned away. Your heart is slow and heavy in a chest that has done fifty years of this.

The phone is hot against your palm. Something moves in it, a listing, a kitchen with the lights too bright, and the glass under your thumb gives you a porch. Late sun. The lockbox in your hand, a cold steel cube, the code under your thumb before you can think it: his daughter's birthday, backward. You have never met her. You know her. You know she hates the way he says *sweetheart* to clients.

The sheet is linen, and it gives you a Sunday. A church with a low ceiling, a carpet the color of oatmeal, the wife's shoulder against his, and his own voice singing flat and happy. He does not doubt it. You nearly drop the phone. It is the first thing of his that has felt like a hand on your neck, and it is warm. Under the faith is the other thing, the one he keeps in the phone and not in the pew. A woman's name in a thread he never deletes, last message years old. *The one who got away.* He scrolls to it some nights. Not to write. To see that it is still there. Tonight he stopped on it. That is why the thumb stopped.

The T-shirt clings to your back, soft and washed thin, and it gives you the morning's other shirt, the one still hanging in the closet. White, the cuffs turned twice. His fingers on each small button, bottom to top, because the top one always fights him. The blazer after it, navy, the shoulder seams tight where he has thickened. The mirror in the hall. The dimples came up when he smiled at himself and he was embarrassed, as he always is, that they will not rest.

You lift the phone away. The air is dry and smells of dust and cut lemons, and the stucco courtyard outside breathes cooling heat through the screen. Your jaw is smooth. You shaved before bed, out of habit, as if the day might still need him. You bring your free hand to your mouth without deciding to, and the thumbnail is already between your teeth, ragged, tasting of salt. His hand knows this better than you. You pull it away.

You hold it up in the blue. The band is plain gold and loose at the knuckle. You turn the hand over, the palm lined, the nails bitten to the quick, the whole thing foreign and entirely yours. Beside you the wife shifts and does not wake.

You look up, past the phone, and say it quietly to the dark: "Hello, Paul."

Then you lie there with his pulse in your ears and wonder how long, whether the wanting will come back tonight or in a year, whether you will wake as him.