Peter Alan Hollis

You leave Imran because of the pipe.

Not the pipe itself. Two hours ago, under a sink in a house in Tempe, his hands knew what to do and yours did not. You stood there with a wrench you could not name the use of while a woman watched from the doorway. Twenty years old, five-five, forearms thick as fence posts, and the body had more skill in it than you had ever been given. It would not lend you any of it. It lent you the ache in his shoulders and the smell of flux on his knuckles, and that was all. Now he sits on the edge of a stranger's mattress in the dark, the patchy beard itching, the whole house asleep, and you open the page with the wheel on it. You pay. You do not say why, even to yourself. Something wants to be a man who could have fixed it. Something wants to be done with being shown up by a body.

The wheel turns. You have been Imran for less than a minute of your own counting, and already he is a coat you are shrugging off.

Then the dark is a different dark.

It is warm, with a ceiling fan turning slowly overhead. Your head is on a pillow that smells of someone's laundry soap, and a light is six inches from your face. Your thumb is stopped mid-scroll on glass. You are on your left side, knees drawn up, and the screen is making a cold blue shape on your cheek. Your breath comes slow and unhurried, a man's breath who was almost asleep.

Your thumb starts again. It is faster than his was. You flick past everything he stopped on, a photo, a headline, a thing he was reading about a man's knee surgery. None of it is yours.

The shirt comes first. It is soft cotton, washed gray, and it gives you a morning without asking. A drawer sticks. His wife's side of the closet is still dark and he is dressing quietly, one sleeve and then the other, left arm first, because the left has the ring and he always lets it lead. The collar is stretched where he pulls it down with two fingers when he is thinking. He is thinking about a deploy that failed. He is forty-five and tired in a way sleep does not reach.

The sheet under your calf is cool and rough. It brings the house. Posts under the floor, the tin roof ticking as it cools after the day, a red dirt yard that stains everything it touches. The glare at noon that makes him squint at the street. Their daughter learned to walk on this floor. He sat on the boards with his arms out, and the gap in his teeth showed because he could not stop grinning. Nobody ever told him to fix that gap. His wife says it is the first thing she saw.

Your free hand rises to your mouth without being asked. The thumbnail finds the edge of the nail and your teeth take it, small and neat, a habit older than the marriage. The nail is already short. The skin beside it is sore. Then something else rises, the flat taste of a tin of dip in a truck at nineteen, a mint-green lid and his father's thumb. He keeps it in a drawer in the garage so no one sees. He has never had a drink in his life and does not think about why. A glass was never going to be the thing that undid him.

His scalp is smooth against the pillow. He shaved it this evening, and the jaw too, careful, because she likes it. The ring is a little tight in the warmth. There is a dull ache low in his back from standing at the desk all day, from two monitors of code and a coffee gone cold by the keyboard. He is strong in the shoulders and soft at the waist, a good ordinary body, five foot eleven, nothing hurt that matters.

Then, unbidden, a woman who is not his wife. Another decade, a porch, her laugh, a phone number he never deleted. It comes with an ache so quiet it has no edges. He has never done anything about her. He only keeps her.

You stop the thumb. The screen dims and the room comes back.

You hold your hand up in the blue light and turn it over. The ring catches. The nail is bitten. It is a stranger's hand and it is yours, and it is warm.

You lift your eyes, and you speak, softly, so no one in the house wakes.

"All right. Let's see how long you last."

Whether it is him you mean, or you, you do not know. Somewhere the wheel is already waiting, patient, and the wanting has not come back yet.