Peter Anand Delacroix

You have sat across a video call from this man for what feels like years. Peter Delacroix: camera on, headphones around his neck, a voice that says "let me look at that" before he fixes the thing you broke. You know the sound of his chair. You know nothing else.

Mid-morning where you are, a Wednesday with nothing in it. You have scrolled until the scrolling went flat. And the thing you have always wanted, since the first film you watched twice, since the threads at two in the morning about waking up in someone else, is sitting in a browser tab. A page with a wheel on it. You pay. You do not believe it. You spin.

The dark arrives first. Then the weight: a body lying on its left side, heavy and warm, hip pressed into a mattress that sags toward the middle. A phone six inches from your face, blue light on one cheek. The thumb is stopped mid-scroll, and then it moves, because you move it. It is faster and steadier than his was, flicking past everything he had paused on. The screen blurs by. You have not blinked in a long time, and when you do it is too late and too deliberate.

The pillowcase is cool against his ear. The shirt is soft with washing, and the cotton against your back opens something.

He puts it on in the dark of a morning, in the one-room-wide house, steam already rising off the street outside the shutters. His wife is still asleep. He folds the sleeve over his wrist, left side first, because the ring catches. It is a good feeling, ordinary, almost holy. He does not wake her. He crosses himself at the kitchen window, a quick habit from a childhood of St. Anne's and his mother's rosary, and the coffee goes cold while he reads code.

The ring is against the phone's edge now. Your thumb finds it, and the memory comes whole: the day it was put on, a hot church, his father's cousin crying, his own heart going like a hammer. His mother's family were from Pune. His father's people were from here. He was always a little too much of both, and a little too short for either. That is where the nose comes in. You touch the bridge of it with a knuckle and feel the slight bend, and you get a fourteen-year-old's afternoon, a ball, a driveway, the hot taste of blood and the shame of crying in front of boys. A doctor set it crooked and said it would do.

The body is honest. The belly presses the mattress. The knees ache a dull, familiar ache. His lower back is stiff from standing at the desk all week, and his hands are strong and square, fluent on keys. His thinning hair is stiff with dye against the pillow. He quit drinking six years ago, and the want for it is still there in him, a small dry cough of a memory. Under that sits something he never told anyone: he is tired of being the one who fixes things.

Somewhere in the house, the ceiling creaks. The phone's light shivers on your face.

You turn the phone face down on the sheet. You lift your hand into the dark, turn it over, palm and knuckles, the band bright on the finger. It is heavy and warm and wholly his, and it is yours.

"Hi, Peter," you say, and his voice comes out low and a little rough, as if it had been waiting. "Hi."

Nothing in the quiet tells you how long you get to keep it. It could be a year. It could be before the next breath goes out. Already, somewhere behind the want, the wheel is turning.