Rafael Anthony Cisneros

You are at the screen, and the evening is nothing. Work is behind you, the scrolling is behind you, the apartment is quiet in the way of a Friday that has decided to be dull. You have read the threads at two in the morning for years. You have watched every film where someone wakes up in a stranger's hands. You never thought it could be bought. The page has a wheel on it. You pay. You spin. You watch it slow.

Then you are standing in rain.

It is steady and cold on your hood, and a sign above you says 3 MIN in orange. You have already stepped out from under the shelter, a beat early, and you push the hood back with a hand that is pale in patches. Water hits your face and you do not turn from it. Your eyes are shut, and the cold feels like something you have been owed.

The jacket is heavy and slick. The first thing it gives you is a morning: a kitchen, a woman's voice from the next room, saying his name the short way. Your thumb finds the ring on your left hand and turns it, and he is sitting on a bed edge at dawn, tired in a way sleep did not fix. The ring has never come off, not once, and it knows it.

Your boots are soaked through. Under them the pavement gives you a night with no drink in it. A parking lot, his hands shaking on a steering wheel, and the plain decision: no more. It has held a long time. He is proud of it and tells no one.

A key ring hangs at your belt. Under the jacket the tie sits flat on the shirt. You feel him knotting it in a bathroom mirror, the vitiligo pale along one side of his jaw, a lifetime of learning not to look at it, then learning to. The sleeve is on your right arm, ink under the cloth: bold lines, faded red. A friend's cramped garage, the needle buzzing, a grin, a bad joke about saints.

The store comes next, in flashes: pallets in the aisle before opening, the box cutter's grip, the ache in the lower back that the muscle covers but does not cure. Debt sits behind it all like a low weight, a number he does not say aloud. There is a recent ex who still matters to him, a name he will not text. He lights a candle for her sometimes anyway, and you feel the embarrassment of it.

Your shoulders are broad and your legs are strong, and the cold has not found your bones yet. Your breath comes slow. The bus is coming, and your heart knocks at the idea of it.

You lift your hands. Pale patches on the knuckles, rain running down the wrist, the ring bright and wet. You turn them over once. Then you look up, into the light.

"Huh," you say, in his voice, low and rough. "It's real."

The sign counts down. Somewhere a wheel is waiting, and you wonder how long this lasts, and when the wanting comes back.