Rafael Ibarra

You are leaving Travis Pruitt because of the sound his wife's sister made on the stairs. That was last night, in the part of him that was still being handled by you. The Navy kept him at the dock until his knees ached, and you had liked that ache for a day. Then the dad bod, the unibrow, and the hands that knew knots turned into a house you had been let into by mistake. Somebody down the hall coughed in her sleep and called him by a name you didn't answer to.

So you stand in his kitchen in Atlanta with the refrigerator humming, and you open the page. The wheel is already turning, and he has been you for less than a minute.

Then there is carpet under both knees, and the dark has a lamp in it.

The lamp is low and the clock says 3:17 in red. Your hands are pressed together on the edge of a bed, and the amen is still in your mouth, half a laugh in it. The laugh is his. You were rising, and your weight is wrong for rising. It is lighter, narrower, with no belly to push against, and your knees fold you back down. The bedspread meets your forehead, cool, a little rough.

The t-shirt is the first thing that talks. Navy cotton, washed thin at the collar, and it slides on your shoulder blades. A morning comes up under it. He pulled it from the drawer in the dark so he wouldn't wake her, one sleeve and then the other, and he was grinning at nothing, because an interview had gone well and the praying was mostly thanks. He is between jobs. It sits in his chest like a swallowed stone, and under it he was hopeful, and that hope reaches you and it is not yours.

Your wedding band is under your thumb. Turn it. A wife, a porch, a Tuesday-night argument about money that ended in laughing. Two children asleep behind two doors, and you can feel exactly how far the doors are. Under that, the other woman: a name that arrives without a face, the one who got away, a summer, a bridge, a song through a truck window. He keeps her in a small room and doesn't visit. Now you have visited, and it is like finding a letter in a coat you just bought.

The carpet is warm under your toes. Cigar smoke is in the curtains, one a week on the back step, and the whiskey he allows himself most nights is somewhere in your throat as a memory of burn. Your scalp prickles. You can feel the buzz-cut stubble against the bedspread, and your jaw is smooth where he shaved it that afternoon. The mole on your cheek itches, and your hand knows exactly where to scratch.

Outside there is a honky-tonk alley, a neon bleed on the window, a guitar somewhere that doesn't know it is three in the morning. He liked that sound. He prayed under it.

You lift your head, and the room holds still. You look at your hands, turn the left one over, and the ring catches the lamp.

"Okay," you say, in his voice, quietly. "Hi."

The house is asleep. Nothing in it is yours yet. You wonder how long this one lasts, and when the wanting starts again.