Rami Haddadin

You are standing in a kitchen in Pittsburgh with a coffee going cold, and you are done with him. Mateo Whitefeather. Less than a minute, you wore him, and already you know what's wrong. It isn't the height or the beard or the hazel eyes. It's that everything fits. His mother's voice is on the phone by the toaster, and it fits, and you stand in it like a coat that was never cut for you. You wanted a thing that doesn't fit. You wanted a stranger's weight. The coffee cup is warm against his palm, the morning is gray in the window, and you open the page with the wheel on it anyway, and press.

Then nothing, and then everything at once. Dark. A mattress under your chest, too soft, sheets twisted around one shin. Your breath is ragged, caught on something, and then in one pull it goes even. One arm hangs off the bed, heavy as a sandbag, the fingers brushing carpet. Light from the street comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across your cheek. Your body is small and dense, a compact thing, and you feel it: the wire-tight thighs, the ache in the shoulders that is a day of reaching overhead. You draw the arm up. You roll onto your back. Your hands fold on your chest, a posture he has never once slept in, and you did not choose it.

The T-shirt under your fingers is soft from washing. You press the cotton and something opens that isn't yours: a hot ladder, a ceiling half-finished, conduit running overhead like ribs, and the particular pride of bending pipe so the angle is true. Your hand drifts to your jaw. Stubble, three days. Beneath it, at the neck, skin that feels different, smooth and slightly raised, and with it comes a child's memory of a boy in a school hallway saying *what's wrong with your face*, and the way Rami lifted his chin and let him look. He has been letting people look his whole life.

The sheet at your fingertips is warm on one side only. A girlfriend's side, a phone buzzing on a nightstand, her laugh. And under it a quieter drawer: the ex, a name he still types and deletes. He is twenty-two and nobody is finished with him yet. The little steel bar in your eyebrow is cool when you touch it, and you remember the afternoon he let a friend do it, laughing, a hot sting, rent due that week and the money gone to this instead. Five thousand dollars in a bank, if that. Red dirt on the porch outside, white glare, a rusted tin roof that ticks when the sun leaves it. The pillow smells of her shampoo and of him, and the two are tangled so you can't pull them apart.

Your feet, bare, find the carpet's edge. The pants are soft sweats. You remember the shirt on the hook, the dark work shirt with his name stitched over the pocket, and how he buttons it from the bottom, always, a habit from a father you can't see yet. It comes only as a hand on a button. It is enough.

You lift your hands into the streetlight and turn them over. Short nails, a nick across one knuckle, a burn-shine on the thumb. Strong, capable hands that already know what to do. You look up.

"Okay," you say, and the voice is lower and rougher than any you've had. "Okay. You're mine."

The room says nothing. Somewhere under the ribs, the wanting is quiet. You wonder how long it stays that way.