Ryan Gallagher

You are Patrick Doyle for less than a minute, and already you know what's wrong with him. His back aches in a narrow strip under the left shoulder blade. His brown eyes keep tracking the ceiling tiles. He is thirty-five and skinny, and the chair at his desk in New York is too big for him, as if it belongs to someone who plans to stay. You do not plan to stay. Nothing is the matter with him. He does not hold a grudge or a hunger. You just sat there with the afternoon light on his keyboard and felt your wanting come back, the way a tooth reminds you of itself. So you open the page with the wheel on it, and you pay, and you spin.

Then there is no Patrick. There is a drawer under your fingers, cold at the lip, and a sheet of paper half out of it, and your hands are already doing the thing they have done ten thousand times. They slip. One motion lands wrong, the paper catches, and you stop and do it again, slowly and correctly. The next ten come out checked, each one, on a job that has not needed checking in years.

You are standing sideways to an open glass door. Beyond it the lobby, and beyond that a doorway, worn marble steps, a rowhouse across the street with the sun flat on its black door. Philadelphia. The carpet gives under his shoes. His weight sits on the right leg, and the left knee is a little loose.

The polo is the first thing to speak. Its cotton is soft from washing, tight across the shoulders, and when the sleeve shifts against your arm you get the morning. His hands pull it off a hanger, the green one, because it is the one that is clean. He smells the collar out of habit. A woman's voice is in the next room saying *don't forget, you promised*, and he says *I know*, and he feels warm and slightly guilty and does not know why. He cannot say what he promised.

The khakis come next, rough at the thigh where the belt rides. He threads the leather through the loops in the dark, one-handed, his other hand holding a phone with a message on it. It is from the ex, the recent one, three lines long. He does not answer it. Reading it made his stomach drop, and the drop is in yours now, a small hot fall under the ribs. He loved her in a plain, tired way and he is trying not to. He picked the new girlfriend because she was kind and made no demands. He is ashamed of that. He puts the phone face down.

The badge swings against your hip. When your thumb finds the plastic edge, you are in a meeting where he says *we can move the schedule* and means it, and everyone nods, and for ten minutes he feels exactly as large as his job. The office is glass on three sides. He leaves the door open so people will come in, and they do. He is good at this. He is paid like it, and the money sits in him like a quiet floor.

The beard itches along the jaw. Your fingers know the bun at the back of his head, the elastic, the tug. His green eyes sting from a screen. Under the sting there is a taste, sweet and chemical, of a vape in a stairwell with someone who is not important, and under that a dry old thirst he gave up. Bourbon, once. He has not touched it in two years and the wanting is still there, polite, waiting at the door.

You are twenty-six. Your legs feel it. Your lungs are wide and clean, and the paper in your hand is a little warm from the sun.

You lift your right hand from the drawer and turn it over. The palm is pale and unmarked. The fingers curl when you ask them to. You look up through the glass, past the steps and the black door, and your voice comes out lower than Patrick's, easy in the throat.

"Okay. Let's see you."

You wonder how long this one holds. You wonder when the wanting will come back, and whether it will find you in him tomorrow.