Samer Haddad

You are leaving Tanner Voss because of a door. It is the one in the hallway of his Denver house, the one he never fixed, and tonight you stood at it for ten minutes with his big contractor's hand flat on the wood, listening to a house full of sleepers. His girl is in there, and his mother's dog. You could feel the blond stubble on his jaw and the white streak he was so proud of, and none of it was yours. Five minutes you wore him before the wanting came back. Five minutes, and he could not do the one thing you came for. He could not be afraid. His whole body was built for a Tuesday. You open the page and the wheel is already turning, and you let go of Tanner Voss like a rail.

Cold tile. Your weight is lower, wider, settled over your heels. A phone is held under your chin, its torch burning white across your lower face, and in the glass a man with dark curls is looking back, and the mouth is saying sixty-one, sixty-two. The voice is gone from joking. Your voice now. His. The torch holds level in your hand, steady as a table.

Then the touching starts.

The hoodie first, its cotton gone soft at the cuffs, a zipper tooth biting your wrist. It gives you a morning: the same hoodie pulled off a hook by the door of a small apartment, his left arm in before the right because the right sleeve is the one he leaves for last, the one with the woman's face on it. He is thinking of her while he does it. Not the girl in bed. The older face, inked in gray, the ex, the one he never covered. He pulls the sleeve down over her like a courtesy.

The phone is warm in your fingers and gives you the séance. A friend's kitchen, candles in saucers, everybody laughing, a dare. He did not believe in anything; he never has. He said fine, three a.m., the bathroom mirror, and he would film it, and he would be the one to laugh. Under that, the tiredness of a man who stands all day. Your calves burn. Your lower back has a hot wire in it from ten hours at the prep table, quartering onions, dicing carrots into a hundred even cubes, the knife going before he decides.

Your right hand has found his pocket. A lighter. The thumb flips the wheel, shut, open, shut, with no instruction from you. Memory comes up through the metal: his father's shop, a cheap gas lighter given away at a corner store, a boy of nine learning the trick for nobody. A daughter's small hand, years later, reaching for it and his hand lifting it away, gentle, gone high. She is five. She laughs at the flame she is never allowed.

The bath mat gives you the cold; the sink's edge, under your left palm, gives you the apartment, rent due, under five thousand dollars in the world and the L going over the roof so that the glass hums. You know, because the floor knows it, that the train is coming.

You turn the phone off. The dark has a smell of toothpaste and old steam. You lift your right hand into what light is left, and you turn it over, wrist, knuckles, the thick fingers. The portrait on the forearm stares back out of the dark, a stranger to you as well.

You look up into the mirror at the hazel eyes and say, quietly, "Okay. Hello."

The train goes over. You wonder how long before the wanting comes, and whether you will still be him when the sun is up.