Samir Haddad

You are leaving Julian Ordoñez because of the quiet. Detroit, the middle of a Tuesday, and Julian has nothing to do: no job, no one expecting him, a sandwich going stale on a counter. He is a good body. The knees work, the goatee is easy, and the beauty mark draws a glance on the bus. But yesterday his phone rang and he let it ring, and you understood you were wearing a man who had no place to be, and you could not stand it. You want somewhere to be. So you sit with his thumb over the glass, and the wheel turns, and he is gone from your hands.

Now the carpet is under your socks, and there is a window full of flat white light.

You are standing at the foot of a bed with both hands at your chest. The shirt is wrong. You feel it before you see it: one button in the wrong hole, the collar riding crooked against your throat. A tie hangs loose on either side of your neck, cool silk against your wrists. Your breath is bigger than Julian's, a belly's worth of it. You press your palm flat on your breastbone and feel ribs under softness, and a heart going fast.

The shirt cuff is stiff with starch, and it opens something that isn't yours. A morning, not this one. A woman's voice from the kitchen, laughing at him for ironing only the front. Two small children, loud. His pride at the crease. He bought this shirt for an interview, one of those jobs with a lanyard, and he wears it now for something else, something that frightens him. The fear is in the fabric. It sits behind the sternum like a swallowed stone.

The ring is cold when you close your fist. It gives you a kitchen, a night, a promise made badly and meant entirely. Under it, fainter, a different woman at a different window, someone who walked away and never quite finished leaving. He still turns his head at certain perfumes.

Your thumb finds your cuticle and picks, a habit older than you. The skin is raw there. Then the carpet again, the lamp, and the nicotine ache behind the jaw where a vape would sit. Debts lean on his shoulders like wet wool. Under the L, the trucks, the cold dawns. Your calves are strong from climbing into a cab. Your back remembers a long haul.

You let the buttons go and do them up right, the tie into a knot you know and he never did. You turn your hand over. The ring catches the window.

You look up and say, "Well. Hello, Samir."

How long does this one last? You don't know. Already something small is stirring at the back of the wanting.