Sanjay Rathore

You are leaving Nikhil Parekh because of his tongue. Four minutes in him, and you have already found it: it keeps going to the place where a molar used to be. Nothing is wrong with him. It is the smallness of him, a man who delivers boxes, whose whole night is a van seat and a door code. The Las Vegas dark sits on the kitchen window, everyone in the house asleep, and you are standing in his freckled hands with the laptop lit and the wheel already turning. You do not say why. You tell yourself it is the beard, that it itches. It is not the beard.

The wheel clicks and slows.

Hold music, the first bar again, bright and cheap, and your shoulder drops a phone into your hand. You are standing. You are in a kitchen with the damp light of a morning that has not decided anything yet. Your thumb has a pen against it. The pen has stopped on the second digit of a number written on an envelope, and your hand does not know to go on.

Your weight comes down through the heels of canvas shoes. It is heavy and compact. Everything sits low in you, in the thighs, the back, the forearms like rope. You are forty-four and you feel every year of it as a pull in the left knee, and none of it as weakness.

Your teeth part and the air finds a gap at the front of them. Your tongue goes to it at once, like a habit. His.

The shirt against your back is soft with washing, and it gives you the morning. A hook on a door, the dark T-shirt taken down because the other was in the wash, the left sleeve pulled over a tattoo of three chevrons and a rocker, and his thumb smoothing the cotton flat over it, a small vanity. Then the keys on the counter, the cold edge of the ring under your fingertips: a house with black railings, rain on them, a door that sticks in damp weather, and a woman's laugh in the hallway that is gone now. Her coat left on the peg for three weeks and he has not moved it. It hurts in a place that is not the knee.

The pen is in your fingers. His thumbnail, you find, is bitten to the quick, and the rest are no better. The sting of it brings a barrack roof at night, a cigarette cupped against the wind, a sergeant's voice saying his name the way you say a name you trust. Then the vape in the pocket against his hip, the plastic warm from his leg, and a Saturday, a big one, a bathroom floor and a laughing boy, three children asleep in the next rooms. Three. Their weight is in his chest like stones he is glad of. You did not ask for that. Nobody asks.

The envelope is a bill, or a form, something with money in it. He is doing well and he is tired of being on hold for it.

You look at your hand. Brown, broad, the knuckles scarred pale where nothing is scarred in the facts but the skin is his. You turn it over. The nail beds are raw. Then you lift your eyes to the window glass, to the gap in the teeth.

"Right," you say, in a voice with gravel in it and London under the gravel. "Let's see how long you last."

Already something in you is asking the other question, the one that is always there: how long this one will hold, and when the wanting will come back.