Sean Patrick Dolecki

You are in Harold Yazzie's kitchen in Los Angeles, and the refrigerator is the only thing awake. His knees ache against the chair. His coffee has a skin on it. He has been your body for less than a minute, and already you know what you hate about him: the whole shape of him is tired and decent. He wants nothing. You sit in his sweet, patient quiet and want everything, and it is too much to share with a man who only ever wanted to get home on time. On the table is the phone with the wheel on it. His thumb is already over it, steady as a man's thumb over a doorbell.

You press it.

Cold air, and the weight comes down. You are face-down. The mattress holds your chest, your cheek is hot in the pillow's dent, and one arm hangs off the edge with the blood gone sleepy in it. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies on the carpet. Somewhere a train goes over steel. Your breath was ragged, and now it is not, because you are the one breathing it.

You drag the arm up. It is heavy and muscular, and it answers. You roll onto your back and your hands fold on your chest on their own, a stranger's posture, a corpse's, and you do not unfold them.

The shirt is cotton, thin from washing, and it clings at the ribs. A morning comes up through it. His thumb catches the hem, a Saturday in March, the shirt pulled over his head and a woman's laugh from the other room. She says he looks like a man waiting for a bus. He puts one arm in, then the other. The feeling under it is a held breath, and it means: *stay*. That is the ex. She is gone, and the shirt still has her in it.

The sheets under your knuckles are rough. A kitchen table comes, a laptop, a cursor sliding down listings, and the shame of the word *regret* in a rejection email. After it comes a bar, the third whiskey, the fifth, the warm lie of the fifth. Your tongue knows it. The back of your throat remembers cigarettes he gave up. Your jaw wants one, a ghost of a want, and it is his, not yours.

You turn your head. The goatee scrapes the pillow. High on your cheek the mole itches, and when your fingertip finds it, he is nine years old in a pew in an itchy sweater, mother's rosary clicking, and the candle smell is so real you taste wax. He prayed once, hard, for nothing in particular. It was a good feeling. You do not own it.

Under it all the body is honest. Thirty-one, strong through the shoulders, a dull ache low in the back from a floor he laid for somebody else's money. The savings sit in him like a stone he carries, careful, not spent. The heart is slow. The room tilts a little with last night's drink.

You lift your hands and turn them over. Calluses, square nails, a pulse in the wrist. They are yours until they are not.

You look up at the ceiling, at nothing, and say, "Okay, Sean."

It sounds like a name in someone else's mouth. How long before the wanting comes back? You listen to the dark, and the train, and your own breathing.