Siosaia Taufa

You are leaving Adrián Soto, and he has been yours for less than a minute. The kitchen in Philadelphia is dark. The fridge hums. His green eyes show in the black window over the sink, and the short beard, and the nose somebody once broke for him. The chair is warm under you. His phone lies face-up with the site already open, and the wheel sits there in its little frame, waiting.

He is fine. That is the trouble. He is five-eight and sound, and he smells of the car wash, of chemical cherry and wet rubber. Nothing is wrong with him. But it was too easy to stand in the hallway and know where the light switch was. I want the part where I do not know. Your thumb finds the wheel. It turns, and the little ticks go by like a stick along a fence.

Then you are walking.

The street is wet and the air is thick as a hand over your mouth. A strip of closed shops runs along your right, the grates down, a fluorescent tube buzzing in the awning. Your jacket hangs open. Your left shoe scuffs the concrete, then your right. You are very drunk and you are very tall, and the kerb comes up at you out of the dark. Your foot goes off it. Your palm slaps the roof of a parked car, cold and beaded with rain. You catch yourself, and the scuff stops.

The shirt is thin and damp against your spine, and it gives you the first thing. A woman's laugh in a doorway, and her saying *you always do this*, and the heat of being the one who stays too long. A recent ex. His chest remembers her before his head does. He wore this shirt to her door last week and left it on.

Your thumb is sore on something small in your left hand. A pen, clicking. The click is older than she is. He did it in the pew as a boy, in a white church with plain windows, while a minister read slowly and his mother's elbow found his ribs. He has done it through every sermon and every estimate since. You make it stop. It starts again by itself.

The jacket collar scrapes your neck. Mowing season rises out of it: green dust, the stink of two-stroke fuel, a trailer of machines at a curb in the heat. His forearms know the pull-cord before you do. Ink runs black along them, and it came with a cousin and a bad joke and a needle, and he is not sorry. Under the drink his body is enormous and steady, a worked thing, thighs and shoulders and a low old ache in the back of the knee. His nose is a little off true. When he breathes through it you hear it whistle faintly. Somebody's elbow did that, in a yard, years ago, and he laughed through the blood.

Money lives in his pockets. Not the cash, the shape of it: a number in a bank he checks on slow nights, never spent, put by like a held breath. He wants a truck of his own. He wants to be asked something by someone who stays.

The corner arrives. Home is right. Your boots, his boots, turn left.

You lift your hand into the streetlight and turn it over. It is wide and scarred across the knuckles, and the ink climbs the wrist. It is not mine. It is mine. You look up, and the road is empty and shining.

"Well," you say, low and slow in a voice like gravel being poured. "Hello, big man."

The pen clicks once in your fist. You do not know how long this one lasts, or when the wanting will come back.