Stephen Kowalski

Nothing on tonight, so you are at the screen with the day gone flat around you, scrolling past things you will not remember. Years of threads at two in the morning, the films, the stories where someone wakes up in another man's arms and legs. You have wanted it the way some people want the sea. Then a page with a wheel, and a price small enough to be a joke. You pay it because you do not believe it. You spin.

He is on his knees at the edge of the bed, and you are too. Carpet under the kneecaps, a lamp on, a clock saying 3:17 in green. His hands are pressed loosely together, and his breath is halfway into a laugh at himself for the amen he just rushed. You are standing up in him, and then you are not. His weight sits down through the thighs and you let it, both knees back on the floor, the smile gone off his face mid-breath. Your forehead goes down to the bedspread. Cotton, cool, the smell of laundry soap.

Then the room starts giving him to you through whatever you touch.

The bedspread against your forehead: his wife tucking it hospital-square that morning, saying *you're going to wear a groove in that floor*, and him answering *somebody has to*. The warmth of it is his, and it is under the teasing.

The t-shirt across your shoulders, soft from a hundred washes. He pulled it from the drawer in the dark last night, sleeve first, right arm, then left, while the street's orange light came through the blinds. The collar's stretch at the neck is his, and so is the small pleasure of it.

The cloth over your knees, grey and loose, and the floor beneath them. His knees ache, the left worse than the right. He has been kneeling here for years, and the ache is a kind of faithfulness he is half-embarrassed by.

Your thumb finds the ring and turns it. Round and round, without being asked. Your hands do it, not you. The ring gives you the glass office with its door always open, a man at a desk saying *come in, I've got a minute*, and the tiredness of being the person everyone brings things to. Under it sits a thin, private fear that he is only a middling shepherd of his own life. That is why he prays at three in the morning, not very seriously, to a God he trusts more than himself.

Then a smaller thing, from further down. A girl he loved before his wife, a porch, a summer. He has not thought of her in months, and he did tonight, and the prayer was partly about that. You hold the ache without understanding it. It is not yours, and it fits in your chest like it is.

Down the hall, two children asleep. He knows their breathing from here, and his body does too: the shoulders drop a quarter inch.

The body underneath all of it is strong. The chest is broad, the forearms thick, the back stiff in the low place where fifty-five has settled. His heart goes steady and heavy. You breathe in and the beard moves against your collar.

You lift your head. You turn your hand over in the lamplight, the ring catching, the fingers thick and capable. You look up into the dark window and hold there.

"Okay," you say, in his low voice. "Okay. Hello."

You do not know how long he lasts. You think of the wheel, waiting somewhere, and of how soon the wanting comes back.