Tanner Mockler

You are standing in Wyatt Pruitt's kitchen, and the refrigerator is humming in the dark. The headset is still on its hook by the door. Six foot six of him, and every doorframe in this apartment has already told you so. You have had him less than a minute. The cabinet over the stove was one shelf too high, and you stood there with your arm stretched out like a man reaching for a fruit that wasn't ripe. The beard is patchy under your palm and the freckles don't matter. He was a body that worked, and something sent you back anyway. It was how the whole of him sat in a chair, heavy and apologetic, as if the world were a smaller room he kept breaking things in. It was the thing you did not say aloud even to yourself. You wanted to be small and fast and sure of the floor. The phone is open on the counter. The wheel turns once, and then he is gone and you are crouched.

The air is warm. A dryer door is open and its small light is on your face, and there is a sock in your right hand, black, still hot from the drum. Fluorescent tube overhead, buzzing at the pitch of a held note. The concrete is cold through the soles. Your knees are folded tight, and your thighs and calves take it without complaint, a body built low and dense. It is the middle of the night and the building above you is asleep. Why is he down here? The question dies, because the answer is the sock.

You pull the load out in one armful. It is heat and lint and the smell of cheap detergent, and it goes into the basket. His fingers know this already. They have the first shirt by the shoulders before you decide anything, a snap, a fold, the corners squared against your forearm. Nothing like the eight crumpled shirts in the drawer upstairs, and you know that drawer. It comes up through the cotton: the shame of it, the shoving of things in. His mother folded everything in thirds. He learned it at fourteen in a kitchen in Pasadena and kept the habit the way you keep a language.

The T-shirt against your back is thin and soft at the collar, and it gives you the morning. Both arms up through it, the hem catching on his ribs. Then the jeans, stiff, and the belt notch he has worn through. A phone buzzing on a mattress. A name on it he does not open. A recent ex, a girl, her handwriting on a coffee cup in a drawer he cannot throw out. The ache is his and not yours. It sits low in the chest like a swallowed stone. He has not smoked in nine days. His hands go to his pocket for a pack that isn't there, and the craving rises in the back of the throat, dry and specific. That is his too.

The denim holds the campus lawn, the laptop warm on his knees, a paper due, grass stains, a dozen students in the sun. It holds the parking lot of a strip mall at dusk, humid as a mouth, a friend's car, a needle, a laugh. The crest on his forearm, the team he loved at sixteen. When you press your thumb on it, you feel the sting of that afternoon. The studs in his ears are cool. The ring in his nose pulls faintly when you breathe. He has about nine thousand dollars to his name, in no single place.

You set the sock on the stack. Matched. You turn your hand over under the tube light, the knuckles scraped, the nails bitten, the ink going down the wrist. You look up.

"Okay," you say, and the voice is lighter than you expected. "Okay. You'll do."

Somewhere above you the building ticks and settles. You hold the warm shirt against your chest and wonder how long, and whether the wanting will find you here or tomorrow, and whose hands these will be by then.