Terrence Amadi Okafor

You have been on the page for an hour, and none of it was worth the hour. The middle of a Monday. A dull afternoon, a screen, a thread you have read before. Under it all the old wish, the one you have carried since you were small enough to be embarrassed by it: to be somebody else, wholly, from the inside. Films, stories, strangers at two in the morning swapping what-ifs. Nobody ever sold it. This page does. A wheel, a button, a price. You do not believe it. You press anyway.

The wheel ticks past names you will never know. It stops.

Dusk is in the window, blue and going. A pendant lamp throws warm light on a table. Your right hand is around a water glass, cold and sweating, and the first thing you have is the weight of his breath, held halfway into the start of a sentence. Across from you someone waits, a dark shape at the table's edge. The bread basket sits untouched between the settings. The air smells of broth and scorched sesame and the damp wool of a jacket.

You are mid-word. You let the word go. It is his mouth and it moves.

The jacket first. Zip teeth against your wrist, navy cotton gone soft at the cuffs, and the memory comes up through the fabric as his, not yours: a dorm hallway, the zipper stuck, his mother's voice on speaker saying *wear the good one, you only get one first impression*. He chose this one. He ironed the T-shirt under it and then felt foolish for ironing it. He stood at the mirror and practiced a smile.

The glass, under your palm. He has been holding it for ten minutes because it gives his hand a job. A flash comes up through it: a church basement folding chair, a paper cup of lukewarm water, a boy of nine reciting a verse in front of everyone and forgetting the end. The shame of that is still in him, old and exact. It is the same shame as tonight's, only larger.

The table's edge presses your forearms. Formica, cool. Through it comes a night in a library carrel, a laptop warm on his knees, a scholarship email that he read nine times. Under that sits the quieter thing nobody knows: he practices conversations in the shower, both parts, and in them he is funny.

The body underneath is steady. Twenty-three, and the shoulders carry no ache yet, only a stiff left knee from sitting too long folded under the chair. His stubble itches along the jaw. His pulse is slow now, as if whoever was nervous has stepped out. The hand around the glass knows how to hold it without crushing it. It has held a great many things carefully.

You finish the sentence. The words come out loud, wide, a voice that carries to the next table. Heads turn. The glass turns a quarter under your fingers and stays there.

You lift your hand off it and look. Brown skin, the nails clipped short, a faint crease across the knuckle from gripping. You turn it over. It is warm. It is yours.

You look up, past the stranger across from you, and say, "Sorry. I'm here now."

And underneath it, quietly, the question you cannot put down: how long. An hour, a year, or the next time the wanting comes back and your thumb goes looking for the button.