Terrence Boyd

You are standing in Cody Mullins's barn at the hour when the horses are only shapes. Six minutes in him and you have already learned what he is: tall, easy, rich in a country way. He has a gelding in the end stall who leans on him like a wall. You have his arms and his enormous quiet. And you stand in the aisle with the smell of cedar shavings and wet leather and want nothing from any of it.

It is not that he is bad. He is a good coat that fits. But the horse sighed against your shoulder, and you understood that every thing the horse knows about him, you will never know, and that the wanting you came with is still sitting in you, untouched, like a coin. You do not say this to yourself. You open the page on the phone he left on the hay bale. The wheel is already turning, and you let it.

Cold wet air. Your weight comes down on a kerb that is not there, and the street tips, and your hand slaps a car's cold roof and holds. The beer is a warm sour weight behind your eyes. Your heart hammers, a short thick body's heart, working. The scuff in your left foot stops because you stop it. You stand there with the paint wet under your palm.

Then the jacket gives you things. Canvas, stiff at the cuffs, heavy with the cold. Your fingers find the pocket seam and a flash arrives that is not yours: a hook by a door, a boyfriend's laugh behind him saying *you're wearing that again*, and a warmth in his chest he is embarrassed to feel. His name is Terrence. Your thumb finds a loose thread and pulls, and the memory is the morning: the grey work shirt buttoned from the bottom, wrong, then undone and done again, the sleeve rolled over the small bad tattoo on his arm. He was twelve drinks from not caring about it. The earplugs on their blue cord swing against your collarbone, and the line comes back whole: yellow plastic spooling out of the die, hours of it, the hum that lives in his teeth, the long gold thread that never ends and never needs him.

Your teeth find a thumbnail, and you realize it is already between them. He does this. The nail is bitten down to the pink, and the taste of it is old and salty and his. It brings the church basement, folding chairs, a hymn he sang loud and a silence he kept, and the ex whose name he does not say in the car, and the money he owes, a number that sits under everything he does like a floor. Your boots are heavy, your belly warm under the jacket, your thighs strong from standing eight hours. Your cheeks are rough with a trimmed beard, and freckles you cannot feel but he always could.

You lift your hands into the streetlight. Brown, thick-fingered, the nails ragged. You turn them over slowly. Then you lift your eyes.

"Hey," you say, and it comes out low and hoarse, a voice somebody else grew. "Hello, Terrence."

Somewhere, the wheel is already waiting. You wonder how long before the coin starts wanting again.