Tobias Reinholt

You have wanted this for as long as you can remember, and tonight it is a page with a wheel on it. The evening is nothing. The day is behind you, the scrolling has gone stale, and there is nothing on. Still, there is the site, the one you did not believe in. You pay. You spin. The wheel slows on a man you will never meet.

Then the dash glow is on your knuckles.

Ten and two. The wheel is warm and slightly tacky under a pad of skin that is not yours. The truck is drifting a foot toward the line, and your arms correct it before you have decided anything, one smooth pull, and the lane takes you back. Your hands come off the wheel and settle lower and wider, a grip that is his and not a thought of yours. Your thumb finds the stalk. The signal ticks on, for an exit that is not his. You do not know how you know that.

The wheel gives the first one. A cracked vinyl rim, a shop truck, a bay at the end of a long Sunday. Your palm remembers a torque wrench handle, the click of it, the quiet pleasure of a bolt coming to exactly the number it should. Under a raised cab he is on his back on a creeper, and a stranger's radio is playing hymns low. He hums. He always hums.

The shirt against your back is the next. The morning comes sleeve by sleeve: the navy shirt off a hook, cuffs rolled twice, left and then right. The tattoo on the inner forearm is pulled into the light. A cross and praying hands, put there at nineteen, in a church basement of a year he does not tell people about. Someone's hand, a boyfriend's, flat on his chest while he buttons. The warm bed behind him. The long hair, silver since he was a boy, pulled back with a band and then let go again because the man in the bed likes it down.

Your jeans. Your thigh aches where a knee has been on concrete all day. Your lungs know the weight of a pack a day, a thin rasp at the bottom of each breath, and a want in your fingers for a cigarette that you have not yet reached for. The moustache moves against your lip when you breathe out. The dimples are there, you can feel them, even though nothing is funny.

Another man's number sits on a phone somewhere in the dark of the cab, a recent ex, and the thought of it makes this chest go tight and soft at once. He has not deleted it. He prays about it, badly, in the shower.

Three miles, and a home you do not know. The signal keeps ticking.

You lift one hand off the wheel and turn it over. The grease sits in the creases. The cross and the praying hands rest against your pulse. Then you look up, into the glass, into the blue of his eyes.

"Hello," you say, and the voice is a stranger's voice. How long do you get this one? When does the wanting come back? You do not know.