Trevor Dunleavy

The body I am leaving has a bad knee, and that is most of why. Luis Garrity's left knee told me about every stair in the school this morning. His reading glasses sat in his shirt pocket, and his students' essays sat in a stack on the kitchen table, waiting for the red pen he never got tired of. It was a decent body, but I had it for less than a minute before the wheel was open on the screen. I sat in his kitchen in El Paso with the light still gray and I did not want a man who could be tired in all the right places. I wanted one who was strong and had no history with pain. I wanted to find out what a stranger's afternoon felt like from inside. I paid, and I spun.

Then I am on a bench under a rack, forearms on my knees. The air smells of rubber mats and old iron. A bottle sweats on the concrete by my shoe. My breath has been going out through my teeth, and I stop it a minute early. My hands go to the bar two inches wider than they have gone all year, and I grind the reps up slow. My face does none of what a last rep does.

The hoodie comes first. Its cuffs are worn soft, and the cotton at the wrists gives me his hands pulling it off a hook. It is gray, three winters old, and bought on sale because he was behind on everything. Under it is a damp black T-shirt, and the damp brings back a locker room and a man saying *you're not a quitter, you just look like one*. That was a manager, years ago. He took it as a joke and laughed with the others.

The bar's knurling bites my palms and gives me the lot. A dealership lot is full of balloons tied to the mirrors, and a blue short-sleeved shirt hangs ironed on a doorknob. He knots the tie in a dark window and gets it wrong twice. His lanyard is cold on his collarbone. He sells cars to people who look at him and see a boy. He is underwater on a loan of his own, deep enough that he does the numbers at red lights. There is no one to call about it.

The hoop in his left ear is a small warm weight. A friend in a parking lot did it with a needle at nineteen, and they were both laughing. He doesn't drink anymore, and I feel that decision in the way his hand moves past the sweating bottle. It is water, only water. His vape sits in the hoodie pocket like a small hard coin, and his thumb knows it before I do. There is a patchy beard that won't fill in, and his fingers go to it and then stop on their own. Under all of it, his shoulders are hot and strong, and his thighs are shaking in a way that feels good. He is twenty-two, and nothing in him has been used up yet.

I set the bar in the rack. It rings, and I look at my hands. They are broad and chalked, and they are mine for now. I turn them over once.

I look up into the dark mirror across the rack and say, "Well. Hello."

I don't know how long this one lasts. I don't know when the wanting comes back, or whether I am still him tomorrow.