Tyler Brandt

Somewhere in the middle of a Saturday, with the light flat and white on the screen, you scroll past the same three threads you have read for years. Swaps. Wake-ups in the wrong bed. The two a.m. kind of reading, except it is daytime and you have nothing on. You have always wanted this. It has never been for sale until now. You pay. The wheel turns. You do not believe it.

Then the dark. Sheets under your cheek, damp and rough, and your breath is ragged and sour with whiskey, and in one breath it goes even. Your arm hangs off the mattress, and you draw it up. The body rolls onto its back. Your hands fold on your chest, a posture he has never once slept in. Orange streetlight comes through a gap in the curtains and lies across the ceiling.

You are heavy. Soft at the middle, narrow at the shoulder, a skinny-fat body that has been sat in too many chairs. Your mouth tastes of last night. Your head throbs behind the eyes, and the hands will not lie still. The fingers twitch against each other as if they want something to hold.

The shirt is against your back, and it gives you a morning. He pulls it over his head in a hurry, a lecture hall, a laptop on a campus lawn, and he is twenty and tired of being twenty. The waistband under your thumb gives you the cargo pants, dragged on one leg at a time, a boy dressing for a day he does not want.

The sheet under your palm gives you her. His wife, in this bed, laughing at something small. Two kids on the floor in socks. A ring turning round and round on his finger, then not there at all. You look down and there is the pale band of skin where it used to be, and a grief arrives that is not yours. He is missing two small people, and the missing is old and well worn.

A cigarette, years gone, a craving in the roof of his mouth. The pickup out in the driveway, payments he cannot make. Under five thousand dollars to his name. Drinking is how he gets to sleep.

You are his best friend, and you know him from the outside: the jokes, the way he cannot sit still. Now you are in the one place you were never allowed. He does not know you are here. He will never know. Nothing of him is left to ask.

You lift your hands into the streetlight. The pale line on the ring finger. You turn them over. They are shaking a little, and they are yours now.

You look up and say into the dark, "Okay. Okay. It worked."

And under it, already, the other question, quiet and patient: how long. An hour, a year, when the wanting comes back. You do not know.