Vikram Nair

You are in Andre Pruitt's kitchen in Detroit, in the grey before the day, and the coffee is going cold in his hand. It is a good body. It is young, the knees don't speak, and the beard comes in the way you like. You had him for three minutes before the site was open in front of you again, and the cursor was already on the wheel. You don't say why, not even to yourself. It was a small thing. A sentence his mother left on the machine, and the way your throat did not close around it. You wanted a man who would have no one to disappoint. You put the cup down and press the button.

The brush stops mid-stroke.

Foam on the lip. Tap running thin against the porcelain. Your arm is up, the elbow bent, the bristles resting against a molar on the left, and the whole house is asleep around you. Nobody is coming. The bathroom light is a warm, tired yellow, and the window over the toilet is black glass.

You start brushing again, on the other side, slower, working the back molars. The mint is sharp enough to water your eyes.

The shirt comes first. It is soft grey cotton, washed too many times, and it hangs off the belly and the thin shoulders, and when the fabric shifts against your back you are suddenly standing in a closet in the dark, feeling for it so you won't wake her. His hand knows the drawer by the sound. A girlfriend, asleep, her breath slow. He has been doing this for years: moving through his own home like a man returning something he borrowed.

The cold edge of the sink under your left palm. The laminate has a chip. He has put his weight on this chip a thousand nights, and with it comes a Saturday: a small girl on the closed toilet lid, swinging her heels, watching him shave. She tells him he has a forehead like a doorway. He laughs so hard he nicks himself. That feeling goes through your chest like warm water, and it isn't yours, and you let it pass through anyway.

The tile is cold under bare feet. The soles are tender, the arches tired from a day of standing and walking glass-walled hallways with the door open, saying yes to people. Eleven years of it. The back aches low and dull, a manager's back, and the stomach sits soft over the waistband, and you feel the ordinary shame of it that is his, not yours.

You rinse. Twice. You spit the grey water down and stand the brush bristles-up in the cup, out of the puddle it has always sat in.

Then the fingers. Your right thumb and forefinger are rubbing at nothing, turning something, and there is a faint bare dent at the base of the third finger. A ring that is not there. A name rises with it, a woman who got away, a long time ago, a lit window in a parking lot and him not going in. He has never told anyone. He still turns the absence at night.

You lift your left arm and look at it. The cross, the praying hands, blue-black on the inner forearm. It means nothing to him now, a decision made at twenty and kept the way you keep a bad address. You turn your hand over. The palm is broad and dry, the nails clean, and it is yours.

You look up into the mirror, at the receding temples and the brown, steady eyes.

"Hello, Vikram," you say, quietly.

The water is still running. You don't know how long this one lasts, or when the wanting comes back, or whether you will be him when the light changes.