Wade Pruett

You are standing in Aaron Kleinman's kitchen, and the coffee has gone cold in your hand. You made it twenty minutes ago and have not drunk it. The window over the sink is going from black to gray, and a bus sighs at the corner. Twenty-six years old, five-five, thin as a rail, and you can feel every rib against the polo he left on the chair. He sells jeans to people who never look at him. The cleft in his chin catches on the razor. Blue eyes in the dark glass of the window, and nothing behind them you want.

He was fine. You were not bored, exactly. It is only that he cannot lift anything. This morning you tried the heavy box of stock in the back, the one that had been waiting, and your arms shook and gave. Your arms. You had wanted to know what it is to carry a thing that matters, and he is built to fold sweaters. So the phone is in your hand, and the page with the wheel is already open, and your thumb is already coming down.

It turns. You do not feel it turn.

Dark. Heat in the dark, and a weight pressing you flat. You are face-down in sheets that smell of sweat and detergent, one arm hanging off the edge of a mattress, your breath ragged, catching, a snore dragged halfway out of you. Streetlight lies in a thin stripe through a gap in the curtains. Then your breath goes even, all at once, and the arm draws itself up. You roll onto your back. Your hands fold on your chest. He has never slept like this in his life, and you do not know that yet.

Your eyes open on a ceiling you have never seen.

The weight is the first thing. You are heavy in a way Aaron never was, dense, a sack of wet sand with the sand packed tight and every grain of it muscle. Your shoulders ache pleasantly, the ache of a day's work still sitting in the meat. Your lower back has a hot coin pressed into it. Your calves hum. You breathe in and the chest goes out farther than you expected, and you have to stop and enjoy it.

The sheet is under your palms. Cotton, thin, washed so many times it feels like paper. A flash comes with it, not yours: a woman's laugh, a cheap fitted sheet they bought together, and the way she snapped it over the corner of a bed in a different apartment. His chest tightens, and so does yours. Then it's gone.

You lift your left hand. The ring finger has a pale band around it, tan against tan, the skin there softer than the rest. You rub your thumb across the place where a ring used to be, and the memory comes up whole. A courthouse hallway. A pen on a chain. The ring in his pocket for three days afterward, turning over and over against his keys, until he put it in a coffee can in a closet and shut the door on it. Your throat closes. It is his throat, and it has done this before.

You sit up. The shirt clings to your back, damp, a gray cotton tee gone soft. Fabric against the skin between your shoulder blades, and the morning arrives sleeve by sleeve. He had put it on yesterday at five-fifteen, in the dark, standing in the closet doorway because the light would wake no one and he did it anyway. Left arm first. He always does the left first. He smoothed the hem down over the belt and checked his face in the mirror without meaning to. Two fingers touched the mole high on his cheek, and then the beard along the jaw, the way you touch a thing to be sure it's still there. You do it now. Your fingers are on your own face, and you did not tell them to.

Bare feet find the carpet. It is rough and slightly gritty, and the memory is a child's: a small girl on this floor, and a smaller one, building something out of couch cushions, and himself on his knees saying be careful, be careful, because the cushions were his and the apartment was not. Two girls. His heart gets heavy and warm at once. You didn't ask for that. It's in the carpet.

You reach for the nightstand and your hand finds a Bible with a cracked spine, the cover soft as a glove. Something rises: a folding chair in a church that used to be a bank, a pastor with a loud voice, and him in the back row praying the words he didn't know how to say to anyone else. Please. Just please. He wasn't asking for anything specific. He was asking to be someone who could stand it.

The room leans toward morning. On your calf, where the blanket has slid, you can feel the tattoo more than see it: script, a name and a date, the skin there faintly raised if you press. You press. A needle, a buzzing, a man saying hold still. Her name. Her birthday. The older girl. He paid for it with money he did not have.

You turn your hands over in the thin light. They are broad and scarred across the knuckles, the nails cut square, the palms hard as saddle leather. They know how to take a couch by its frame and walk it down a staircase, how to tilt and pivot and lower. You close them and feel what they could carry. The thing you wanted, the thing Aaron could not give you, is lying here in your lap like a gift.

You wonder how long it lasts. The wanting is already stirring, a small dry thing at the back of the mouth, and you don't know when it will wake all the way. An hour. A year. You look up.

"All right," you say, in a voice gone low and rough and not yours. "Let's see what you can do."