Warren Alan Teague

Gerald's knees are the first thing I leave. Forty-seven years of them, and a belly that sat on the bed's edge like a second person. Four minutes in him and I had already opened his refrigerator at the hour when everyone sleeps, eaten a cold slice of something standing over the sink, and known I did not want to be short or heavy or good at code. Nothing was wrong with him. He worked. His chest hummed with the wheeze of a man who had never once been asked to run. I just stood there with the grease on his fingers and the whole dark house breathing around me, and I thought: I could be anyone, and I'm being this.

So the page is open on the glow of his phone. Pay. Spin. The wheel clicks down through its little teeth and I do not breathe, and then I am kneeling.

Carpet under both shins. A lamp to my left, warm on one cheek. The clock says 3:42 in green and I am a second into a sentence I did not start, the last of it still in my mouth like the end of a laugh. Amen. I'm half up already, one foot flat, and my body is long, so long, the floor farther away than it has ever been. Then the strength goes out of the standing and I come back down on both knees, and my forehead finds the bedspread. It is rough, a little cool, smelling of dryer sheets and someone else's hair.

The bedspread is the first key. A flash: a woman's hand smoothing this exact cloth flat at the corner, saying *you'll sleep in your clothes one of these days*, and his fondness for her goes through me like warm water, a feeling I have no right to and cannot refuse. Her name is Joanne. I know it the way you know a tooth.

The T-shirt against my back is soft with a thousand washings. Cotton, gray, a hole starting at the hem. The memory comes sleeve by sleeve. He pulls it from the drawer in the dark so as not to wake her. His arms go in. His head pushes through. He stands a moment at the bedroom door with the shirt still warm from his own body, because he has not slept, because the numbers on the six screens have been turning behind his eyes all week, a position he took, a client's money, a quarter that will not close. He thinks: *pray, you idiot, it's free.* So he kneels. He is not very good at it. He never was. He believes anyway, in a loose way, like a man who believes in a bridge he has never crossed.

My hands are pressed together under my chin. They shake. Not much, a fine steady chatter in the fingers, like a wire carrying current. I know it is old. He has hidden it in meetings by holding a pen, by folding his arms. A doctor once said a word to him, and the word is gone, only the dread of the word remains. I press the hands flatter and they go on trembling against each other.

The ring is cold. I turn it with my thumb and the room slides: a different woman, years back, a porch in the rain, her laughing at something he said, and the plain sick certainty that he let her go and has never told Joanne he still reaches for that day. Nobody knows. It sits in him like a stone in a shoe he has stopped noticing, and now it is in mine.

His body is good. Six-three and nothing to apologize for, long thighs, a back that holds straight. My knees ache dully from the carpet, a forty-eight-year ache, honest and not unkind. My jaw is smooth, shaved last evening; I touch it and feel nothing but skin. The air smells of dust on the lampshade, and of her lotion, and of the end of the night.

I lift my head. Across the bed, the window is black and gives me back a man kneeling, dark hair parted hard, green eyes wide.

I hold up my hands and turn them over. The tremor runs through them like a rumor. They are mine now. I look up into the glass.

"Okay," I say, and his voice is lower than I expected. "Okay. Let's see how long you last."