Wayne Teague

You were Bilal Haddou for less than a minute, and already you know why you are leaving him. His body is a good one, and that is the trouble. It is twenty-six, with a short beard and a drafting-table patience, and it wakes at the first tap on the glass of the night. Standing in his kitchen in the dark, you drank a glass of water and felt nothing in the throat at all, nothing like wanting. He had a clean sleeping house, a lease and a lanyard. He had no appetite you could use, so you ran out of him the way you run out of a room. Your thumb is already on the wheel.

It turns. There is no road, no breath held, no drop.

The couch has you. Gray light moves on your face, and the show is mid-joke. Your thumb rests on a remote and your leg is bouncing on its own, a little motor you did not start. Someone on the screen says something, and a laugh sits in this chest, ready, belonging to the man who just left. The scene cuts to a bright frame. You sit up straight and set the remote on the couch arm. The laugh does not come, and you let it not come.

Then the things he is touching begin to talk.

The shirt is thin from washing, soft as skin at the collar. A flash comes in his feeling, not yours: a concert, years ago, a Saturday, his wife laughing in a parking lot because the shirt was too big on him and he bought it anyway. He was thirty and loud. The cotton still smells faintly of her detergent, then of him, sour and sweet with beer.

The plaid flannel pants pull at the knee. Morning, or rather the evening he got them: a Christmas, a daughter small enough to stand on his feet while he walked her across the kitchen. He had worn them all day and told no one he was happy. It sits in his chest like a swallowed coin.

His fingers find the ring and turn it. Plain gold, loose in winter, tight in July. The ring gives you a night on a porch, a gravel road ticking as it cooled, and the water tower far off with its red light blinking. He had said something to her there, badly, and she said yes anyway. You feel the shame and the luck of it as one thing.

Your tongue goes to the gap in the front of his mouth. It knows the place. It finds the empty spot and the memory comes as a hard sound: a fall, a tailgate, a boy's dare, and a long year of keeping his lips closed over it in photographs. Under the couch cushion, the pouch tin presses your hip. Your hand goes there without being asked. Under the lip it would burn, and he would feel his shoulders drop. On the table, the cans stand in their rows, and the weight of the count is all in his wrists: too many, again, and tomorrow the headset at seven, a cubicle row, a stranger's voice in his ear saying the word unacceptable. He answers it with his teeth shut. He says, I understand your frustration. He means nothing by it and does it for nine hours.

The couch cushion under his thighs is worn to the shape of him. His back aches low and left, a forty-one-year-old ache, and his knees creak as the leg bounces. His heels are cold on the boards. Somewhere in the house a child is asleep, and you know it without a picture. He listens for her even now, the way you listen for a pot about to boil. It is the strongest thing in him, stronger than the beer.

You lift your hands into the screen light and turn them over. The wedding band catches blue. They are broad, nicked and dry, and the knuckles are swollen. They are not Bilal's and not yours.

You look up, toward the dark window, and you say, softly, "Okay. You're mine now."

The bright frame fades. The leg keeps bouncing. You wonder how long you will have this one, and when the wanting will come for you.