Wyatt Combs

You are standing in Mateo Arroyo's kitchen, in New York, with the window open and a pot going cold, when you know you are finished with him. He is nothing you could complain about. The blue eyes are fine. The beauty mark is fine. But it is Thursday night, and for three minutes you have been trying to reach the top shelf, and the shelf is a little too high, and your heel keeps coming off the floor. Five-eight. You keep reaching for things that are not there. You think of the rope, the crowd, the way a room opens in front of a tall man, and you do not say it aloud, even here, even alone. You open the page. The wheel turns. You pay.

Then there is a tap running, and the tooth-edge of a brush against your molar, and foam on your lip.

The brushing stops mid-stroke. You stand in a bathroom with a lamp burning yellow over a cracked mirror, and the floor is a long way down. Your head nearly meets the light fixture. Your breath is slow and wide. Water runs over the white basin and you are looking at nothing, exactly as he was.

You start again, on the other side, slower, working the back molars.

The tile is cold through the thin soles of old boots he did not take off. His jeans pull at the thighs, and the green shirt sits close across your shoulders. You lean on the sink to spit, and the porcelain edge under your palm gives you something not yours: a Sunday, a different sink, his mother's, a dish towel over his shoulder, and a feeling like being forgiven for something small. It goes.

The shirt: you pulled it from the pile on the chair this morning, no, he did, the sleeves tight at the biceps and he pushed his arms through them, one and then the other, the way you push a boat off a bank. He liked how it looked and would never say so. The jeans next, the belt loop that always catches his thumb. The boots he left laced because the laces fight him.

You rinse once. The cup in your hand is plastic, and under your fingers it brings the rope: one in the morning, a boy in a Carhartt jacket, and you, he, bigger than the problem, open palms, a voice that catches on the first word. Wh-where's your ID, man. The stutter lives in the hands too. They tighten when he is pushed, the fingers going rigid and then drumming his thigh, and he is ashamed of it and nobody has ever said a word.

Then the creek. The cable footbridge swaying under his weight, brown water below, green shade, a girl walking ahead of him in a yellow raincoat, turning to laugh because the bridge moves more for him than for her. Her name is there, nearly, a warm shape on the tongue. You let it stay unsaid.

Money is a low hum behind everything, a number he owes that is bigger than he is. Your knees ache with the old standing. Your back is strong. Your jaw is smooth, freshly shaved, and when you touch it with your thumb you find the deep cleft in the chin, a dimple you could rest a fingertip in.

You rinse twice. You stand the brush bristles-up, out of the grey water it has always sat in.

You look at your hands. They are enormous. You turn them over, palms rough, a wide scrape of callus at the base of each finger, and then you lift your eyes to the mirror, to a stranger's brown eyes and your own attention in them.

"Okay," you say, and his voice is low and slow, with the hills in it. "Okay. Let's see how long you last."

You do not know if it is him you mean.