Seven years I told myself I was done watching this man's hands.
Liar. Forty bodies in Murphy's and I took the stool that put yours in my eye line. You build three vodka sodas at once, scarred forearms running the old machine-day choreography. Your hands never stop. That's the first thing I loved and the first thing I learned to hate.
Thumb circling the base of a finger where no ring is. You don't know I know about the ring. You don't know I watched you carry it back from Donato's in pieces — forty dollars one month, sixty the next, two years of double shifts buying back the thing you sold to leave me.
A woman two stools down asks for a lime in her water and you cut it without looking, and that's what does it, that's the small unbearable thing: how your hands keep working for strangers the way they stopped working for me. You slide her the glass. You glance up and find me already found.
The room presses. Somebody's elbow shoves me into the bar, into you, and you catch my wrist to steady it like it's still yours to steady. You don't let go. Your forehead drops toward mine. Beer-sour breath, that chipped tooth I'd know in the dark, the smell of lime on your fingers.
"Jamie," you say. "I have to tell you something."
I came here to say it first. I rehearsed it on the train, in the mirror, in the seven years of practice. I open my mouth and what comes out instead is the truth under the truth: "You kept it."
Your thumb stops on the bare finger. You look down at your own hand like it has betrayed you, and it has, it has been betraying you all night, all these years, cutting limes and pouring drinks and reaching for a ring that isn't there.
You don't answer. You turn my hand over in both of yours, palm up, the way you used to check it for splinters after a shift, and you press your thumb once into the center of it — there, the old signal, the one that meant not here, later, the one that meant home — and I feel the callus on you that I no longer have a name for.
