initiate.

The train does the last of the thinking for him. Fluorescent light. A shoulder that is not his. The plastic bag between his shoes keeps tapping the same ankle, a stupid little metronome. He bought something on the way home because the hardware-store window was lit and the office still had its hooks in his neck. A small padlock. Brass. For a shed he does not have. By the time the doors open on his stop he has already forgotten it, which is how you know it will matter.

Home is the same lamp as always. He puts the bag by the shoes. He puts water in the kettle and does not wait for it. The notebook is still on the table from the morning, lid half-closed like a mouth that did not finish a sentence. He should eat. He should not sit down. He sits down. The office day is supposed to be over. The chair disagrees.

This time the destination is not the compiler. A forum. Blue on black. Threads that smell like rooms he has only visited in his head. He tells himself he is only looking. Looking is how it always starts, and looking is already a posture.

Her profile does not shout. That is the first wrongness. No throne. No tribute. A still of a woman in a doorway, zip to the throat, copper in the hair, a mouth that has already decided. The bio is one word, or three, or a URL that is not a shop. He reads it twice because his brain keeps trying to add a price.

He initiates. Of course he does. A sentence that wants to be casual and comes out like a throat-clear. Hi. Something about the still. Something about the writing. He has no idea what he is in for, which is the last honest minute he will have for a while.

She does not answer at once. The kettle clicks off in the other room and he does not get up. The bag by the shoes makes no sound. He refreshes. He hates that he refreshes. He is forty-something and a notebook and a forgotten padlock and he is refreshing a woman in a doorway like a boy. The wait gets into his cock before she types a word. That is not romance. That is occupancy.

When she answers it is not a conversation. It is a temperature. Sit. He laughs, once, at the screen, because he is already sitting, and then the laugh dies because he understands she did not mean the chair he is in. She meant the other one. The one that makes sitting into a personality. He feels himself get hard in his work trousers like an idiot and he puts his palms on the table as if the wood had asked.

Closer, then: he tells her about the day. He does not tell her about the lock. He tells her he is tired. She does not comfort him. She asks whether the trousers are still on. He says yes. She says good, for now. The for now lands in him like a hand on the back of the neck. He could close the lid. He does not. He could eat. He does not. He could remember the bag. He remembers it, suddenly, all at once, brass in plastic, and the knowledge is filthy without anyone having touched him.

She does not ask for the padlock. That is the meanness. He sits there with a shed-lock he bought for no shed, throbbing into cheap trousers, waiting for a woman who is still dressed in a photograph to tell him what the evening is. She types one more line. Not yet. Then nothing. The lamp is a cheap circle. The forum is a quiet room. He is still at the notebook. He has initiated. He has no idea. He will put the brass on the table himself before she ever asks. The conversation did not start when he hit send. It started in the hardware-store window, under office light, when he was still pretending he was only buying something stupid.