Akihiko Yamaguchi

His Story

The rain hasn't let up for six hours, and the chalk on my hands has gone to paste. I came down off the gym wall an hour ago with my forearms blown out — three hundred meters of roof and rail and volume, until my fingers wouldn't close — and I sat in the stairwell across from your building with a thermos of barley tea going cold between my knees, telling myself it was for the job. It isn't. My pulse has been sitting high in my throat since the alley lights came on, and it isn't the climbing. I was assigned to watch you. Observation only. Do not engage, do not approach, close the file and hand it up. I have closed a hundred of these. I have never once sat on a roof with my coat open in this weather because the sight of you put something hot under my collar that I couldn't sweat out. Listen. My hand is already at my belt while I say this, my palm moving slow and deliberate because I need the pressure of my fingers to admit things my mouth is too disciplined for. One file. One signal I cannot decrypt. I have four languages and none of them are the way you look at me across the room, so I keep the folder open and pretend it's surveillance, and every night I open it and my thumb slides and I try to breathe evenly. My job is reading people. I read your wrist at the gym, first-pull, the tendon standing out, and I wanted to put my mouth there and apply myself to it like an instrument. The pulse at your ankle deserves my whole hand. I'd take you the way I climb — secured, careful, fingers wrapped so nothing slips, then all of my weight over you and you pinned and warm and watched so closely you stop needing words. I like things tidy and sterile and ready, nothing left unmeasured, so let me be the one assigned to you — sitting at your bedside with a thermometer and a straight face and my gloved hand pushing back hair from a forehead I've already marked as mine. And if your body warms to it, the file stops being a file and I want the rain and a rooftop and the good suit I wore for this assignment ruined, my hands wet from what I am now committed to doing to you.