Andrés Molina

The apartment in Dallas smells like microwave rice and printer toner, and Derek's recliner has molded itself to a body that isn't yours, not really, even after however many weeks it's been. You've been him long enough to know the help desk job is fine, the dad bod is comfortable in a way that surprised you, the silence of the place is total. Nothing sent you back except the particular flatness of a Wednesday with nothing in it. You finish a can of something cheap, feel the gray in Derek's hair when you rake a hand through it out of a habit that isn't yours yet, and open the laptop. The wheel is already loaded, like it's been waiting. You spin because Derek, this afternoon, is not enough, and because 977 times has taught you that the feeling passes the moment you land somewhere new.

The tongs are still in your hand when it happens — his hand — mid-plate, a strip of pork belly hovering over a smear of something dark and sweet, and the motion that has run itself ten thousand times stutters. You set the piece down wrong, an inch off center, and something in you — some new, correcting attention — makes you pick it up and place it again, exactly, slow and deliberate as a man doing algebra in his head. The next ticket comes and you plate it like you've never plated anything before, checking the angle of the garnish, the wipe of the rim, checking everything, because you don't yet know this is a thing his hands used to do without you.

The kitchen exhales heat and cumin and scorched sugar around you. Behind you a voice calls out a table number in the specific bark of a man three tickets deep, and it means nothing to you and everything to him, the way the whole line means something to him — this too-bright fluorescent tube, the pass window with L.A. sun cutting gold through the gap by the door, palms visible for a second before someone's back blocks it. The apron strings at your waist are tied in a knot you didn't tie, and that's when it starts coming, the way it always comes: through what he's wearing, what he's touching, never handed over, only leaking.

The apron ties — his own hands doing this exact knot this morning, in the stucco courtyard, sun already flat and hot at ten, humming something without meaning to, the smell of drier sheets on the shirt because his girlfriend does the laundry on Tuesdays now, has for four months, and it still catches him a little, the tenderness of finding his own clothes folded by someone else's hands. The chef's coat against your shoulders brings the rasp of the industrial iron at the laundry service, brings a flash of putting it on backstage-fast before a Saturday rush, brings, underneath that, an older memory the fabric doesn't want to let go of — a different girl, the one before, sliding this same shirt off him in her apartment on Alvarado, laughing at the flour on his collarbone, and the ugly quiet months after when that ended and he came to work hollowed out and cut his hand on a mandoline because his attention wasn't anywhere. The scar isn't there — the facts don't give you one — but the memory of almost having one is, sharp and specific, gone before you can hold it.

The tongs know things his mind barely bothered to store: the weight of a hotel pan full of braised meat, the give of a knife through fat, muscle memory built over three years of six-day weeks, a body that got strong from lifting cases of oil and forty-quart pots rather than any gym. Freckles itch faintly in the heat, the ones he's had opinions about his whole life, self-conscious in middle school, proud of them by nineteen because she — the ex, not the current one — used to trace them with a fingertip like a connect-the-dots and tell him they were the best thing about his face. Your jaw is smooth, freshly shaved this morning in a mirror clouded with shower steam, a ritual he does every day without stubble ever getting the chance to argue back.

The ink on his forearm is warm under the kitchen lights and it comes through skin-deep and total: a name, his mother's, and a date under it — the day she died, three years back, the reason he doesn't go home for a while every spring, the reason he prays badly and rarely but still crosses himself before service some nights out of something that isn't quite habit and isn't quite faith either, just hers, left in him. There's a beer after every shift, sometimes four, sometimes more than that, a thing his girlfriend has started to mention gently and he has started to deflect. His nails are bitten to the quick, unconsciously, and even now — even you, new in him — feel the ridge of one at the tip of a finger and want, suddenly and specifically, to put it in his mouth.

The line calls another ticket. Onions, garlic, the low fat-hiss of the flattop, someone laughing two stations down at a joke you didn't hear the start of, and all of it is his, all of it arriving in pieces too fast to sort, none of it yours to keep straight yet.

You look down at the hand holding the tongs — brown, freckled at the wrist where his sleeve is rolled, a thin white line of scar tissue you didn't put there and can't place — and you turn it over slowly, like it might answer back.

"Who's cooking," you say, out loud, to nobody, in a voice that isn't Derek's anymore and isn't quite settled into being anyone's, "who's cooking this."