Anthony Deluca

Colton's five minutes are almost up before they even start.

You're standing in his kitchenette in a lifeguard's off-brand flip-flops, the linoleum cold and gritty under your borrowed feet, and it's already wrong. The whistle-tan line at his neck. The smell of pool chemical baked into his skin no shower gets out. Thirty-four and average and small, 5'9" of him, and you have been in bigger men, better men, and you know within the five minutes what this one is: a body that clocks in and clocks out and does not surprise you. Somewhere behind his eyes there was a whole life — a scar through the eyebrow that came from somewhere, a stand chair, a summer or forty of them — and you didn't even wait for it to surface. You reached for the site on his phone with his own thumbprint before his coffee finished dripping.

That's the plain truth of it, if you said it out loud, which you don't: you got bored in five minutes flat. So you spin.

The wheel turns and the highway comes up out of nowhere, three miles of dark road already dissolving into dash glow, and his hands are on it — ten and two, tendons standing under the tattooed skin — and then they're yours. The car drifts a foot toward the line and pulls itself straight, smooth as breathing, the way a body corrects when it's been driven ten thousand times down this same stretch. Your hands — his hands — come off the wheel and resettle lower, wider, more like how you like to hold one, and without meaning to you reach over and thumb the turn signal for an exit that isn't this man's exit at all. Late. Saturday night late, the kind of late where a body's alone with the road and thinks nothing of it.

The shirt is what gets you first — plain black cotton, sweat-cooled against your back where it met the seat, and it opens like a door: a gym that smelled like rubber matting and Icy Hot, fluorescent tubes buzzing over a green practice mat, a row of teenage boys in singlets watching him demonstrate a sprawl with his knees popping audibly on the way down. Coach D, they call him, not Anthony, hardly ever Anthony except from his mother on the phone on Sundays. There's pride folded into that gym smell, real and uncomplicated, the only clean thing you've found in him yet.

The steering wheel gives you more, sweat-polished leather worn smooth in two spots from years of this same grip, and here comes an argument in a parking lot outside a Publix, a girl — Marisol, her name arrives with her voice already sharp in it — telling him he loves those boys on the mat more than he'll ever love a person who talks back. She's not wrong and some part of him already knew it before she said it, which is why the memory carries a bruise on it he hasn't let close. Three weeks gone. He still checks whether she's read his texts, though he'd swear on the eyebrow barbell that he doesn't.

The barbell itself, when your face — his face — brushes it adjusting in a phantom mirror instinct, brings a flash of a shop in Wynwood, nineteen years old, a friend daring him, the bite of the needle almost a relief after a bad tournament loss that afternoon. And the ink up both forearms answers when your eyes drop to them without you asking them to: the black-and-gray woman's face on the left, his grandmother, dead before he was old enough to really know her, done from the one photograph the family has; and the psalm script under it that he can recite better drunk than sober, which tells you something about how often that happens. Cigars on the balcony, the pastel paint gone salt-dull at the rail, ice in a glass sweating onto his knee while the ocean haze eats the horizon — that's most nights lately, more than he'd admit to his mother, more than he'd admit to himself except in the specific, private arithmetic of counting how many it takes before the argument in the Publix parking lot stops replaying.

The hoodie he had on earlier at practice — you don't have it now, you have the shirt, but the memory of dressing this morning comes anyway, threaded backward through the same skin: pulling the gray hoodie over his head in the dark so he wouldn't wake nobody, because there's nobody there to wake anymore, hooking the whistle-lanyard around his neck out of habit before he'd even had coffee, checking the mirror for one second too long at the eyebrow piercing like it might have moved overnight. Twenty-three, and his knuckles ache faintly, permanently, from the cracking he does without noticing — you feel the tendon-memory of it now, an itch to pop them sitting right under your borrowed skin, waiting.

The wheel is warm. The dash glow paints the same knuckles that want cracking. Three miles from a home that is one bedroom, one balcony, one framed photo of a grandmother's face he wears twice on his own arm.

You look down at his hands on the wheel, turning one over in the low light like you're checking it's real.

"Not my exit," you say, to no one, in his voice, and you leave the signal blinking anyway.