Arjun Mehta

The rope is still warm when your fingers close around it.

You didn't mean to be here. You meant — well, you're not sure what you meant, standing in your own life an hour ago, thinking his name the way you always think it, half-joke, half-ache, *God, I wish.* You didn't know there was a bell for that. You didn't know there was a shrine tucked between a nail salon and a Stop N Save that took wishes literally, that had been waiting, patient as rust, for someone to ring it wrong.

So now you're standing in a strip-mall parking lot at dusk, the string lights buzzing faintly above you, the smell of wet asphalt and marigolds and someone's incense going thin in the humid air. And you're not you. You're broad through the shoulders in a way you never are. You're 5'6" and lean and the kurta collar sits close against a throat that isn't yours, and when you open your eyes you're looking down at hands that pluck at the rope like they don't quite understand yet what has happened to them.

His hands. Arjun's hands.

You bow, because his body remembers to, muscle carrying the gesture through before you can even locate yourself inside it. You straighten. Somewhere in the boy-shaped space you're wearing there's a flicker, a held breath, gone before you can call it protest — like he stepped back from a door he didn't know was open, and you stepped through, and it will be a full day before anyone comes looking for the key.

You laugh, a little, and it comes out in a stranger's low voice. Behind you a car eases through the lot, headlights swiping gold across wet lines. Ahead of you is Arjun's whole ordinary Tuesday, waiting to be lived twice.

You spend the evening figuring him out like reading a language you've always wanted to speak. The little hoop in his left ear catches the string lights when you turn your head, and you turn your head more than you need to, just to feel it. You find his phone in his pocket — his sister's name in the recent calls, a group chat blowing up about some professor's exam curve, a photo folder embarrassingly full of a dog that isn't in Houston with him anymore. You feel a strange tenderness toward all of it, the way you might feel tenderness toward a person's handwriting.

You drive his car — careful, too careful, checking the mirrors twice — back toward the apartment his key fits, and you let yourself sit for a minute in the driveway with the engine off, hands on a steering wheel that belongs to someone you have wanted, quietly, for longer than you'd admit to his face. Not like this. You never wanted it like this. But wanting doesn't ask permission about its own shape.

The apartment smells like him — cardamom and fabric softener and the ghost of cheap cologne. You open his laptop out of a curiosity that feels almost like trespass, close it again just as fast, ashamed of your own hands. Instead you make tea in his kitchen, badly, and eat it standing at the counter, and text his mother back a "yes aunty I ate" because it feels wrong to let her worry into the void.

Near midnight you stand in front of the bathroom mirror for a long time. His brown eyes look back at you, tired, a little bloodshot, unmistakably his. You reach up — not thinking, just wanting — and touch two fingers to the small silver hoop, the closest thing to a signature this ordinary, unremarkable, entirely wanted boy has ever worn.

"Sorry," you tell the mirror, and you're not sure who you're apologizing to. Him, for the day you're borrowing. Yourself, for how much you'll miss this when it's gone. Whatever god runs the shrine, for ringing a bell that wasn't yours to ring.

You sleep in his bed like a guest who was never invited, and somewhere near dawn — you don't feel the moment it happens, it's not a wrench or a tearing, just an absence, the softest door closing — you're gone, and he's back, waking up in his own room with no memory of the parking lot, the bell, the hour he lost to a stranger's wanting.

He'll go to campus today. Laptop open on the lawn, backpack against a live oak, the same nothing-in-particular about him that makes people's eyes slide past without knowing what they missed.

You, wherever you've gone back to, will know exactly what you missed. You'll think of him doing something ordinary — squinting at a syllabus, adjusting his bag strap, laughing at something on his phone — and you'll feel the ghost-weight of a small silver hoop that was never, not for one day, actually yours to keep.