Brandon Yee

You've been Craig Vandenberg for three minutes and you already know you're done with him.

It's the gray in the mirror of the smart watch he never takes off, catching the gym lights wrong. It's the way his knees announce themselves when he shifts weight off the squat rack — not old, not broken, just *tired* in a way you didn't sign up for and didn't feel the first ninety seconds. A client's already texted him twice about rescheduling. Somewhere in his phone is a woman who calls him "babe" in a tone you recognize as the tail end of patience. None of that is yours. None of it interests you. You didn't spin twenty-six times to end up standing in a Los Angeles Equinox doing math about somebody's cardio plan.

So you find the corner of the gym where nobody's looking, you pull up vessel.cards on Craig's cracked phone screen, and you pay, and you spin, already halfway gone before the wheel stops.

—

The couch takes your weight before you understand you have weight to give it. Dark room. Blue-white flicker crawling over a wall you didn't choose. Something loose and rectangular in your right hand, ridged buttons under two fingers. Your body — no, *his* body, and for one disorienting beat both of those are the same fact — sits up straight without you telling it to, spine unfolding off the cushions, and you set the remote down on the couch arm like you've done it ten thousand times, though this is the first time you've ever touched it.

The TV cuts to a bright frame. Whatever was funny on the way in isn't funny on the way out. You don't laugh. You just watch, a stranger sitting up very straight in a stranger's living room, wearing a stranger's stillness like a coat that fits.

Then the shirt against your back says something.

It's not words. It's cotton gone soft in fifty washes, a print across the chest you can't see but can feel the shape of — a ship, stars, kanji you don't read but he does, half-asleep, the way you read your own name. And with it: a closet door, louvered, one hinge that shrieks if you open it too fast. His hand — *your* hand, now — reaching past four shirts he doesn't wear anymore for this one, because today's stream is retro sci-fi night and the chat likes when he dresses the bit. Pulling it over his head. The migraine-bright ring light already humming behind him, waiting.

More comes; you didn't ask for it and it comes anyway. The desk rig: three monitors, a webcam eye that has watched him longer than most of his exes, a mic boom he adjusts by feel, not sight, because six years of streaming has taught these fingers exactly where six inches of foam ends up. You feel the specific ache of sitting eight hours in that chair, the small furnace of embarrassment when a raid comes in mid-sentence and he's said something dumb, the bigger, warmer thing — pride, plain pride, unimprovable — when the donation reads out a name he recognizes, someone who's watched him for four years, someone who was a kid when they started and isn't anymore.

The waistband at your stomach remembers itself too — looser than it used to be, a body that used to play travel league baseball and now mostly plays Baldur's Gate, soft in a way he makes jokes about before anyone else can. Not weak. Never weak. There's strength folded into the doughiness, shoulders that still remember throwing a ball sixty feet, forearms that can hold a monitor arm steady one-handed while he reroutes a cable with the other. A body that works fine and knows it and isn't at war with itself about it, which surprises you, coming out of Craig, who was.

The studs in both earlobes bring back a mirror, nineteen years old, his mother's face over his shoulder saying *both of them, really,* not really asking. The ring — not on a finger, you notice, but somewhere close, somewhere your fingers keep drifting to out of habit even now — brings back a courthouse, a JP, a woman in a green dress who is currently asleep two rooms away with their younger one, no wedding, they never did the wedding, just the paperwork and the two kids and six years of built-in unfussy love that never needed a party to prove itself. The girlfriend. That's the word for her, officially, and it makes him laugh sometimes, girlfriend, mother of his children, decidedly not a girl.

The remote, resting on the couch arm where you set it down: chat, tonight, probably already asking where he went. The parking lot two miles from here, dusk, a strip mall with a boba place he films outros in front of sometimes because the neon looks good on camera. Nicotine pouch dissolving under his lip right now, a taste you didn't know you were carrying until you noticed it. A show he watches with the lights off because his girlfriend likes the room dark and he likes her more than he likes seeing the screen clearly.

None of it is loud. All of it is his, and all of it, for now, is yours to be inside of.

You look down. The hand on your knee is thinner-fingered than Craig's, freckled at the knuckle, a stranger's hand doing a stranger's habitual thing — already turning a ring that isn't on it, muscle memory reaching for metal that lives in a dish by the sink tonight. You turn it over anyway, empty, watching it not find what it's looking for.

Then you lift your eyes to the dark TV, where for one second your own reflection looks back at you, and you say, to no one, to the empty room, to whatever this is going to be:

"Okay. Let's see how long you last."