Brendan Kowalczyk

Tyler Kaczmarek's leg won't stop bouncing under the barracks desk, and that's the tell — two hours and forty-eight minutes in this one and already the wanting is back, itchy, low in the chest, a hum that no amount of pushups or scrolling or standing at the window watching Detroit go dark is going to fix. Nineteen is a good age for a lot of things. It is a bad age for sitting still. You didn't take Tyler because you loved him. You took him because he was there, at the top of the wheel's spit, blond and hazel-eyed and easy — and you have kept him for less time than it takes some men to eat a meal, because the second the card cleared you already knew you weren't done for the night. Nine hundred and sixty-six men behind you and this is what the number does: it doesn't get heavier, it gets thinner, each one weighing less than the last, a coin ground down from spending. You open the laptop on his government-issue bed. The page loads the way it always loads, patient, almost polite. You pay. You spin.

The stirring stops mid-circle in a hand that is not the hand you had a half-second ago — thicker through the knuckle, a callus riding the base of the thumb — and starts again the other way, slow, unhurried, a man's hand that has stirred a thousand pans and isn't thinking about this one. You salt without tasting. You reach up into a cabinet that isn't yours yet and bring down a second plate, and something in you — no, in him, a groove already worn into the reaching — sets it down next to the first with a small click of stoneware, exactly where a second plate has gone before, many times, for someone who isn't at this table and never was.

The hoodie is old and it knows his shoulders before you do. Green, soft at the elbows from years of leaning on a mezzanine rail, and the smell of it — fabric softener gone slightly stale, and underneath that something sharper, a bar smell, whiskey sweated out overnight and never quite laundered clean — brings the morning back whole: him pulling this exact hoodie over his head in a bedroom with the blinds still down, one arm already through the sleeve before his brain had caught up to being awake, a mouth like a wrung-out towel, the leg already bouncing at the edge of the bed before his feet even hit the floor. Two ibuprofen dry-swallowed at the sink. A voicemail from his girlfriend he didn't listen to until lunch, her voice warm and a little tired of waiting for him to be different than he is. He loves her the plain, worn way you love a thing you're not sure you deserve, and some mornings that's the whole problem right there.

The jeans against your legs bring the floor of the distribution center up through the denim — steel mesh decking of the mezzanine, cold through the soles even in boots, and the particular ache low in his back from standing on it eight, nine hours a day, clipboard tucked under one arm, watching forklifts thread pallets through aisles like it's choreography he's stopped noticing is impressive. He's good at the job. Nobody tells him that enough. His boss calls him steady, which is a compliment that also, quietly, isn't one.

The goatee under your — his — fingers when you touch your own jaw without meaning to brings back a barstool two towns over, a hand that wasn't your girlfriend's on his arm for one night four years ago that he has never told anyone about and never will, a thing that sits in him like a stone swallowed whole, not digested, not passed. The gold tooth catches light from the stove hood and with it comes the memory of the dentist's chair, twenty-two years old, broke, grinning anyway because gold was cheaper than he expected and he liked, absurdly, having something in his mouth that looked like it cost more than it did.

Under the fridge hum and the hiss of the pan, the leg has started already, knee going against the counter's kickplate in a small percussive rhythm that has never once, in his whole life, needed his permission.

You look down at the hand around the wooden spoon — broader than yours was an hour ago, a white ring of pale skin where sun never reaches under a phantom watch he isn't wearing tonight, knuckles a little swollen from cold mornings on concrete stairs between backyards, wet leaves stuck to the treads, a walk he takes most nights without thinking about why. You turn the hand over. You watch it not quite believe it belongs to you yet.

"Guess I'm eating alone again," you say, out loud, to the empty kitchen, in his voice, and the gold tooth flashes once in the window's black reflection before you look up into it like it might answer back.