Brett Halloran

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Kevin Cho's feet hurt already, and his shift hasn't started.

You are standing at the console in the lobby of a building you have no feeling for, in shoes that are half a size too small because the man they belong to always meant to buy new ones and never did. Two minutes ago you became him. You paid, you spun, you got a security guard in Pittsburgh, average build, a face that does nothing in particular, and you have already learned everything about him you're going to bother learning: he has a thermos of coffee going cold by the monitors, and a radio clipped to his belt that hasn't crackled once. That's it. That's the whole appeal, and it turns out the whole appeal is nothing. You did not spin thirty-two times to end up standing still. The wheel is right there on the little tablet propped against the console, page still open from before, and your leg — his leg, technically, but it answers to you now — is already bouncing under the desk, itchy, undecided, deciding.

You put your thumb down before you've finished the thought. That's usually how it goes.

—

The hand goes to the button on your chest and stops there, flat, feeling ribs that are not the ribs you had half a second ago — softer, wider, a low push of belly under the shirt where there wasn't one. The button is done up wrong. You can feel that it's wrong before you understand what wrong even means in this life, some rule this body already knows and you don't, and your fingers — his fingers, blunt, a little thick at the knuckle — undo it and do it again, and again, until it sits right, the way hands do a thing they've done four thousand mornings without asking permission from whoever's home. The tie is next, hanging loose around a collar that smells like hotel detergent, and it gets knotted in a way no closet in this life has ever seen it done, some other man's habit riding in on muscle memory that isn't yours and isn't quite his anymore either. Behind you, unmade, a bed with a suitcase gaping open on the far corner of it. Sun coming low and orange through a gap in curtains that don't quite meet.

The shirt against your back is the first key. It turns and gives you a hotel room in Tampa, different bed, same brand of anonymous carpet, and a version of this exact motion — the wrong button, the right button — done in a hurry because the wife, no, not wife, Danielle, is calling from the bathroom about whether he remembered his dad's birthday, and he hadn't, and he feels that small hot flare of failure land in the chest you're currently standing in, three years old and still warm. You didn't ask for it. It came anyway, the way all of it is going to come, through cloth and skin and the metal of a belt buckle you haven't touched yet.

His name arrives with his hands finishing the tie: Brett. Thirty-three. Sales, some regional territory that has him living out of Hyatts and Courtyards four nights out of seven, home in Miami just enough to keep the plants alive and the girlfriend, Priya, half-convinced it's temporary. It has been temporary for six years. There are kids — three of them, a fourth maybe on the way if the last conversation with Priya meant what he thinks it meant — from two women before her, and he loves them in the specific overextended way of a man who is always either about to leave for the airport or just back from it. The love is real. You feel it land somewhere under the sternum, heavy and a little guilty, the second the belt buckle gives you a flash of a birthday party at a bowling alley, a kid missing a front tooth, Brett on his knees in dress pants he'd have to explain the grass stains on later.

The girlfriend he's actually going home to is not the one that matters most, and the body seems to know this without wanting to. There's another key in the nightstand, unreachable right now but close enough to leak through anyway — a woman named Colleen, years gone, married to somebody else in Tallahassee now, and the wanting there is old and dumb and permanent, the kind that doesn't go away just because you did the smart thing. He thinks about her more than he'd say out loud to anyone, especially anyone at the church he still goes to some Sundays, where he does not drink the coffee because he never drinks anything, where he sits with his leg going under the pew like it's going now, like it always goes, some motor in him that never learned how to idle.

The tattoo on his arm — tribal, black, half under the rolled cuff — comes with a memory of a boardwalk in Fort Lauderdale, twenty-two years old, a friend now dead of something stupid and preventable, the two of them laughing at a flash sheet on a shop wall like it was the funniest thing either of them had ever seen. The ink is the last dumb thing he did before the sales job and the hotels and the slow accumulation of a life that fits him like the shoes he still hasn't replaced. His body is thick through the middle in the specific way of a man who used to play something and stopped, shoulders still wide enough to remember it, breath a little short even standing still, a throat that will start snoring the second his head hits a pillow tonight, a thing Priya has learned to sleep through and Colleen, once, teased him about mercilessly and lovingly in a bed that isn't this one.

You are done with the tie. His fingers know it's finished before you do.

—

You hold your hands up in the low hotel light, and they are not the hands you had two minutes and one life ago. Thicker. A ring's ghost-mark faint on one finger where he must take it off for flights. You turn them over once, palms up, like you're checking them for something that isn't there.

"There we go," you say, out loud, to the empty room, in a voice with a Florida flatness to it that isn't yours yet and already sort of is.

You pick up the lanyard off the dresser and put it on, and somewhere out past the curtains Miami is already sweating through the morning, and somewhere behind you, a long way behind you now, a man named Kevin Cho is standing at a console with his shift not yet started and no idea, ever, that he spent two minutes being borrowed.