Brian Costanza

The barbershop smell is still in his nose — talc and clipper oil — and that's the whole problem. Two minutes wearing Nico Sarnowski and already the wanting is back, because nineteen means nothing to work with yet, skinny fat and dimples and a mirror behind the chair he hasn't even earned the right to be tired of. You made him flex at his own reflection once, in the two minutes you had him, and it wasn't enough, it is never enough right after, that's the trick of the wheel — it gives you a man and the man is a room you walk through in ten seconds and then you're standing in the doorway again, wanting the next room. Pittsburgh evening light coming flat through the shop's front window. You go back to the site with his phone still warm from his own pocket, thumb — his thumb, yours now — finding the page like it's muscle memory that was never yours to have. A wheel on a screen. You pay. You spin.

The television is mid-cut, some crime show throwing blue light across a dark room, and you arrive already sitting up straight, spine snapping into a posture nobody chose on purpose, a remote settling onto a couch arm under fingers that know exactly how far the armrest is without looking. Weight — more weight than you had a second ago, a wider chest, thirty-nine years of ordinary wear in the shoulders. The room smells like fabric softener and something reheated an hour ago. Somewhere down a hallway a dishwasher is running. You do not laugh at the joke on the screen. He would have laughed at the joke on the screen.

The shirt is a soft old flannel, unbuttoned over a gray tee, and it comes first, sleeve by sleeve, faded threads of a morning — his morning, hours behind you now in Pittsburgh's clock but his own end of day here, the light through the blinds already going orange when he pulled it on. Work had ended, some client's late cancellation freeing him early, and he'd stood in the closet a second deciding between this and nothing, chose this because Danielle likes him in it, likes him soft-looking on the couch instead of squared off and coach-postured the way the gym makes him stand. That's her name, arriving with the cotton against your back: Danielle, upstairs right now folding a basket of the kids' laundry, humming something. Two kids — a nine-year-old who has his slow left-eye squint when he's thinking, a six-year-old who still needs the light on. He put them to bed himself tonight because Danielle had a work call. Read them the shark book twice.

The wedding band is next, plain gold, worn soft at the edge from twelve years of barbell chalk and dish soap — and under it, faint and complicated, a whole first marriage: Carla, quicker temper, a house in Marietta he doesn't drive past anymore, no kids from that one, just four years and a way of arguing he's still, if he's honest in the dark like this, a little afraid he'll fall back into. He isn't afraid of Danielle. He is afraid of himself around Danielle sometimes, in the specific way of a man who has already broken one thing he swore he wouldn't.

The sleeve tattoo comes alive against the couch cushion, praying hands and the cross healed into the crook of his right arm eleven years now, done the same month his father's heart gave out the first time, the same year he got serious about the gym floor instead of just lifting for himself. He believes in it plainly, without needing to explain it to anyone at the gym who asks — Mass most Sundays, grace before dinner even the nights the kids won't sit still for it. His leg is already going, heel bouncing against the ottoman leg, has been since before you arrived, since before he was born probably, some engine in him that never fully cuts off even sunk into this couch in the dark, even with a blood pressure number his doctor keeps frowning at, even with the beer he had at six now empty on the side table, the last cigarette he smoked nine years behind him and still, some nights, missed. Clients call him Coach B. He corrects new hires who call him "sir." He is not a big deal to anybody outside this house and he has made an entire life out of being enough inside it, which is its own kind of enormous, the kind you don't see from a wheel spin, only from inside the flannel with the dishwasher running down the hall.

You look at your hands — his hands, thick-knuckled, a callus map of dumbbells and clipboard pens — turning the left one over so the band catches the TV light, and up past it into the dark glass of the screen where a face that isn't yours yet is learning to be, jaw set the way his never quite was mid-sitcom.

"Danielle," you call up the stairs, testing the shape of her name in his voice, "you gonna come watch this or what," and underneath it, quiet, not for her: how long, this time, before the wanting comes back for someone else's room.