Brian Halloway

The bay smells like brake dust and the coffee going cold on the tool chest, and your knuckles — Rajesh's knuckles, split at the second one from yesterday's timing belt — ache in a way that has nothing to do with you. You've been him fifty-one seconds. That's the thing nobody tells you about the wheel until you've spun it seven hundred times: the new one is loudest right when it's most unearned, when you haven't done a single thing to deserve the weight of him yet, and already you're bored of the smell of his shop. Fifty-one seconds and you're thinking about the ceiling fan, the stool, the wife who calls at noon, none of it yours to keep. You wipe your hand on a rag that isn't yours either and you're already gone, already reaching for the card in your coat that shouldn't still be a coat, for the site, for the wheel, because the wanting doesn't wait for a decent interval. It never has. Seven hundred ninety-two men and the itch shows up around the one-minute mark, every time, like clockwork you built yourself.

You spin.

You are standing at a ledge of pale wood, and the light through it is airport light, flat and endless, and your hand is already moving toward the trackpad — and it stutters. Two fingers where the gesture calls for three. You correct, slow, like a man relearning his own signature, and the next ten scrolls come out careful, deliberate, checked, on hands that have not needed checking in years. Somewhere below the window a jet is turning onto a taxiway. There's a rolling bag against your calf, upright, patient, the handle still warm from a grip that was his and now isn't.

The shirt is what opens first — light blue, the collar a little damp already at the back of the neck, and it comes with the smell of a hotel laundry service and, underneath that, a closet in a house with a cul-de-sac out front, heavy Atlanta air pressing on the windows even through the AC. Ironing board out at six-fifteen. Bree — the girlfriend, not the ex, though the ex comes too, unbidden, a name (Danielle) and a fight about a christening he skipped for a client dinner — Bree had laid the shirt over the door for him because he'd fallen asleep on the flight in from three days of workshops in Charlotte and forgotten to hang anything. He remembers the weight of his daughter on his hip that morning, four years old, sticky-handed, saying *Daddy plane again?* like an accusation. He remembers loving her so much it embarrassed him, the specific shame of a man who measures his life in status tiers and spreadsheet tabs and still cries a little at gate goodbyes.

The vest next, buttons found by feel — his fingers know this, two hooks, done a thousand mornings, the body underneath it thirty-two and holding up fine except for the low ache behind the left knee from a half-marathon he ran once to prove something to nobody. The beard comes back as a smell, aftershave applied to a jaw he's kept short and neat since a partner told him it read "more senior," and he laughed about it to Bree and did it anyway, and there's something in that — the whole shape of him is a man doing what's asked in a slightly different order than he'd have chosen himself.

The AirPod against your ear crackles with the tail end of a call already ended, a colleague's voice cut off mid-sentence about Q3 deliverables, and under that a whole year comes up at once: the promotion he didn't get, the one he did, the gap in his front teeth he used to hate as a kid until a girl in college told him it was the first thing she noticed about his smile and meant it kindly. His shoes, when you feel them through the socks, remember standing lines — TSA, boarding, the loyalty desk — a life measured in queues he's stopped resenting because resenting them changed nothing.

Twenty-five to seventy-five thousand dollars sits somewhere in an account he checks more than he'd admit. No drink in three years, quit clean after a wedding he doesn't like to think about. No cigarettes in longer. No god, no chapel, nothing he prays to, only spreadsheets and a kid's laugh and a woman's voice on the phone saying *safe flight* like it still matters to say.

You look down. The hand on the trackpad is pale, dusted with light hair at the wrist, a hand that has never in its life touched a socket wrench, and you turn it over slow, watching it not be Rajesh's, watching the gap show when your mouth opens on its own halfway to a smile you didn't order.

"Sorry — lost my train of thought there," you say, to no one, to the lounge, to the window, and you don't know yet if that's true or if it's the last thing that'll ever come out of him in his own voice.