Bryce Halloran

You are standing in Cody Marsziak's scrubs at his kitchen sink at three in the morning, the tap running over a mug you don't remember choosing to wash, and Cody's hands — nurse's hands, blunt-nailed, steady even half-asleep — are doing it without you. That's the thing about him you already know after two hours and twenty-two minutes: he is competent in a way you didn't earn, his body finishing tasks his mind started on some other night, on autopilot, on a shift you never worked. It's restful, wearing a man like this. It is also, you decide, a little bit nothing. You did not spin the wheel to fold towels. Somewhere under Cody's tiredness is a memory that isn't yours — Daniel Nishikawa's kitchen, the smell of star anise, a laugh you both know from the inside because six spins ago you wore the man who laughed it — and it needled you into this before you'd even thought it through: Daniel has a roommate. You were Daniel for less than a minute, left him three hours fifty-five ago, and even in that minute you felt the shape of the debt in the house like a draft under a door — somebody in that apartment who owes people money he does not have, and whose jaw you never saw unclench. You want to see it from the other side. You dry your hands on Cody's towel, open the site on Cody's phone with Cody's thumbprint, and spin.

The fork is already coming down when you arrive, and your first sensation is how light he is — not weak, just narrow, a build that runs on coffee and cigarettes and whatever's in the container, which is pasta, cold, eaten standing because sitting felt like giving up on the rest of the night before it started. The coat is still on his shoulders, damp wool, ocean-heavy air even through the window glass. Outside it's Miami dark, neon smearing on wet balcony tile two floors down, and somewhere behind that glass it should be a Saturday morning by every clock that matters to a day job — except this man's day job ended hours ago and his night has just been going and going, the particular ache of it sitting behind his eyes like sand. You set the fork down because his hand does it before you've decided to, an old habit surfacing through muscle you're only just borrowing, and you sit at the little counter stool and finish the noodles in even mouthfuls, looking at nothing in the dark window, which is what he was already doing and what his body intends to keep doing whether you're driving or not.

Then the coat. Your palm finds the lining as you shrug it the rest of the way off and it comes with a flash: a rental car, a trade show floor, this exact coat slung over a folding chair while he pitched analytics software to a man who wasn't listening, the quiet flood of shame at knowing the pitch by heart and still watching it land nowhere. His numbers are bad. Not late-on-rent bad — under, deep under, a hole with his name on it that started as a bet he was sure about and became a second bet to cover the first, evangelical guilt riding shotgun on every one of them, because his mother would know exactly which commandment covers it. He hasn't told the girlfriend the real number. He told the ex an even smaller lie about it once, months before she left, and some nights — this one — he still reaches for his phone to text her before he remembers reaching is the mistake.

The lanyard's gone, hung on a hook by the door hours ago, but your fingers find the ghost of it at your collarbone anyway, and that gives you the hotel lobby: fluorescent calm, badge swinging, small talk with a concierge who has heard forty pitches this week and forgets his by the elevator. The sleeve on his left arm, rolled to the elbow this morning without thinking, gives you the tattoo underneath it — fine geometric lines he chose at twenty-two for no reason he could defend to his father, and defended anyway, badly, at a Thanksgiving table three years back, the memory arriving with actual heat in it, actual pride under the shame.

Your jaw is already tight — his default, not a decision, clenching down on nothing the way hands clench on other men — and when you notice it you can't quite make it stop, because it isn't yours to unclench, it's a habit worn into muscle before you got here, ADHD static he manages by chewing on his own bite. Under your ribs is the particular tired of a pack a day and a body that's twenty-four and skinny and still bounces back from it every morning regardless. This is a body that runs hot with worry and cold with the ocean coming through the window glass, and you sit inside both at once, full, for one held second, on his stool, in his kitchen, wearing his debt like a second coat he never got to take off.

You look down and turn one hand over in the dim light off the balcony, and it is thin at the wrist in a way Cody's wasn't, in a way Daniel's roommate's — whoever he is, wherever he's sleeping tonight — never will be either, because you didn't go there, you came here instead, and some other night is still owed.

"Okay," you say to the window, to no one, to him. "Let's see how bad it really is."