Bryce Halloran

Darnell's feet ache inside somebody else's memory of standing eight hours on a lifeguard tower, even though tonight he never left the chair. That's the thing about being new in a body less than a minute — you still feel the ghost of what he did with it all day, sunscreen smell in the nose, whistle-weight against the sternum. You sit on his couch, in his kitchen light, looking at his hands — broad, freckled, a stranger's hands you have worn 394 times over now in some shape or another — and you already know you're not staying. Not because Darnell is broken. He isn't. He's fine: steady heart, decent knees for forty-one, a town that likes him. That's exactly the problem. Fine has a ceiling. You spun the wheel the first time out of hunger and you have never once spun it since out of anything else, and hunger doesn't respect a nice life freckled onto a good man in Ohio. You open the laptop, thumb the touchpad to vessel.cards out of habit more than plan, and the wheel is already spinning under your eye before you've admitted you're going to let it.

It stops.

And you are lying on your side in the dark, your cheek lit blue, a phone six inches from a face that is not the one you had ten seconds ago. Your — his — thumb is stopped mid-scroll over something that stopped mattering the instant you arrived. You feel the weight settle first: heavier through the shoulders, denser, younger, a body that has done something with itself in a gym that Darnell's never had time for. Then the thumb moves. Faster. Steadier. It flicks three times past a video he'd paused on before you got here, and somewhere behind your borrowed eyes there is a face on a screen that used to matter and now doesn't, because you are the one deciding what the thumb does.

Then it comes. Not all at once — through the phone first, glass warm from his palm, and a flash: him laughing at a comment section at two in the afternoon, camera light still glowing behind him, some viewer typing *marry me Bryce* and his wife walking past the doorway in a towel and him mouthing *later* at her, grinning, the stream chat exploding with heart emojis he'd pretend not to see. That's Bryce Halloran. Twenty-six. A desk with three monitors and a ring light he adjusts like a man trimming a hedge, RGB strips pulsing behind him in patterns his subs vote on. You feel through the phone how many hours a day this thing is in his hand — not gaming, not tonight, just this, thumb worn to it the way another man's thumb wears to a rosary.

The mattress under you gives more memory: three years of falling into this exact bed after a stream ran long, Aubrey already asleep, the blue nightlight from the kids' room down the hall bleeding under the door. You feel the specific ache of loving her still, and past her — not gone, never gone — the outline of a woman he doesn't let himself think about on purpose, a college thing that ended clean and wrong at the same time, the one his thumb still almost stops on some nights before he catches it. He never told Aubrey there's a version of missing someone that doesn't mean anything's wrong at home. He believes that. Mostly.

The shirt is against your back now and it opens on its own: this morning, dressing for a stream he almost cancelled — humidity making the studio lights feel like a held breath, tattoo ink on his forearm catching the ring light the way it always does, the black-and-gray face on his skin, a memory he doesn't look at directly, put there for a reason he tells the internet a version of and tells God the real one. His hands know a webcam angle the way a carpenter's hands know a level — the wedding band clinks the desk sometimes and he's learned to keep it out of frame or lean into it, whichever the day calls for. Two kids down the hall, small shoes by a door somewhere, a marriage that mostly works, a church he goes to less than he says he does and prays more than he lets on. Muscle he built alone in a garage at eleven at night because it was the only hour that was his. None of it dramatic. All of it his.

You feel his exhaustion sitting under the muscle like a second skeleton — a long day of being watched for money, done now, phone the last hour that belongs only to him, and even that you've taken.

You look at your hands. Tattooed, ringed, young, not aching from any tower, not freckled from any lake — new in every way that matters.

You lift your eyes to where his camera would be, if it were on, and say, out loud, to no one:

"Okay. Let's see what you've got."