Bryce Holloway

You are sitting on the edge of Colton Freeburg's bed in a Miami condo that isn't yours, in the middle of the night, and the thing you notice first is how little there is to notice. Heavy in the gut. Dimples that mean nothing when there's no one to smile at. Three minutes ago you paid to become an insurance agent who owns a nice enough couch and a mediocre television, and already the wanting is back, that itch behind the sternum that has nothing to do with him and everything to do with the shape of the wheel itself, spinning, always spinning, somewhere else, someone else. You haven't even learned this man's coffee order. You don't want to. Your thumb finds the site again on his phone, the login still warm from whoever set it up — you, three minutes ago, a stranger to yourself already — and you spin.

The breath changes first. Ragged, then even, one clean transition like a tape splicing over, and the arm that was hanging off the mattress lifts itself, folds against a chest that is thinner than the one you just left, a chest with less give to it, softer in a different way — not the gut but the whole frame, unfinished-looking, a body that skipped a meal it needed. Streetlight comes through a gap in curtains that are not the curtains you knew a half-second ago. Your — his — hands settle at his sternum in a posture that does not belong to him, though you have no way of knowing that yet except that it feels wrong the way a bed feels wrong in a hotel: fine, just not yours.

Then the sheets. Cheap cotton, softened by a hundred washes, and it comes up through your back like heat off asphalt — an apartment off Beltway 8, the smell of drywall dust that never fully leaves a man who breathes it forty hours a week, and under that, coffee left too long on a warmer in a site trailer. His name arrives with the smell: Bryce. Bryce Holloway, thirty-two, and the sheets know him better than you do, because the sheets were on the bed the night his ex-girlfriend threw a phone at the wall two feet from where you're lying now, and the crack is still there behind the nightstand, papered over with nothing, just left, the way you leave things when patching them means admitting they happened.

The pillow gives you his daughter's laugh — four years old, gap-toothed, riding his shoulders through a job site on a Saturday when the crew wasn't in, pointing at the crane like it was a dinosaur. The other side of the bed, cool and untouched, gives you the girlfriend he has now, careful and a little tired of being careful, six months in and still learning which of his silences mean tired and which mean something else. And under both of those, quieter, the ex — not the phone-throwing night, but before it, a whole year of before it, the two of them cheap-drunk on a balcony that doesn't exist anymore because the building got sold, and you feel, not your feeling but his, folded into the mattress like a stain that dry-cleaned out but never really left, that he has not entirely stopped reaching for her in the dark, some nights, before he remembers.

His jaw is smooth under your palm when your hand drifts there without you telling it to — shaved that morning, before the sun, because the crew starts at six and Bryce Holloway has not once in four years let them see him unshaven, and the memory of the razor comes with it, cold water, a bathroom light that flickers, his own face in a mirror looking older than thirty-two and not minding it much. His hair is wrong under your other hand, too long, over the ears, down the neck, and that comes with an embarrassed half-laugh of a memory — his girlfriend's fingers in it two nights ago, telling him he looked like a rock star from 1998, and him telling her he'd get it cut when the framing crew finished the east wing, which is a lie he tells himself every two weeks.

The nails give you the most, oddly — his teeth against the ragged edge of his own thumbnail, a habit from a foreman's job where the worry never really clocks out, where a beam a half-inch off can mean a man's hand under it later, and the two kids and the girlfriend and the mortgage on the condo the ex kept are all riding on him getting it right, every day, again. The calluses on his palm remember steel and lumber and cold coffee cups gripped too hard in trailers before dawn meetings. His feet, bare against the sheet, know the particular ache of steel-toe boots worn twelve hours a day for a decade, an ache that isn't there right now and that the body still expects, the way a phantom expects a limb.

You sit up in him. The room smells like a man who works with his hands and loves two kids he doesn't see enough and hasn't slept right in months, not since her, not since the new one either, really, if he's honest, and he mostly isn't, out loud.

You look at your hands — his hands, blunt-fingered, nails bitten to the quick, a paper cut healing on one knuckle from a punch list he doesn't remember signing.

"Still me," you say to the dark room, to nobody, and you don't know yet if that's true, or for how long, or whether by morning — his morning, six a.m., the crew waiting on the east wing — you'll still want to be.