Bryce Talamantes

Harjot's flat has a smell you have learned in a day and twenty-three hours: green soap, ink, the ozone tang of the autoclave cooling in the back room. You are sitting on his stool at four in the morning, the light box still glowing over a stencil nobody will use, and you already know you are not staying. It's not the ache in his shoulder from bending over strangers' skin twelve hours a day. It's not even that his hands, when you hold them up, are somebody else's steady, careful hands, good at a thing you did not earn. It's that this life is small and finished-feeling, a life with a lease and a dog next door and a mother who calls on Sundays, and some worse, quieter part of you has already priced it against everything you have not been yet. Twenty-two men behind you, and this one bores you the way a held breath starts to. You open the laptop. The wheel is already spinning before you've decided anything, which is its own kind of answer.

The card lands and you are standing.

Cold air on your face that was not there a second ago — a coat, the room narrow, a spoon-fork stopped an inch from your mouth. The container is warm through the plastic. You feel the specific ache of legs that have run drills for three hours that same day, an ache Harjot's body never had, and it is almost sweet, the difference. The fork goes down on the counter with a small sound. You did not tell it to.

The coat comes off your shoulders — his shoulders — because his hands know to shrug it there, onto the chair, without being asked, and that's the first flash: this exact motion, a hundred nights, the locker room smell of it still in the collar, Gatorade and turf and the cold spray they use on knees. You sit at the little table because his body sits there, an old habit older than you, and eats the rest of the container in even mouthful, mouthful, mouthful, and you are only riding along while he — while it — finishes what he started, and the window in front of you gives back nothing but a dark rectangle and your own reflection with hair the color of a struck match gone to ash.

The fork, though — the fork in your hand is the key. You feel his grip on it and something opens: a locker room after practice, steam off the showers, a towel snapped somewhere behind him, somebody's bad joke about his hair, and him laughing without looking up from lacing his shoes, twenty-one and easy in his own skin in a way you have not felt in any of the twenty-three men you've been. The earring you didn't notice you were wearing until your head turns and it swings — that's a memory too, a dare from an ex, the recent one, her mouth against his ear in a bar bathroom, laughing, go on then, and him doing it because she asked and because it made his mother wince which was half the point at the time.

The forearm. You look down without meaning to and there it is, the small ugly tattoo, lines gone soft with age and bad ink, and it comes up through the skin like heat: nineteen years old, a shop in Bushwick that smelled like burnt sugar, a friend who is barely a friend anymore holding his other hand steady, both of them a little drunk on something that wasn't quite courage. He'd told his girlfriend it meant something. It doesn't. He has hated it in every mirror since, the way you hate a haircut, mildly, permanently.

The jeans against your legs remember themselves being put on — his hands, sleep-slow, pulling them up in a bedroom with the shade still down, a phone buzzing with a name he didn't answer yet, his daughter's face as a lock screen, round-cheeked, maybe two, the weight of her sleeping on his chest once at four in the morning exactly like this one, him wide awake and afraid to move. His current girlfriend's laugh through the bathroom door, toothbrush going, some easy domestic sound that isn't quite love yet but is trying to be. The jacket zipper under your chin remembers the cold outside the practice facility, remembers him pinching a nicotine pouch into his cheek at the curb before getting in the car, a small private ritual, nobody's business.

None of it is much. That's the strange mercy of him — no scandal in the hands, no violence in the walk, just a kid with silver hair he maybe regrets a little too, dating somebody, loving a baby he doesn't see enough, carrying a tattoo like a scar he gave himself on purpose. Evangelical mother somewhere praying for him on Sundays whether he asks her to or not. A body that runs well and eats standing up because sitting down to eat alone in a kitchen this quiet feels like something he hasn't figured out yet how to want.

The container is empty. You set it down. Your hand — his hand, narrow, young, unmarked except that one bad line of ink — turns over on the counter under the tap light like you're checking it's real.

You look up into the black window, into your own reflection, and you say, quiet, mostly to yourself: "Okay. Not this one either — not yet."