Callum Reardon

You are standing in the dark of a bathroom in Ohio, and the man you are is already too much.

Six foot four. Muscular fat, the kind that sits on a frame like a coat you can't take off. The cauliflower ear throbs against the cold of the tile wall where you've leaned your head. Early, before anyone's day has started. His beard is wet from the tap. You've had him under a minute, and you have already learned what he is: a body that works and wants nothing. You stood in his kitchen and nothing in you reached for anything. A man who sells and folds and sleeps. And there was Marcus Odom, three spins ago, in the high desert, with the cleft chin and the goatee and a best friend's voice on a phone. You wore that man for a minute and heard what the friend said, and it has not stopped ringing. That friend is who you are going for, though you won't say so. You open the site. The wheel is already turning under your thumb.

Then you're lying down.

Sheets, twisted, cool on the shin. A streetlight lays a thin stripe across the room through the curtain gap. Your breath was ragged and now it isn't, one breath, even. Your arm hangs off the mattress and it draws itself up, and the body rolls onto its back and the hands fold at the chest like a man laid out. He has never slept like this. You didn't choose it. It's only what you do.

The shirt first. Soft cotton, thin at the collar, and your fingers find the hem and the morning arrives, not yours: him pulling a different shirt over his head, a white one, stiff, the cuffs rolled twice because the courthouse air-conditioning is brutal, a grey tie knotted badly and left loose on purpose. His feeling is a dull small pride, and a fear under it.

The sheets. Cheap, washed grey. They give you a woman's laugh in this same bed, an old ex-girlfriend, her foot cold against his calf, an argument about nothing at all that he would give the whole apartment to have again. His chest tightens now, in yours.

The watch isn't on; the wrist is bare. Still the wrist remembers its weight, a steel link he bought the week he passed the bar, with money he didn't have. Under five thousand in the bank and a watch that cost a third of it.

Your left arm lies across your chest, and the sleeve edge sits on the tattoo. You feel the skin there as a memory: a needle on a hot afternoon, bold lines, a friend laughing in the next chair, twenty years old and stupid and happy. The ink has faded to something softer.

Twenty-five. The back is loose and clean. No ache anywhere. The legs want to run. His jaw is smooth, shaved last night, and you drag a palm across it and his face is warm and ordinary, and the freckles are somewhere under your thumb. A glass of water sits by the bed; one drink or two most evenings, tonight two, and the taste of it is still faint and bitter in the back of the throat. You don't believe in anything and neither did he, and the dark is only dark.

You lift your hand into the streetlight. Turn it over. Palm, knuckles, the nails bitten. A lawyer's hand, with nothing of mine in it.

You sit up and the room is quiet, and you say, to no one, "Okay. Who's next?" Your voice is lower than you expected, and the question is already there, how long, when the wanting comes back, whether the morning finds you in him.