Cody Fontenot

The forge is cold this early, and Danilo Freitas's hands ache in a way you don't yet fully own — a stone bruise behind his heel, an old man's complaint on a young man's foot. One minute in him and already you know the trick of it: some bodies arrive with a debt already owed to themselves. You stand in his dark kitchen listening to a rooster that hasn't figured out the hour, and you think: not this. Not the ache, not the smell of hoof-scorch under your nails, not the four a.m. calls to trailers on the North Shore. You didn't even unpack him. You are already reaching for the site on a cracked phone screen that isn't yours either.

The wheel doesn't care that it's morning here. It spins anyway.

And then you are face-down in humid sheets that are not stone-cold Honolulu sheets, and there is a breath that was ragged and is now, in the space of your arrival, perfectly even. An arm that had been hanging into open air off the edge of a mattress draws itself up like something remembering how to be wanted. Your — his — body rolls, unbidden by any thought you had, onto its back, hands folding over the chest like a man laid out for a viewing. Sun is coming hard through a gap in the curtain, a blade of it lying across the floorboards. Somewhere outside, water sits in the street, cooking off in steam. It is the middle of a Monday here. He should not be asleep. That's the first wrongness you feel, before you feel anything else: the wrongness of a body sleeping through good daylight, curled around a night it worked and a day it hasn't caught up to yet.

The tattoo comes first, because your forearm is bent up near your face and your eyes catch it before your mind does: script, a name, a date. ELIZA. 19-11-21. Touching nothing yet, and still it opens like a struck match — a delivery room you were not born into but he was there for, a nurse's voice, a name chosen in the car on the way, his sister maybe, or a friend's kid, you don't know yet, only that his chest went tight with something enormous and he'd gone the next week and gotten it put on skin so it couldn't be argued with.

The sheet under your palm is next. Cheap cotton, softened past its life, and it gives you the shape of the mattress they can't afford to replace, a landlord who doesn't answer texts, humidity that never really leaves this room even with the window unit running all August. Somebody's weight beside where you lie — gone now, feet sticking out of a heap of blanket at the foot of the bed, and just from that heap you get her: a laugh through a screen door, an argument about dishes that ended in her sitting on the counter while he stirred a pot, the two of them splitting a shift so one is always sleeping while the other's awake, a marriage they haven't had yet and a love that doesn't need the paper.

The shirt is still on you, a soft grey-green cotton gone thin at the collar, and it gives you this morning — his morning, hours ago now, dressing in the grey dark of five a.m. Pulling the shirt over his head half-asleep, one arm through wrong, laughing quietly at himself so he wouldn't wake her, the smell of yesterday's coffee on the counter he didn't bother to make fresh. Steel-toe boots by the door that he'd stepped out of only an hour before you arrived, the floor still gritted faintly with chips he'd tracked in without noticing — that's the lathe, that's the shop, that's ten hours of noise and oil and a foreman who likes him fine, work that pays enough to put a little away and never enough to stop counting it. Nineteen years old and already good with his hands in a way that has nothing to do with the biting — the nails chewed down to nothing, a habit from a boy who worried more than anyone around him ever noticed.

You feel the dad-bod softness of your own stomach under the shirt, the shortness of your own reach compared to the last man, hazel eyes blinking against sun that shouldn't be this bright behind closed lids at what his body insists is bedtime. Everything in him is tired in the specific, forgivable way of someone who works nights and loves someone who doesn't, and who has learned to sleep however the hours give it to him, face-down, arm hanging, careless, safe.

You sit up. The girlfriend's shape shifts in the blanket-heap but doesn't wake.

You look at your hands — soft-knuckled, nail beds bitten raw, a little steel dust still gray in the creases of the right one — and you turn the right one over slow, like you're checking it's really yours to turn.

"Not yet," you say, to no one, to the room, to the wheel that isn't even open on a screen right now. "Not yet."