Cody Prentiss

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Sunday afternoon, your Sunday, the light doing that flat gray thing through the blinds that makes any hour feel like four p.m. forever. Nothing on. You'd scrolled past everything twice. The tab had been open in the corner for three days — vessel.cards, a name you'd bookmarked the way you bookmark things you don't believe in, just in case. You'd wanted this since before you could say why: the idea of it, someone else's weight, someone else's morning, worn like a coat that actually fits. Every story you'd ever read about it stopped short of proof. So you paid, because the button was there and your thumb was already tired of everything else, and you spun, and the wheel did not care that you didn't believe in it.

There is no feeling of falling. There is only weight, arriving all at once, mid-breath.

You are on your back. That is the first wrong thing — the arm that was hanging is not hanging, it is folded warm across a chest that is not a chest you know, it is enormous and solid and rising slow. Streetlight through a gap in curtains you have never seen. Somewhere outside, Seattle rain ticking on a sill. The breath under your borrowed ribs goes from ragged to even like a held door finally swinging shut, and you are here, in him, at — you don't know the hour, only that it's dark, and that his body was expecting a long night's worth more sleep than this.

His shirt is bunched against your back where you're lying on it, that black t-shirt slept in, and touch is the door: sawdust and drywall dust ground into the weave, and behind that, half a second, the shape of a day — the slab, wet with dew at six a.m., him crouched over a chalk line snapping it taut, the compressor kicking on with a bark that used to make the new guys jump. Cody. The name comes up out of the fabric like something surfacing. Cody Prentiss, twenty-four, and this body has framed more walls than you will ever be able to count, and it knows it without asking, the way your own hands would know a doorknob in the dark.

You are face up but the memory of face-down is still in the muscle — a night shift, an early framing crew that starts stupidly late so the crane can run without traffic downtown, and that's the oddity sitting right there under your tongue: it's not the middle of his night by accident, it's the middle of his night by schedule, three hours of sleep snatched before he has to be back on the slab at four a.m. with a headlamp and a thermos. His girlfriend's pillow is empty beside him — she works days, she's long asleep somewhere else in this apartment or not here at all tonight, you can't tell yet, only that the sheets on that side are cool and unbothered.

You bring the folded hands up in front of your face without deciding to — his gesture, not yours, muscle looking for a toothpick that isn't there, jaw working on nothing. The tattoos on the forearm brush the sheet and give you more: script, a woman's name, Sarah, and a date under it that isn't a birthday, it's an anniversary, three years now, and there's a whole autumn evening folded into that — a folding chair on a beach in Westport, her laughing at something dumb he said, the tattoo gun buzzing two weeks later in a shop on Aurora while he grinned through the sting because pain that means something doesn't count as pain. The other arm has a second name, older, half-finished in his memory the way grief always is — you don't chase that one, it closes on its own like a door pulled shut from the other side.

His flannel is on a chair by the bed, and even from here, unworn, it gives you the morning he put it on last: buttoning it one-handed over the gray tee while thumbing his phone with the other, Sarah's voice from the kitchen asking if he'd grabbed his lunch, the belt with the two pouches already slung and heavy on his hip before he even left the bedroom, boots by the door catching dust and paint fleck like they always do by Thursday. His hands know a nail gun's kick before the trigger's even pulled, know how a stud wants to sit before the level says so, know the particular ache that lives in the lower back after eight hours bent at a slab, a good ache, an earned one. He quit smoking four years ago and the toothpick habit walked in right behind it, unasked, and never left. He drinks maybe at a wedding, maybe on New Year's. He doesn't pray. He doesn't need to; the work is its own church, four a.m. quiet before the city wakes up, coffee going cold on a sawhorse.

You feel how big he is lying still — six-five stretched the length of a mattress too short for him, weight that presses down into memory foam like a decision, forearms thick enough that the tattoo ink sits stretched and slightly warped over the muscle underneath. It is a good weight. It is nothing like what you had before, and you had nothing before, not really, not a body worth naming.

You sit up. The room tips once, settles. You bring both hands up into the gray wash of streetlight and turn them over, palm to back, back to palm — calloused, nicked along one knuckle, a healing scrape from a stray staple gun mishap earlier in the week arriving with its own small sting of memory, the foreman laughing, *you're fine, walk it off.*

You say it out loud, quiet, so as not to wake anyone who might be down the hall: "Okay." Just that. Not his voice exactly, not yours either — his throat, his register, a stranger's intention riding it.

Somewhere behind you, days or minutes off, the wheel is still spinning for anyone who wants it, and it does not care that you have not decided yet whether tomorrow's four a.m. alarm is a problem that belongs to you now, or whether you'll be gone from him before it ever rings.