Cody Vantreese

Eddie Marchesi has been you for three minutes, and already his patchy beard itches in a way that makes you want to leave. You're sitting on the edge of his dorm bed, laptop open, the small-town Ohio window going amber with a Monday evening you didn't earn and don't want. His roommate's music thuds through the wall. There's a psych textbook open to a chapter you have no intention of reading, and a phone buzzing with a name — some girl, Ashley, maybe, wanting to know if he's coming to dinner. You feel the ghost of Eddie's nervousness about that dinner sitting in his chest like a swallowed stone, and it isn't yours, and you don't want it. Nineteen is young. Average is average. You spun for a reason last time and you can't remember it anymore, only that whatever it was, it isn't here now. Boredom, maybe. Or just the itch that's always there, low and constant, the same itch that got you into this the first time. You open the site. The wheel again. You pay. You spin, and somewhere your hand — Eddie's hand — is already going slack around the phone.

The water is running before you understand you're the one standing over it. Cold porcelain under two palms. A mouth already moving, foam gone thin at the corner of lips that are not the lips you had four seconds ago, brushing the same four molars for the second time, slower now, because some reflex older than you finishes what it started before it lets you in. Steam-warm bathroom air. A window high and small, throwing afternoon light flat across white subway tile. You are taller. Heavier through the shoulders. There is a weight to standing here that Eddie never had, a stillness in the knees like they've done a hundred thousand hours of standing and don't complain about it anymore. The brush comes out. Two rinses, like a ritual. It gets set bristles-up, deliberate, out of grey water that has apparently always been grey, always sat in that cup, and that small precise habit arrives with a flicker of feeling that isn't fondness exactly — more like the tired loyalty a man has for the one thing in his bathroom he controls.

Then the shirt against your back gives you Sarah.

Not all at once. First just the fabric — worn cotton gone soft at the collar, a smell of cut grass and gasoline that never fully washes out — and then a whole morning comes with it, an old one, autumn light in a bedroom in the Outer Sunset, her hand flattening this same collar down while he stood still and let her. Sarah Kowalik, twenty-two months of her, done eight weeks now, and the tattoo on the inner forearm is her name and the date they met, inked in a fit of twenty-year-old certainty he still hasn't decided if he regrets. His arm moves, wiping his mouth, and the ink catches light and drags her whole voice back — laughing at something in a booth at a taco place on Judah, the two of them splitting a burrito because neither of them had money that month. Gone now. Replaced, mostly, by a woman named Priya who he's been seeing eleven weeks, who doesn't know about the tattoo yet, who he hasn't told because there hasn't been a right night for it.

His hands know things yours never did — the particular grip for gripping a trimmer's throttle without white-knuckling it through an eight-hour day, the callus map across both palms that reads like a language of turf and root and cold mower-handles at 7 a.m. His lower back aches, low-grade and permanent, the kind that comes from three years of pushing an Ariens up other people's slopes. His knees are twenty-one-year-old knees, still good, still fast, and some part of him — some part of you now — wants to run just to feel that they still can. There's a can of nicotine pouches somewhere in these jeans pocket, and just the thought of it brings the phantom hit of mint and leather at the back of the throat, a habit picked up freshman year of some trade-school program he never finished. He hasn't had a drink since his mother's funeral made him swear one off in a fit of grief he doesn't fully remember choosing. Mass on the Sundays his crew doesn't work early. His mother's rosary is in the truck's glovebox, actually, not this house — flash of her voice saying his name the way only she said it, Cody, two syllables like a small blessing.

The trailer of mowers is parked at a curb three streets from here, waiting on a lawn he was due back to in twenty minutes, before you arrived and paused the whole world on his behalf. Somewhere under the sink smell is engine oil and cut Bermuda grass, and under that, faint, the ghost of Priya's shampoo from where she stayed over Friday, her toothbrush right there beside his in the cup, hers pink, his blue, both of them standing the same way, bristles-up, because he taught her that too.

You look down. His forearms are wet to the wrist, the tattoo glistening faint under bathroom light, Sarah's name sitting there like a sentence somebody else wrote in a language you're only now learning to read. You turn the hand over once, slow, like checking it for damage that isn't there, and something in your chest — his chest, on loan — turns over with it.

"Okay," you say to the mirror, in a voice thicker and lower than the one you left behind, and you don't know yet if you mean the day, or him, or the wheel waiting patient on some other screen in some other state where nobody is sitting anymore.