Colby Fontenot

Douglas Hennemyer's hand is not Douglas Hennemyer's hand anymore, not really, not after fourteen other hands, but it is the one you have right now, and it is resting on a laptop that isn't yours in an apartment that isn't yours, and the beauty mark on the wrist catches the desk lamp when you turn it. Less than a minute in him. You already know the shape of the disappointment: bald, competent, a little soft at the middle, the kind of man whose whole life fit inside a performance review. You didn't spin for this. You never spin for this — you spin for the half-second after, the part where somebody else's whole self floods up through your fingers like groundwater. Douglas is fine. Douglas is nothing. You are already bored of him the way you were bored of Kenneth, of Rohan, of the ones whose names blur now into a single low hum of men who worked and slept and did not surprise you. You open the laptop. You find the site the way your body — his body, on loan — already remembers finding it, muscle memory grooved into fourteen returns. The wheel is right there, patient, colored like a carnival. You do not even finish the thought that is greed dressed up as curiosity. You spin.

The room is dark and it is not Douglas's room. There is a phone six inches from a face that is not Douglas's face, close enough that the screen lights one cheek in blue and leaves the other in shadow, and a thumb — young, blunt-nailed, a little callused at the pad — is stopped mid-scroll over something that no longer matters. You feel the weight settle into you all at once: shorter, denser, muscle packed close under warm skin, a body still holding the loose-limbed ease of someone who lay down after a long day and hasn't gotten up. The thumb starts moving again before you've told it to, faster now, flicking through strangers' faces with a steadiness that isn't tired the way his was tired thirty seconds ago.

The mattress is under you, and touch is the first door: the sheet against your bare calf gives you a flash of a hundred nights just like this one, TV murmuring from another room down a shotgun hall, wet French Quarter light leaking grey-gold through a curtain that never quite closes. The phone in your hand is the second door, warmer than it should be, worn smooth at the corners from being carried in scrub pockets — and it opens wider: a nurses' station, fluorescent tubes buzzing white-blue, a stack of charts, the particular ache behind the eyes that comes on around hour nine and never fully leaves, a coworker laughing at something down the hall while you press two fingers to your temple and keep writing because the meds pass doesn't wait for a migraine. You feel it now, faint but there, a low pressure gathering behind the left eye like weather.

The studs in your earlobes are cold under your own fingers when your hand drifts up — an old habit, touching your face without meaning to, and it gives you an afternoon: fifteen years old, a mirror, a friend with a needle and a lighter and too much confidence, the sting, the pride afterward of having done something small and irreversible. The shirt is not on you yet — it's a t-shirt tonight, not the scrubs, but the scrubs come anyway, called up by the elastic waistband of the shorts against your hip: a whole morning, this exact pair of scrub pants pulled on in a bathroom with the fan broken, sleeve by sleeve into the top, badge clipped, the little tug of the lanyard settling against your sternum, the walk to the car past a neighbor watering ferns on a porch one room wide. You feel how strong this body is without being asked to — eighteen and built like it, shoulders that carry patients twice his weight, forearms roped from lifting and turning bodies all shift long, and under the strength the migraine sitting patient and small, waiting for stress to wake it.

And there is a girl. Not in the room, not for years now, but the memory arrives through the phone itself, through the specific tilt of the thumb that keeps almost-typing her name into a search bar it never sends: someone from a year that ended badly and gently at once, a laugh you can still hear better than you can see her face, a breakup that neither of you were cruel about, which somehow made it worse. Sunday Mass with a grandmother who still calls him mon cher. A body that has never smoked, that drinks only when someone hands him something at somebody's birthday, that goes quiet after two beers instead of loud. None of it is dramatic. All of it is his, and it keeps coming, unbidden, in his feeling and not yours — small, warm, complete, like finding rooms in a house you were told was one floor.

You stop scrolling. You turn the hand over in the blue light, your hand, his hand, and look at the thumb, the studs' small weight tugging at each ear, the whole compact strength of him sitting still for the first time in fourteen bodies that it has felt like this — young enough that nothing hurts yet except the thing behind the eye that isn't pain so much as its rumor.

"Okay," you say to the empty room, and you don't know yet if you mean the migraine or the waiting or him. "Okay."