Cole Bertrand

Ovidio's kitchen is too small for you and you have only been him for forty seconds. The stream is still running on the laptop on the counter, chat scrolling, somebody's donation sound looping its little chime, and you can feel already how this body wants a cigarette it hasn't had in eleven years and how the knees complain going down for the cat food. You catch the reflection in the dark microwave door — cleft chin, tired eyes, a man built low and wide like something meant to be stepped over rather than looked at — and you think, not unkindly, *no*. Six hundred and eighty-five men and you have learned to know within a minute whether you're going to stay a night or a breath. Ovidio was a breath. You mute the stream, because someone should, and you go to the site still glowing on the second monitor, and you spin.

The bathroom arrives around you the way a room arrives when you've always been standing in it. Fogged mirror, a stripe wiped clear at hand height, a light overhead buzzing faintly yellow. Your mouth is open on the last sound of a word you didn't choose and it keeps going after you've already stopped being the one saying it — a small tear in the moment, gone before it matters. The fog creeps back into the wiped stripe like it's trying to cover for you. You lift a hand — his hand — and wipe the glass clear again, and look yourself over from the collar down, the way he would have, checking that the wish landed on someone recognizable.

It has. Green t-shirt, soft from washing, a little tight through the chest in a way that says he likes how it sits. Black jeans, no shoes yet, tile cold enough under bare feet that you feel it arrive a half-second late, like the body is still deciding what to report. The dimples are there even now, doing nothing, just resting in the face like they were carved before he had opinions worth having. A nose ring, thin, barely a fact until your fingers find it out of habit and something surfaces: a piercing shop on Bedford, nineteen years old, his ex — Marisol, laughing, holding his hand too hard because she was more scared of the needle than he was.

The shirt gives you the morning it went on. Not this morning — a morning weeks back, folded out of a drawer he never quite closes, sniffed once at the collar for cleanliness, pulled on with the particular economy of someone who dresses without thinking because thinking is expensive for him, some days, in ways that aren't about clothes. A lecture hall unspools behind your eyes: a laptop lid, twenty tabs, a girl two seats down he has a mild, guilty thing for that he'd never act on because Priya is real and this is not — just static, just the noise a brain makes when it won't sit still. He was diagnosed at twenty-two and the relief of the word *ADHD* landing on him like an apology nobody else had thought to give. Adderall some weeks. Not others. A campus lawn, laptop balanced on his knees, the sun doing something generous to the whole afternoon.

The floor tile keeps talking: showers taken here half-drunk on a Saturday, singing badly, a roommate banging on the door. The mirror light hums the same hum it always hums, and under that hum, a whole stack of ordinary nights — Priya's voice through the phone speaker propped against the toothbrush cup, telling him to hurry up, they'll miss the movie. The stoop outside, sodium-lit, where he sits some nights just to not be inside yet. Nothing here worth much — no money, no property, nothing that would survive an inventory — and none of that matters to the body, which is twenty-three and fast and doesn't yet know what it's for.

You feel your own hand rise unbidden to your jaw, thumb along it, the specific tell of him you didn't ask for and now own — his hands finding his face when his head is elsewhere, doing it now while his head is you.

You look down at the hand. Turn it over. It is not yours and it is, now, the only one you have.

You lift your eyes to the mirror, to the fog already starting to close back over the glass, and you say, out loud, in his voice, to no one:

"Okay. Yeah. That's — okay."