Colin Hasbrook

You are standing in Michael Corcoran's kitchen when the second thought comes, right behind the first. The first thought is that the panel job in Dorchester paid out and the check cleared. The second thought, sliding in under it like water under a door, is that this body's knees ache going down stairs now, that the gut sits heavy over the belt in a way that never used to bother you and now always does, that fifty-eight is a number that keeps being true no matter how many times you check. You have been him less than a minute and you already know the whole shape of tonight: beer, recliner, the game, bed. You have had that night in eleven other men. You are not bored of Michael so much as bored of the math his body keeps doing without asking you — the stairs, the knees, the gut. You set his beer down on the counter without opening it. You go to the laptop still logged into vessel.cards from Saturday, and you spin, because there is always a version of tonight that hasn't happened to you yet.

The street tilts and rights itself and is a different street. Wet asphalt, shuttered grates, a neon sign buzzing something about returns above your head. Your foot catches the curb wrong, hand slaps flat on a cold parked hood — and then it doesn't happen again, the next step and the one after land clean, and you are walking, light, quiet, a body that weighs nothing like Michael's, jacket hanging open over a chest that has never once thought about its knees. You turn left at the corner. You don't know why. Somewhere behind that decision is a version of him going home a different way, but he isn't home, and neither, now, are you.

The denim jacket gives it first — worn soft at the elbows, and there's a whole morning in it: standing in front of a mirror in the underhouse room with the bay window's light coming down grey through the one high pane, pulling this jacket on over the tee because the gym would be cold at six a.m. before the heater caught up, and thinking, not for the first time, that he should really call Danny back. Danny, the ex, three weeks gone and still living in the ring rope callus on his palms somehow, still in the smell of leather that isn't here right now but that his hands remember anyway — the mitts, the worn seams, the particular give of them after four years of catching punches meant for a bag. Danny used to sit ringside during closing hour with his knees up on the bottom rope, watching him work a kid through a combo, and it had felt, for a while, like something that could hold weight.

The jeans know the walk to the BART, the fifteen blocks he does most nights instead of paying for a ride, jacket open no matter the fog because he runs hot, always has, since he was a kid too skinny to keep warm and now not skinny at all in that soft, unfinished way — strong in the shoulders and forearms from years of holding mitts steady against grown men's fists, soft everywhere else, the gut a little loose no matter how clean he eats, and he has stopped being ashamed of it, mostly, most days. The freckles across his nose are the one thing anyone ever compliments first and he has never known what to do with that. The nose ring is three years old and his mother still hasn't said anything about it, which is its own kind of comment.

Tonight — his tonight, the one still going when you land in it — was supposed to be one beer with the guys from the gym and turned into four, then whatever came after four, and somewhere in there he told himself he was walking the long way home because the night air felt good and not because Danny's building is six blocks past his own and he likes knowing the lights are on up there even when he doesn't go in. His shoe has been scuffing every third step for the last ten minutes, a small stumbling rhythm his own feet were keeping without him. His leg would be bouncing right now if he were sitting down; standing, the restlessness has nowhere to go but into that scuff, that drift toward a door he has decided, six or seven times tonight, not to knock on.

The tattoos on the left arm come up through the sleeve where it's rolled — the swallow, the compass, the banner he got at nineteen that says nothing because he chickened out on the wording and just kept the scroll blank, which the artist thought was funny and he has never explained to anyone since. Bold lines under streetlight. A body built by other men's punches landing on leather he was holding, four hundred rounds a week, hands that know without being told how to angle a mitt so the shock doesn't run up into the wrist.

You feel all of it arrive at once and settle, the way water finds the bottom of a glass — his weight, his ache-free knees, his twenty-one years, his skinny-fat frame that has never once thought about stairs.

You look down. Your hand — his hand, the freckled forearm, the swallow inked into the skin of it — turns over once in the streetlight like you're checking it's real.

"Huh," you say, out loud, to no one, to the shuttered street, to the lens of whatever is watching. "Okay."

You don't turn back toward home. Somewhere up the block a light is on in a window that isn't yours yet either, and you have all the time in the world to decide, or none, because you never know which until the wheel says so.