Colin Vasquez

The site loads slow on purpose, like it wants you to sit with the decision. A wheel, a price, a button that says SPIN in a font too plain to be lying to you. You've had the tab open for eleven minutes. It's a Tuesday, late, the kind of dull that makes a person believe in signs, and you've believed in this one — the swap, the sinking-into-someone-else of it — since before you could say why. You pay. You spin. You do not expect it to catch.

It catches.

There is a pan in your hand, no — his hand, and it is already yours, and the spoon is already moving in a circle you didn't start. You feel the stove's heat on your forearm before you understand you have a forearm again, a different one, thicker at the wrist than you remember having, if you ever had one to remember. The stirring stops. Some old reflex — his, yours now — checks itself, reverses, keeps circling the other way, as if the hand needed to prove it still worked. You salt the pan without tasting it. You reach up into the cabinet and your fingers — nail-bitten, you notice, down past where the pink starts — take down a second plate and set it beside the first one on the counter, and you don't know yet why there are two.

Then you do, because the shirt against your back tells you.

It's the green one, the soft-worn cotton of it settling into a memory of itself — sleeves, a morning, a mirror steamed from the shower. Colin standing in his half of the closet in the garage apartment below the bay window, cold light coming grey through the high window at driveway level, pulling this shirt on inside out first, laughing at himself, pulling it off, doing it right. Someone's voice from the other room — not seen, just heard, warm, half-asleep — asking if he's making the thing with the sausage again. He said yeah. He said come by after your shift, I'll have two plates. That's whose plate is next to his. That's who's coming.

More comes with the jeans, worn soft at the thigh where the radio clips on shift, the fabric remembering ladders, remembering the apron of the firehouse at golden hour, remembering standing for the photo nobody made him smile for, unibrow and all, the guys ribbing him about it the way they rib him about everything, easy, brotherly. He loves that house. He loves the particular ache in his shoulders that comes from real work, the callus map of his palms that his hands use without asking him — tying a hose coupling, gripping a rail, all muscle memory older than thought. He is twenty-one and his body already knows things his mind has stopped supervising.

The floor under his — under your — feet is cheap linoleum, the cold coming up faintly through the socks, and that cold is its own memory: nights coming home late, peeling off boots at this exact threshold, the smell of whatever he's cooking clinging to the low ceiling of this half-buried little kitchen with its one bald bulb overhead. A memory of his mother's kitchen ghosts under it, briefer, warmer, gone before you can hold it — she taught him this dish, or a version of it, and he's been quietly improving on hers for three years without telling her. He believes in nothing in particular and something anyway — a shape behind things he doesn't push on — and this, this cooking, this small ritual of a second plate for someone he's choosing again and again, Tuesday after Tuesday, is as close as he gets to devotion.

The tattoo at his collarbone prickles faintly with the memory of the needle, four years old now, a dare with his sister that he won and she didn't. Small things. All of it small, all of it him, arriving in pieces too fast to sort and too warm to want to.

You look down. The hand at the end of your borrowed arm still has a thumbnail bitten close, a burn scar pale and old across two knuckles, a spoon loose in the fingers like it belongs there more than you do.

You lift your eyes off it, into whatever is watching — the low light, the empty doorway where someone is about to walk in expecting Colin and only Colin.

"Two plates," you say, out loud, in his voice, like it's an answer to a question nobody asked you yet. "Guess that's still true."

You don't know for how long.