Colter Vance

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Rudy Camarena's office smells like other people's mistakes — old case files, cold coffee, a candle his ex-wife left behind that he never throws out. You are standing in it at eleven at night on a Friday, in his silver hair and his lawyer's gut and his good hands, and you cannot sleep, because sleeping in a body you're only borrowing feels like wasting it.

You've had worse. You've had better, once, briefly — a boy in Manila with a motorbike and a girl who texted him hearts, gone in an afternoon because you got restless before you even learned his name for the street. Rudy is comfortable. Rudy has a retainer and a bad knee and a daughter who calls on Sundays out of duty. Rudy, you have decided in the space of one sleepless hour, is *boring*. Not bad. Just finished. You know his apartment now, his firm, the weight of him going up stairs. There's nothing left in him you haven't already touched.

So you open the laptop, and there's the wheel again, vessel.cards, spinning colors over a field of men who don't know they're on a page. You pay. You spin. You feel Rudy's chest, his heartbeat, the specific ache in his left knee — all of it letting go at once like a coat dropped on a floor.

—

Your teeth are open and blowing air out on a held breath, and then they're not, and the air changes temperature going into you. It's warmer here. Thinner light. Your hands are already on a bar, and they are two inches wider than muscle memory wants, and something in you — some last correction, some *him* still lingering in the reflex — pushes the rack out anyway, grinding through a rep with a face that isn't straining, isn't finishing, isn't anything a last rep should be.

You are shorter. Lighter. Twenty-nine years old in a chest that hasn't quit anything in its life. The bar racks with a clatter that isn't yours yet, and your hands come down off it, and they are not old hands. They are not soft hands. There is chalk on them.

—

The bench takes your weight and gives back a memory: sweat-slick vinyl, a hundred sets, the exact give of an old cushion that knows your ass better than your bed does. Your forearms drop to your knees on instinct and the freckles on them catch gym light you didn't turn on but somebody did, months ago, and never fixed the flicker in.

The water bottle sweats against your foot when you shift, and that's the one that opens wide: you are nineteen and it's summer and you are drinking water out of a hose because you can't afford bottles yet, and your mother is yelling at you through the trailer's screen door to come in before the heat gets worse, and none of that is true anymore, none of that trailer is the one you live in now, but it is the reason the one you live in now — the single-wide, blocks under it, sagebrush at the step — never once felt like coming down in the world. It felt like the only place that ever made sense.

The shirt against your back — gray, thin, dry now but you remember it damp — gives you this morning. Pulling it on in the bad light of the single window, the fabric catching on your shoulders because you're built for shirts one size up. Before that: standing in front of the ring light at the desk rig, headset around your neck, chat scrolling faster than you can read it, somebody donating twenty bucks to ask if the ship tattoo means something. It does. STAY TRUE, it says, wrong on purpose, an old joke from the shop that did it — the artist misheard you the first time and you liked it enough to keep it. A galleon on your calf in colors already going soft at the edges, because you got it at twenty-two with money you didn't have, the same month you signed the lease on the trailer, the same year everything either fell apart or held.

There's a girl in this — Mara, who brings you coffee she doesn't drink herself and laughs at streams from the other room so chat can hear it bleed through the walls, on purpose, a bit you built together. And behind her, further back, another one — Sierra, the ex, whose name still catches in your chest like a hook left in after the fish got away; you split eight months ago and it still shows up in your leg, which never once stops bouncing, has not stopped bouncing since you were fourteen, whether you're anxious or fine or dead asleep. There's a kid too — a boy, four, who lives with his mother two towns over and calls you on video some nights, and you hold the phone too close to your face so he can see the freckles he says look like his.

You take the pills every morning without making it a thing. You count reps instead of drinks. You have not had a drink in three years and you have never smoked and both of those facts feel, in this body, like something you built rather than something you were given.

Your hands know the bar. Your knees know the concrete floor. Your chest, held together with three years of five a.m. sessions in a garage that gets to a hundred and ten degrees by July, knows exactly how much this last set should have cost you — and knows, somewhere underneath, that it didn't cost that.

—

You look down. Freckled forearms, chalk in the creases of the palm, a tan line at the wrist where a watch usually sits.

You turn the hand over once, like checking it for something that isn't there.

"Whoa," you say, out loud, to the empty garage, and you don't know yet if that's Colter's old surprise finishing a rep or yours arriving in it — and neither does the wheel, and neither will you, until you spin it again.