Colton Ainsworth

You are sitting at Hector Villareal's kitchen table at eleven at night, five minutes into a life you have already decided against.

It isn't the height, though the counters sit wrong and your knees keep finding the underside of the table. It isn't the face in the dark microwave glass, kind and unfamiliar. It's that Hector graded papers before bed, a stack of them by the sink in handwriting you'll never learn, and something in you looked at that stack and felt nothing at all — not distaste, not curiosity, just a room with the lights left on in it. Eight men now, and this is the first one you left because he was fine. Comfortable. A pension somewhere down the years, a bed made every morning, a life like a well-swept floor. You did not spin the wheel eight times to end up somewhere swept.

So you open the site on a phone that isn't yours, in a kitchen that isn't yours, and you pay, and you spin — and the wheel doesn't care that it's the middle of a Dallas night, because somewhere it is always the middle of somebody's night.

The razor is already moving.

It goes up the jaw against the grain, fast, no hesitation at the corner of the mouth, and that missing hesitation is the first wrong thing — a rhythm broken mid-stroke by a hand that has never done this stroke before. You feel the foam cold going warm at the throat, a sink's worn porcelain lip biting into a stomach leaned too far over it, tile grit under bare feet. Shorter. Lighter. A body built narrower through the shoulders, a low hum of tiredness sitting in it that has nothing to do with the hour and everything to do with hours already worked.

The mirror shows a face with foam smeared crooked on one side, done on the other — pale eyes, dark hair falling either side where fingers pushed it, and cutting through one eyebrow, a thin scar that catches the bare bulb overhead.

Then his hands, on the razor, on the sink's edge, and it starts coming in.

The razor first — cheap, disposable, bought three at a time from the gas station because he never remembers until he's down to none — and with it a hundred identical mornings in identical light, this same bulb, this same crack running through the tile grout he's traced with his eyes so many times he could draw it blind. He shaves at night because the shift runs backward from everyone else's: doors locked behind the last bus rider, gym floor still ticking as it cools, and somewhere around two in the morning, alone in a building built for six hundred children and holding none of them, he stops at this sink to make himself look like a man going somewhere rather than a man about to sleep through the actual day.

The jeans against his hips remember themselves onto him — worn thin at a knee he goes down on for gum under desks and worse under bleachers, a belt loop that gave up its belt a year ago and was never replaced. No shirt yet; that memory is folded over a stall door, waiting, and even unworn it gives him something: the gray fabric gone soft at the collar from a hundred washes, two chest pockets, one holding a pen that leaks blue into the seam if he isn't careful. He is careful. He has always been careful with the little that's his.

The tattoo on his forearm answers to nothing being touched — just sits there in the mirror's low light, a shield, a crest, a team he stopped caring about the season after his dad stopped calling, and never once thought about having removed, because it isn't about the team anymore, hasn't been in years.

His hand goes to his own jaw without the razor in it — an old habit, checking a stretch of skin that's already smooth — and that touch alone opens a wider door: Danny's mouth against that same jaw two nights ago in a truck cab with the engine running for the AC, both of them putting off going inside because inside meant morning meant Danny's shift and Colton's shift never lining up, weeks of missed mornings stacked into a relationship conducted mostly by text and by this, stolen and warm and running the battery down. Before Danny there was Reese, eight months of Reese, ending the way those things end when one man is ready to say a word out loud in his hometown and the other one isn't and maybe never will be — Reese's voice on the phone, not angry, worse than angry, just tired, *you're not hiding me, Colt, you're hiding you* — and that one is still tender to the touch a year on, a molar you find with your tongue before you remember not to.

The water running under his hand, cold, the pipe knocking once the way it always does — and under it, further down, a whole marriage of a different kind: nineteen years old, married to this town without ever choosing it, buffing the same floor his own gym teacher once made him run laps on, his mother two counties over asking when he's coming home for supper like home isn't twenty minutes down a gravel road she helped him find. No church, not for years, nothing to pray to and nobody minding that he doesn't. A beer on a Friday if somebody's buying. No cigarettes — tried once at sixteen, hated it, never again.

And under all of it, holding the whole small honest weight of him: the body itself, thirty-two and average and durable, a low ache riding one shoulder from a floor buffer that pulls wrong, forearms gone quietly strong from mop-wringing nobody would guess to look at his sleeves rolled down, feet that know eleven miles of corridor tile before the sun's anywhere near up.

You straighten at the sink. Foam clings crooked to half a jaw shaved smooth on both sides now, the razor set down without thought, muscle finishing a job muscle has done a thousand nights running.

You look at your hand — the one that held the razor, narrower than the last one, a nick healed white across one knuckle you don't remember getting because you didn't.

You lift your eyes into the mirror, into him, and you say, "Well. Hi."

Somewhere down the road a phone is charging with three unread texts from a man named Danny on it, and neither of you knows yet how long you'll be the one who answers them.