Colton Freeburg

Four minutes. That's what Efraín Solórzano got out of you — four minutes of being sixty and muscular and gray at the temples, standing in a break room that smelled of jet fuel and burnt coffee, a baggage cart's idle rattle coming through the wall. You'd wanted the strength of him, the wide hazel-eyed calm, the dimples that show even at rest — the wheel had teased you with the idea before, twice now, and this time it landed you inside them for real. And it was nothing. Four minutes of a body clocking in on a shift that wasn't yours to finish, standing in a hallway that smelled like somebody else's whole life, and no feeling in it at all except the itch that always comes back faster than you expect: not this one. Not tonight. You didn't even sit down. You found the phone in your — his — pocket, thumbed to the site out of habit more than hope, and the wheel was already lit up waiting, like it knew. You didn't decide so much as let your thumb keep moving. It costs the same whether you keep him ninety seconds or ninety years, and ninety seconds was already looking generous.

The wheel turns and there is no in-between, no falling, no dark — just Efraín's break room gone, and this instead: warm sheets, a body face-down with weight you don't yet know how to carry, an arm hung off the edge of a mattress into cooler air. The hand at the end of it flexes once on its own, a wedding band catching what little light there is, before you have caught up to owning it. Breath that was ragged — someone getting close to waking, or fighting not to — smooths out under you into one long even pull, and the arm draws itself up off the mattress edge, and the whole heavy back of him rolls onto the sheets, hands coming to rest folded on his chest like a man laid out for a viewing. He has never slept like this in his life. You have him arranged like a photograph before you've said a word inside him.

Streetlight bars through a gap in the curtain and lies across a stranger's chest — your chest now, wide and soft-heavy at once, breathing on its own before you tell it to. The mattress under this back is real in a way Efraín's break-room linoleum never got the chance to be. You lie still and let it come.

The sheet under your palm gives you the shape of the mattress first — memory-foam, a Christmas gift from her mother two years back, too soft for his liking but he never said so — and then it gives you her side, empty and cool, because she works the earlier shift this week at the hospital gift shop and left before dark. Colton. The name arrives with the pillow smell, laundry detergent and the ghost of his own sweat, the way a name arrives when it's been called across a house a thousand times. Colton Freeburg, and this apartment two blocks off the water in a building the color of a melted popsicle, ocean haze fogging the sliding door to the balcony where he stands some nights vaping and looking at neon smeared on wet tile below.

Your hand finds the wedding band on its own hand — the metal is warm from his own skin, plain gold, no stone, bought on a layaway plan the month after she said yes — and that's a whole Tuesday afternoon back: the two of them at a mall kiosk in Kendall, her laughing at how his finger was too big for the display sizes, the girl behind the counter measuring twice. He'd cried a little in the car after, not from sadness. He does that. Cries easy, laughs easy, dimples showing even when he's trying to look serious across a desk from a man asking why his premium went up.

The desk comes back through the memory of his own forearm, the tattoo riding the inner skin — eagle, anchor, a rose gone the soft brown-red of old ink, done the week he turned twenty-one at a shop that smelled like his grandfather's garage, because his grandfather had worn a version of it forty years before him in a different branch of a different war and Colton wanted something of the man on his own arm before the man was fully gone from the world. He never finished the Navy paperwork himself — flat feet, a form letter, a recruiter's shrug — so the tattoo is the whole service he'll ever give, and it still catches a little in his chest when clients ask about it, and he tells them a shorter version.

The shirt is the next door in. Not on his back now — he sleeps in a plain gray T-shirt, damp at the collar — but the memory of the other shirt arrives anyway, riding in on the smell of drugstore starch still caught in the fabric under his fingers: yesterday morning, dressing for the strip-mall office with the peeling gold lettering on the glass, top button first because his neck's gotten thick enough that missing it makes the tie sit wrong, sleeves rolled twice each so the ink shows just enough to make small talk with, never all the way. Two guest chairs across the desk that have held a thousand nervous strangers explaining wrecked cars and dead water heaters, and Colton good at the quiet parts of that job, the parts where you let a man cry about his flooded garage and don't rush him. He is decent at this in a way that surprises people who only see the size of him first — heavy through the shoulders and gut both, a man built like he could move furniture for a living, delicate instead with paperwork and other people's disasters.

The nicotine wants noticing too, a faint want low in the chest, the vape on the nightstand not yet reached for, a habit that outlasted the drinking he gave up two years back after a Wednesday night men's group at Christ Fellowship where he stood up without planning to and said out loud that he didn't like who he was after the third beer. Nobody in that room laughed. He kept going back. He still goes back.

And under all of it, the plain animal fact of this body: twenty-five, heavy, strong through the back in a way that aches faintly between the shoulder blades most mornings from lifting nothing heavier than a stack of claim files, a body that runs a little hot at night so the sheet is always kicked half off by morning even though tonight it found him arranged too neatly, too still, hands folded like he's already decided something.

You lie in him another moment, feeling how warm and slow and entirely undramatic this life is — a wife on an early shift, a vape going dead on a nightstand, dimples he'll show a stranger in an office chair tomorrow without meaning to — and you understand, distantly, why nobody would spin away from this if they had any sense. But you didn't come back to the wheel today for sense.

You lift your folded hands off your chest and look at them in the striped light — thick fingers, a ring that isn't yours, ink that isn't yours, going pale where the blood hasn't caught up to the morning yet. You turn the right one over slowly, like you're checking it's real.

"Okay," you say to the dark room, to no one, in his voice, dimples showing even though there's nothing here to smile about. "Okay."

Somewhere down the hall a nightstand vape sits dead and unclaimed, and the wheel, wherever it is, keeps spinning without you for now.