Colton Pelletier

Gary Trawick's kitchen clock says a quarter to midnight and you are standing in his skinny-fat body at the counter, still in the scrubs, the ID badge turned backwards on its clip the way it always ends up by the end of a shift. You have been him less than a minute — long enough to feel the ache riding up both his heels, long enough to feel how his lower back doesn't so much hurt as complain, a low grumbling thing that will outlast the night. Fifty-nine years of somebody's body, freckles gone the color of weak tea under the kitchen light, and you already know you are not staying in it. Not because of anything Gary did. Because of what you did in him three hours ago, four spins back, wearing another man entirely — the bald one, the nurse in New Orleans, Marcus's coworker, whose house you walked through touching things that weren't yours to touch, whose life you know now from the inside in a way that itches. You left him fine. You left him breathing and confused and alone in his own kitchen, the way you always do. But something about carrying him around in your memory now, stacked under Gary's freckled hands, has made Gary's hands feel like somebody else's gloves. You want out of the glove. That's the whole reason, and it is not a good one, and you don't say it out loud even to yourself. You open the laptop. The wheel is already loaded, spinning lazy, waiting.

You click. The screen goes white, then isn't a screen.

You are gripping a barbell.

It's cold on your palms and the cold is the first thing, colder than the gym air has any right to make it, and your arms — these arms, younger, stronger, unfamiliar — are already at full extension mid-press, the plates trembling very slightly with your held breath. Blond hair is stuck damp to a forehead you cannot see because you are behind these eyes now and this is what behind-the-eyes looks like: a water bottle sweating on rubber flooring below you, a rack of dumbbells swimming faintly in a mirror across the room, RGB light bleeding pink-blue off a monitor in some other part of the apartment that this gym must be attached to, or near, because you can feel that closeness in your body the way you feel weather coming. You are supposed to be blowing air through your teeth, the way a man does on his last rep. You don't. The breath just stops being a performance and becomes actual breath, held wrong, and you push the bar up anyway, slow, arms shaking for a different reason than the one they started with.

The name comes first through the bar itself, aluminum knurling biting into calluses that are not new calluses — Colton, and with it a flood of gym mornings, hundreds of them, the specific ritual click of loading plates before sunrise because streaming till 2 a.m. means training before anyone's awake to bother him, means the gym is his and only the guy who mops the mats and a couple of night-shift nurses coming off twelves.

Then the shirt — black, cotton gone soft, a band logo half-cracked and flaking off the chest, and it gives you the morning he put it on: pulling it over his head in the gray shingle house with the traps stacked by the door, sea light coming through a salt-fogged window, headset already looped around his neck out of habit before he'd even decided to stream that afternoon. The cargo pants next, wide-legged, worn at a specific fold behind the knee from sitting cross-legged at the desk twelve hours a day — that chair-shape is baked into the fabric and baked into his hips too, a low dull stiffness there that the gym is supposed to fix and only half does.

The sneakers on the floor of a garden shed-turned-storage-room flash at you sideways, not this moment but another — sitting on a splintered bench after mowing somebody's lawn for cash between streams, ankle catching the light where there's a thin dark mark he got from a bike chain at fourteen and never once called a tattoo because it isn't one, it's a scar shaped like carelessness. The water bottle sweating by his foot brings back a whole relationship in one wet ring on concrete: her, the ex, sitting across from him in this same gym eight months ago, laughing at him for narrating his own deadlift into a phone mic clipped to his collar, and how that laugh is gone now, and how he still sometimes streams like she might be watching from wherever she went.

His hands know this bar. They've known it for years — the specific give of this exact rack, bought secondhand, bolted into a floor he leveled himself with shims cut from a cereal box. Twenty-two years old and the body under all this is honest in a way Gary's never was: shoulders that ache pleasantly instead of complaining, a mid-back that's tired but not broken, dimples denting into his cheeks right now for no reason at all, just the shape of his resting face, unbidden, the thing everyone in his chat comments on and he pretends not to notice.

You finish the rep. The bar comes down into the rack with a sound too loud for how careful you tried to be.

You look at your hands — his hands, blond hairs pale against pink knuckles, a nick healing on one thumb from a lobster trap he helped a neighbor haul last week, nothing you did, nothing you know except through him, through this — and you turn them over slow in the RGB-tinted dark of the empty gym, and you say, to no one, to the empty mirror, to the water bottle still sweating on the mats:

"Okay. Okay — who are you."