Colton Rieffer

The espresso machine hisses behind the counter and Tyler's forearm — your forearm, for two hours and eighteen minutes now — aches from steaming milk for a line that never thinned out on a Saturday. Dimples, blue eyes, twenty-two years old, a body that runs warm and quick and bored out of its mind. You like him fine. You liked him for the first hour. But there's a rhythm to being twenty-two and slinging coffee that you've already worn thin, the same joke from the same regular, the same playlist looping through the espresso grinder's whine, and underneath the liking is the itch that always comes first, low and familiar: *what else is out there tonight.* You wipe your palms — his palms — on the apron, clock the register lull, and slip into the back hallway where the phone is charging, vessel.cards still open in a tab from last night. You don't decide so much as notice you already have. The wheel doesn't care that it's Saturday afternoon here. It only cares that somewhere the sun is already down.

You spin. The wheel doesn't ask why. It never does.

The ring light is the first thing — too close, too white, a soft electric halo with a face suspended in the middle of it, and the face is yours now, mid-syllable, mouth open on a word that stops being Colton's the instant you arrive and starts being nobody's for a half a second, and then it's yours. His weight drops into you all at once — heavier than the barista's, older in the knees, a low ache behind the sternum that isn't pain exactly, just thirty-four years pressing down where twenty-two never had to. Your hand is resting on a desk edge. His shirt sleeve is rolled to the forearm and it's warm from his own arm, not yours yet, waiting. The chat scrolls under the monitor, four little colored names nobody's reading. You feel your own — his own — mouth still moving, and you hear the cadence change, slow down, go careful, like a man choosing each word off a shelf instead of grabbing it.

The flannel is what opens him first — worn soft at the collar, a snap you didn't do but your fingers remember doing, sleeves cuffed twice at the wrist out of habit before he ever sat down to stream. Buttoning it, an hour ago in his life, two hours and change in yours-and-his both if you traced the clocks square, though nobody traces clocks square anymore. He stood in front of the closet mirror with the shirt half-on and thought, not for the first time, that the eyebrow barbell looked stupid with flannel and didn't take it out anyway, because she used to say it made him look like he still had somewhere to be. The scar under it itches sometimes in humidity. It's humid tonight. Green-shade, creek-damp Kentucky humid, cable footbridge fog rolling low over brown water two hollers from where he's sitting.

The whistle. Not on him now, but his palm remembers its shape from ten hours earlier, hot lanyard, red trunks, the stand creaking under him as he watched a floatie drift past the buoy line and did the math on whether it was worth the walk. Nobody drowned today. Nobody's drowned on his watch in six seasons, which is either luck or the one thing about himself he's proud of without qualifying it. His lungs know their own limits before he does — an inhaler rattling in a gym bag zipper pocket, a wheeze that starts if he runs the sand instead of walks it, asthma older than the tattoo on his forearm, an anchor he got the year he thought he'd leave this county on a boat out of Norfolk and didn't.

The desk under his other hand is the one she used to sit on, cross-legged, laughing at whatever garbage was on his old laptop, before she wasn't around to sit on anything of his anymore. That ended two years ago and some months, and he still reaches for his phone some nights to tell her something funny before he remembers there's no one on the other end who wants it. That's most of why the flask lives in the desk drawer six inches from where his hand is resting right now — not misery, just company, the kind that doesn't ask him to explain the eyebrow scar (a diving board, fifteen, showing off, worth it) or why he clenches his jaw instead of ever finishing a sentence about her.

Chat says something. HI COLT. OMG HES ACTUALLY STREAMING. Four little names, going nowhere, and his — your — mouth is already answering in that new slow cadence, careful like a man reading a language he half-knows.

You look down. His hands are on the desk, blunt-nailed, a thin white line of an old rope-burn across two knuckles nobody but a lifeguard would recognize as a rescue. You turn one over like it might have a seam.

"There you are," you say, quiet, mostly to the ring light, mostly to no one, and you smile with a mouth that isn't used yet to smiling like that. "Chat, you're not gonna believe who's actually in here now."