Colton Vasik

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Gary Petrakis's hands smell like bleach and truck diesel no matter how long the shift has been over, and that is the first thing you notice, again, sitting on the edge of his bed at two in the afternoon with the blinds cut into stripes across the floor. Forty-nine years old, gray going silver at the temples, a body that still moves well for what it's carried. You have been him less than a minute and already the itch is back — not boredom exactly, something thinner than that, a kind of hunger with no particular shape. It doesn't want food. It wants somewhere else. Gary's phone is on the nightstand, and Gary's knees ache getting up, and you think, not unkindly, *sorry, man*, before you've even opened the laptop. Four hundred and eighty-four men and the feeling never changes: the site loads gray-blue and clean, a wheel and a button, and your — his — thumb is already moving toward it before the page finishes.

You spin.

The bar is two inches wider in your grip than it was a set ago, and you don't question it, because you are not you yet, you are only weight and breath and the particular ache climbing up both forearms. Legs locked at the base, chalk-dry palms, the fluorescent tube overhead throwing a flat white bar across your vision. Somewhere below that a body is grinding a rep it has no memory of choosing to start, and it finishes anyway, slow, controlled, none of the shaking a last rep should have. You feel yourself — him — set the bar back on the rack with a sound like a held breath let out through iron.

Then the room comes in through what's touching you.

The hoodie first — you're not wearing it now, it's on the bench behind you, but your bare shoulders remember the weight of it from an hour ago, the give of the worn cotton at the neck, the lanyard cord with the whistle that swings against your sternum when you bend to demonstrate a sprawl for the JV kids. You put it on this morning half-asleep, one arm and then the other, the fabric smelling like the inside of a gym bag that never quite dries out. There's a girl's voice from that morning too, drifting up loose and unplaced — *you're gonna be late* — Priya, on the other side of the bed, not looking up from her coffee, and you love her in the plain unspectacular way of two people who've made a routine out of each other. Somewhere behind that, quieter, another voice, a different apartment, six months gone — Ashley, who you still text sometimes when it's late and you've had too many of the whiskeys that are always the fourth or fifth drink of the night, never the first. That one doesn't come with words so much as a weight in the chest, guilt filed next to want.

The gray t-shirt is against your back now — dry cotton, the raglan seam sitting exactly where a hundred practices have taught it to sit — and it gives you the mat under your bare feet before it gives you anything else: the specific give of the wrestling room floor, foam under vinyl, a smell of feet and Lysol you stopped noticing years ago. You've coached here two years. You were a wrestler before that, a decent one, not a great one, and the half sleeve on your right arm — eagle, banner, rose, all the old bold lines gone a little soft at the edges — you got the summer after you stopped competing, a going-away present to the version of yourself that used to cut weight for a living. Your right forearm knows the shape of a collar tie without being told. Your hands, when nobody's watching them, find a pen and click it, click it, click it, an old habit from filling out lineup cards nobody reads.

The whistle cord is looped loose around your neck and it brings back the specific dull throb sitting behind your left eye — a migraine building the way it always does on a long Friday, low light making it worse, and you know without being told that there's a nicotine pouch already tucked behind your lip, mint gone flat an hour ago, and that there's a six-pack waiting for you tonight the way there's a six-pack waiting most nights, not a problem exactly, just a fact, like the ache in your knees will be a fact at fifty.

The water bottle by your foot, when your fingers close on it, gives you the whole rest of the evening before it's happened: Priya's key in the brownstone door, the wet sidewalk out front under sodium light, the particular tired satisfaction of a Friday practice run clean, twenty-some kids who trust you more than they'd ever say. You're twenty. You didn't expect to be good at this, coaching, being looked at like you have answers. Turns out you do, some days.

You look at your hands.

They're younger than any hands you've worn in months — no give in the knuckles, no old scar from a fall off a truck bed, just clean, faintly chalked, the tattoo running color up the forearm to the elbow like something still trying to finish itself. You turn the right one over, slow, the way a man checks a hand he's had his whole life and never once had reason to doubt.

"Two more," you say, to nobody, to the empty gym, your voice coming out easy and a half-step rough at the edges, the way his throat is built. It isn't for the kids. It isn't for anyone.

You lift your eyes off the hand and out toward wherever the lens would be, and you hold there, and somewhere very far under the wanting is the other wanting, already stirring, already asking without asking — not tonight, maybe not for a long time, but someday soon — *who's next.*