Colton Weaver

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Colin Vasquez's kitchen smells like the inside of a fire truck even though there's no truck here, just a studio apartment with a lumpy couch and a beer in the fridge you didn't buy. Twelve minutes. You stood in his body by the counter, felt the phantom ache in a shoulder he'd wrenched hauling a hose off a rig, and thought: this is fine, but it's someone else's ache. You didn't do the hauling. You didn't earn the tired in his hands. Riding a stranger's life is like reading a book with the middle pages torn out — you get the furniture, not the feeling. You want to feel the wanting again, the part where it's new. That's the whole reason you keep the card in your pocket, the little rectangle with the wheel on it, warm from his jeans. You open the laptop, thumb to vessel.cards, and spin, because it is Tuesday and the kitchen is ugly and there is nothing stopping you.

The wheel is still turning when the restaurant arrives around you — low lamps, a candle guttering in red glass, the smell of yeast rolls gone lukewarm. You are mid-sentence. You feel the shape of the apology in a throat that isn't yours yet, the consonants already loaded, and you finish it: something about traffic, about the flight delay, about being sorry, and your voice carries two tables over and a woman in a green sweater across from you winces at the volume of it. Your hand is on a water glass. You turn it a quarter turn on the tablecloth without meaning to, and it stays there, ringed in condensation, and you are sitting in a chair with someone else's spine.

The shirt is what starts it — plain cotton, a t-shirt gone soft at the collar from washing, and it gives you a Tuesday morning three days back: him standing in front of a closet that's mostly whites and navy, pilot shirts on wire hangers, epaulets catching the light, and this one gray shirt pulled off a lower shelf because today's not a work day, today's a day off and he wants to not look like a pilot for six hours. He'd stood there flipping a lighter between two fingers without lighting anything, just the click-spin-click of it, thinking about the app, about her profile picture, about whether blue hair reads as fun or reads as a mistake to a woman he's meeting for the first time. He'd decided fun. He'd decided it twice.

The chair under you gives another one — not this restaurant, a cockpit jump seat, four months ago, second officer beside him running the checklist in a voice like a metronome, and the particular clean fear of night approach into Pittsburgh with the lights of the Mon Valley strung out below like something spilled. His hands had known the yoke the way his hands now, at this table, know the water glass — not thinking, just answering. He loves it in a way he has never once said out loud to anyone, not his girlfriend, not his mother, because saying it feels like asking to be told it's not that impressive, and somebody at a barbecue always tries.

The bread basket gives you nothing — untouched, and that's its own memory, a mother's voice from somewhere in his twenties saying you're not going to eat that? and him not eating it anyway, a small stubbornness that has outlived the reason for it.

The migraine sits behind his left eye like weather, and you understand — through him, not you — that he agreed to this date on a day he shouldn't have agreed to anything, that the restaurant's low gold lighting is doing something unkind to the base of his skull, that he has been rationing his sentences all night because talking makes the ache worse and the woman across from him has noticed the rationing and mistaken it for boredom. He isn't bored. He's twenty-one and he flies airplanes for a living and he cannot find four consecutive charming sentences tonight to save his life, and he knows, distantly, humiliatingly, that this is going badly, and he does not know why the apology came out too loud, and he will lie in bed later replaying it.

The nicotine want rises in the back of the throat, unscratched — no lighter in this hand, both hands on the table where they're supposed to be, on a first date, being good.

You feel all twenty-one years of him settle into the seat at once — the height that makes airport seats too small, the shoulders built by nothing more athletic than hauling a flight bag through terminals for three years, the freckles across the nose that a girl in eighth grade called constellations and that he privately still thinks about sometimes, absurdly, at thirty thousand feet. None of it hurts the way Colin's shoulder hurt. It just is: young, healthy, headached, wanting a cigarette, sitting across from a woman he is failing to charm.

You look down at your hands on the tablecloth — his hands, no rings, a thumb that twitches toward a pocket that has no lighter in it because he left his jacket at the door. You turn one hand over like you're checking it for something. Then you lift your eyes to the woman across the table, and past her, toward wherever the lens of the evening would be if there were one, and you say, in a voice that finally comes out at the right volume:

"Sorry — where was I."