Connor Vasil

The apartment does nothing at this hour. That's the whole problem with it — the blue light of the phone, the couch cushion gone shapeless under you, some show playing to nobody. You've had this fascination since you were a kid who couldn't explain it: the idea of the wheel, the swap, being someone else behind their own eyes. You've read every thread at two in the morning that promised it and delivered nothing. Then a friend of a friend of a friend dropped a link with no context, and it was a page, plain as a receipt, with a wheel on it and a price under it, and you paid it before you could talk yourself out of being embarrassed.

You spin. It doesn't animate long. It just stops.

You are face-down in sheets that are not your sheets, one arm hanging into cool air, and the arm draws itself up without your asking, folding onto a chest that is not your chest, and the breath under it goes from ragged to slow like something exhaling that has been holding it for miles. It is the middle of the afternoon somewhere you have never been, and it was the middle of your own dead evening a second ago, and both of those things are true at once and neither of them explains the ceiling fan turning lazily above you or the strip of gold light lying flat across the wall.

You are on your back. You have never once, in your life, slept on your back. That thought isn't yours, and it arrives anyway, dropped in sideways, the first thing his body gives you before you've even asked for anything.

You lie there a second in the borrowed stillness of it. Then the wanting that got you here does what it always does — it wants more — and you sit up, and his weight comes with you, heavier through the shoulders than you expected, a body that has done pushups it didn't want to do and pull-ups on some station bar for no reason but boredom. Your — his — bare feet find carpet. Gray, cheap, apartment-grade. Sliding glass door across the room, curtain gapped, and past the gap: pastel buildings going soft in afternoon haze, the flat shine of ocean somewhere behind them.

The shirt is balled at the foot of the bed, and when your hand closes on it, on his hand's own instinct, it comes — not a picture exactly, a temperature. Six a.m., dark still, the uniform shirt off a hanger in a closet that smells like fabric softener and gun oil, one sleeve then the other, the little hitch every single time doing the top button because his fingers are thick and the button is small. Three years of that hitch. Three years of a night shift that never got easier to sleep off, no matter how heavy the curtains, which is why it's two in the afternoon here and he is only now, only just, all the way under.

The badge is on the dresser and just looking at it — not even touching it, just looking — brings the locker room up around you, gray paint, the specific ammonia smell of a mop bucket somebody left too long, a sergeant clapping him on the shoulder after a call that went bad and saying good job, kid, meaning it, and him going home and not being able to eat dinner. The pills in the bathroom cabinet, small and unremarkable, taken every morning before the shift like brushing his teeth, a doctor's handwriting he trusts more than he trusts most people. A rosary he doesn't carry but keeps in the truck's glovebox, out of some old habit from his mother's kitchen table, crossing himself once before every shift starts, quick, almost embarrassed by it, done anyway.

Loneliness comes through clearest of anything, no object needed, just the shape of the apartment itself — one mug in the drying rack, one key on the hook, a phone with no messages worth opening. A drink most nights, alone, on the balcony, watching the neon smear on wet tile below and thinking it's fine, this is fine, this is what twenty-nine looks like for guys like him, except he's not twenty-nine, he's nineteen, and some nights that gap between how old he feels and how old he is sits in his chest like a stone he hasn't figured out how to put down.

Your hand — his hand — finds his own opposite thumb without meaning to, working at the cuticle there, an old unconscious habit, worn skin gone a little raw at the edge of the nail. That's his, not yours. You didn't bring that.

You look at the hand doing it. Freckled across the back, a working tan line at the wrist, nothing on the fingers, no ring, no mark, nothing but skin and callus and a picked-at thumb. You turn it over once in the gold light like it might explain something, and it doesn't, it's just a hand, just his, now yours the way none of your other hands have ever been yours because you never had one before this.

You lift your eyes toward the window, toward wherever a lens would be if there were one, and you hear his own voice come out low, still thick with sleep that wasn't his to lose.

"Didn't feel like anybody left."

Outside, the ocean haze doesn't move, and neither do you, not yet — not until the wanting decides it's time again, and it hasn't, not this second, not this one either.