Corey Halvorsen

The mop bucket is still warm where your hand left it, and that is the last thing Colton Ainsworth's body will ever feel with you inside it. You have had him one minute. One minute of fluorescent hum and bleach and the particular ache in his lower back that never got looked at because nobody around here has good insurance, and already you are bored in a way that feels like hunger. A minute was long enough to know this life: a scar through the eyebrow he doesn't remember getting, a break room with a busted vending machine, thirty more years of this floor if he's lucky. You didn't even taste it. You are already gone, in your head, before you are gone anywhere else — sitting down at the site again, the wheel spinning under your own eagerness while Colton's chest still rises and falls, waiting for whatever comes next to be somebody else's problem.

The wheel stops. It always stops on someone.

You come up standing at a stove that isn't yours, gas flame blue and low, a wooden spoon in your hand mid-turn through something that smells like garlic and browned butter. The stirring falters — one full circle short — then reverses, your wrist doing it before you've decided to, muscle answering to a body that already knew how before you arrived. Salt goes into the pan. You don't taste it. Somewhere behind your sternum a second plate is already being reached for, the cabinet door warm from the oven vent, and you set it down next to the first one on the counter like it belongs there, like someone is coming.

The shirt is what opens first — cotton gone soft at the collar from a hundred washes, a green so faded it's almost gray under the range light, and through it comes an afternoon: him at a laundromat two years back, phone propped against the folding table, chat scrolling past faster than he can read it, someone donating five dollars just to tell him his hairline's receding, him laughing so hard he drops a sock. Streaming from a laundromat. That's Corey — never not performing, even when nobody official is watching, because somebody in that chat is always watching and that has been enough for him since he was nineteen.

The spoon in your hand is next, and it gives you the kitchen itself before it gives you him — the brick backsplash he loves, bought this unit specifically for that exposed wall, the L train two blocks over rattling the window glass on a schedule he's stopped hearing. Cooking for one used to mean cooking for two. That's in the second plate, in the way his hand went to the cabinet without asking his brain first: eight months of setting two down every night out of a habit built across a year and a half with Jenna, and four months of a habit that won't quit just because she did. He knows he's doing it. He does it anyway, some nights, like a toothpick worn down to nothing between his back teeth.

The cargo pants give you standing eight hours at the desk rig, RGB strips cycling through colors nobody asked for, camera light a small sun in his periphery, chat asking him to react to something, always to react, his face the only inventory he's got to sell. The freckles across his nose are the one thing anyone comments on in the donations — u have more freckles than personality lol — and he laughed at that one too, on stream, because five thousand people watching him laugh is still better than the quiet after they log off. Under the shirt, at his back: a nicotine itch starting low and familiar, a pack waiting on the counter three feet away, and under that, further down, the particular flatness some mornings that a small orange bottle in the bathroom cabinet keeps from getting worse. Treated. Managed. His, quietly, the way a man in a city eleven million strong can still be handling something alone at whatever hour this is, everyone he knows asleep, only the pan and the exhaust fan and the L for company.

The Converse under your feet know this floor's slight tilt near the fridge. The headphones aren't around your neck right now but you can feel where they'd sit anyway, muscle memory reaching for them out of habit before remembering there's no stream tonight, just him, just dinner, just a second plate he can't stop setting out.

You look down at the hand holding the spoon — his hand, blond-haired knuckles, a small burn scar from a pan handle years before you ever existed to him — and you turn it over once, like checking it's real.

"Force of habit," you say to the empty kitchen, and you don't put the second plate away.