Corey Vantassel

---

Danny Otsuka's knees ache in a way that has nothing to do with age and everything to do with a ship's ladder he climbed ten thousand times, and you are sitting in his ache on the edge of his bed, in his house that smells like diesel and instant coffee, drumming fingers you didn't ask for against a thigh that isn't yours. Eight minutes ago you were a landscaper in Honolulu with dimples and a short beard and dirt under blunt nails, and it was good — it is always good, the first minute, the sun on it — but you know that body from the inside now, every callus, and knowing isn't the same as wanting to stay. Seven minutes you wore him. Long enough to remember why you left the first time. Long enough to remember his best friend, the one who calls him at two in the morning some nights just to talk about nothing, the one whose voice on the phone this Kai-body still recognized before you'd even said hello. You hang up on a version of a friendship that isn't yours to keep, and Danny's hands — thick, patient, waiting — reach for the laptop instead. Small-town Ohio evening light through a mariner's window. The wheel is already loaded in the tab from last time. You don't examine the feeling much. It's not boredom exactly. It's the itch of a life that fits someone else better than it fits you, and a stubbornness that says the fix is one more spin, always one more, never this one.

You pay. You spin.

—

The barre is cold under your palm and the mirror is full of a stranger's face wearing your — no, his — surprise, and for half a second the foot that was extending into a slow développé stutters, drops an inch, corrects. You are standing in a body mid-motion, weight rolled onto the ball of one foot in a soft black shoe gone grey at the toe, and the rest of the studio arrives around you a beat behind the body itself: fluorescent hum, a lamp cone of yellow light hanging crooked over the floor, the diner sign glowing red and dead through the window across the street, one stoplight blinking for nobody. Late. Later than the shift should run. Your chest is breathing harder than the movement accounts for, and underneath your sternum something that isn't you flickers once — not pain, not distress, just a hitch, like a record skipping — and then goes still and lets you in.

—

The tank top is damp at the small of the back and it gives you the first flash: this morning, pulling it from the same drawer he's pulled it from for three years, gray gone soft at the seams, a shirt he bought two-for-one at a big-box store outside Mansfield and never replaced because why would he, it still works. His name is Corey. It arrives with the shirt, plain as a label. Corey Vantassel, twenty-eight, and the leggings against your calves bring the rest of the morning with them — sitting on the edge of a mattress that's just a mattress, no headboard, socked feet on cold floorboards, pulling the leg warmers up over ankles that have been sprained twice and taped through both times because there was a show to get to. The shoes: ribbon gone soft as rag, leather worn through at the big toe on the right one from a turn he does eight hundred times a rehearsal and has never once gotten lazy on. His hands know these knots without his eyes. You feel that — the specific competence of it, fingers that have tied this exact bow in the dark, in a car, once in a hospital waiting room the week his mother had her hip done.

The barre itself is the deepest thing. Your palm on the wood remembers ten years of palms on this exact grain, remembers being nineteen and still thinking this town's studio was a stepping stone to somewhere else, and remembers, later, deciding it wasn't a stepping stone, it was just where he danced, and that being fine. Scraping by on studio pay and teaching the Saturday kids' class, on income that never once worried him the way it might have worried somebody who needed more from money than food and rosin and gas to get to auditions two hours away he mostly didn't book. He quit drinking at twenty-four without a dramatic reason, just noticed one week that he liked mornings better without the fog, and he never smoked, never saw the appeal of putting something in his lungs that took his breath instead of building it. Church some Sundays, not all, a plain unbothered faith that never asked him to explain it to anyone. Single — an ex two years back who wanted more evenings than the studio let him give her, and no bitterness left in it, just a Tuesday-shaped absence.

And Kai. The mirror gives you that one last, glancing off the reflection of your own freckled face at an angle that isn't yours. Best friends since a summer program at nineteen, Corey the only one from that cohort who kept in touch when Kai moved to Honolulu, calls that outlast the difference in their lives by sheer stubborn affection — a landscaper and a dancer, six thousand miles and a shared joke about how neither of them followed the plan. You were Kai eight minutes ago. You know, with a clarity that makes your stomach fold, that if the phone in Corey's bag rings tonight it might be him, and Corey would answer it happy, with no idea at all what had been standing in his best friend's skin an hour before, drumming fingers, deciding whether to stay.

The body under all of it: twenty-eight and strong in the specific unglamorous way of a man who has rehearsed six days a week for a decade, quadriceps that don't shake even after ninety minutes, a lower back that complains by four o'clock and gets ignored, the crew cut you didn't choose growing in slightly uneven at one temple where he cuts it himself in the bathroom mirror to save eleven dollars. Nothing hurts that he'd call pain. Everything is used.

—

You lift your hand off the barre and hold it in front of your face — his hand, blunt-nailed, a thin white scar of callus across two knuckles from a partner lift gone wrong three years ago that never made the facts because nobody thought to call it a mark. You turn it over once, palm up, like it might tell you something the memories didn't.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to the empty studio and the red light dying in the window across the street. "Okay."

Your fingers start drumming against your own thigh before you've decided to let them.