Damarion Iverson

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The site loads slower than it should, like it's thinking about it. A wheel, spare and plain, the kind of thing you'd expect to sell a mattress. You have wanted this since before you can date it — every story where someone opens their eyes in a stranger's skin, every 2 a.m. thread you told yourself was just curiosity. Tuesday afternoon, nothing on, the kind of dull where even doomscrolling feels like a chore. You have never believed a wheel could do what this one claims. You pay anyway. You spin anyway.

It does not ask twice.

The gym is fluorescent and too bright behind your eyes, which are not your eyes, and there is a bar in your hands two inches wider than it has any right to be. Your — his — arms are already committed, already pulling, and the last rep does not look like a last rep should. No shaking. No grimace. Just weight, moving, calm as arithmetic. Breath held on a whistle that cuts off a minute early. A water bottle sweats on the floor by a bench that isn't under you anymore.

You are standing in the middle of someone else's exhale.

The bar is the first thing that gives him to you — not a memory yet, just the callus map along his palm, the specific ache in his shoulders that says this is week six of a program he wrote on the back of a receipt. Rack the bar. The clang runs up through your — his — forearms and something opens: mornings, plural, stacking. Four a.m., unlocking the bakery's back door with a key that's gone soft and rounded from ten thousand turns. The smell arrives before the memory does — flour and scorched sugar and the particular cold of a walk-in — and then Damarion is in the room with you, sleeves rolled, sliding trays into a rack that ticks as it cools.

The gray t-shirt against your back gives you the rest of this morning, ordinary as a held breath: pulling it on in the dark of a studio apartment so as not to wake anyone, except there was no one to wake. Jeans next, the ones with the give already broken into the knees. Boots that have taken flour and oven-black and never once been clean, laced in the dark by feel because his hands know the pattern without his eyes. He almost grabbed the inhaler off the nightstand. Almost didn't. It's in the gym bag now, zipped in the front pocket, and some small animal part of this body already knows exactly where.

There's a lighter he isn't smoking anything with, just something his fingers do — flip, catch, flip — when his mind wanders off a proof time or a payroll shortfall. It's in the bag too. You feel the phantom ache of his thumb missing it.

You get the rest in pieces, the way touch gives it: the birthmark under your jaw, which he stopped hating around sixteen and started just living with, the way you live with weather. Church on the Sundays his grandmother still drags him to, the choir swelling in a room that smells like candle wax and coffee urn. A girl he liked for eight months who is not an ex because it never got that far. A shift supervisor who yelled at him once for underproofing a batch, and how he didn't say anything back, just fixed it, because that's what you do with heat — you let it pass over you and you keep your hands moving. The rent that's always a little late. The inhaler's two puffs before cardio, a habit older than most of his memories, lungs that catch sometimes on cold mornings and don't ask permission first.

None of it is yours. All of it sits in you anyway, heavy and warm, like borrowed a coat that still has someone's shape in it.

You look down. His hands — hands that shape three hundred rolls before the sun's up, hands that have never once reached for a cigarette, hands that flip a lighter without thinking and set a bar down two inches wider than they'd dared all year — turn over in the gym light like you've never seen hands do this before.

You lift them, you look up into the mirror across the rack, and you hear his voice come out of your mouth for the first time.

"Whose rep was that?"

You don't spin again. Not yet. But the wheel is still open in a tab somewhere, in a life you don't have to describe, and the wanting that got you here hasn't gone anywhere at all.