Danilo Reyes

You are Corey Halvorsen for exactly three minutes, and it is the worst three minutes you have spent in eleven bodies.

The stream is off but the ring light is still on, throwing that flat blue-white across a bedroom that smells like energy drink syrup and unwashed hoodie. You keep catching yourself in the black mirror of the monitor — a face too young to have earned anything it has, a jaw that has never had to do a single hour of work, freckles like the manufacturer left the packing slip on. Blond, blue-eyed, twenty-three, athletic, and completely useless. You tried to make him do a pull-up on the closet bar for content forty seconds after arriving and his shoulder screamed at you like it had never been asked for anything before. Soft. Pampered. A body built for chairs.

You did not come here for a body built for chairs.

Somewhere under all this there is a want that has nothing to do with comfort — you have spun ten times chasing a feeling you can't name from the outside, and the feeling is never in the easy ones. It is in the ones with a life already lived hard into them, memories with calluses on. This kid has three hundred thousand followers and has never once been tired in a way that meant anything. You cannot stand another second being nobody in a body built to be looked at.

So you find the phone, you find the site, vessel.cards, the wheel already spun once tonight glowing faint in the browser history like a held breath, and you spin it again.

—

The kitchen is dark except for one gooseneck lamp clipped to a cabinet, throwing yellow across cracked linoleum. You are shorter, all at once, the ceiling closer, the air different — bleach and old grease and something metallic underneath that you don't have a name for yet. Your thumb is already lifted off a phone screen, hanging there in the blue light like it forgot what it was doing. A watch, four figures, gone translucent under your unmoving finger. You feel the weight settle into you sideways, the way all of them do — not falling into a body but discovering you were already standing in it, mid-argument with a price tag you will never win.

The phone turns face-down on the counter on its own decision, not yours, and the hand that set it there is thick through the knuckles and doesn't want to move again.

—

The shirt is what opens him first — gray cotton, worn soft at the collar from being pulled over his head a thousand mornings, and through it comes the one this morning, specific, small: him standing in front of a mirror that isn't there anymore, tugging the collar straight over the rose at his collarbone because a client's family will be at the graveside today and he likes to look decent even for people who will never look at him. Steel toes already laced. Knees of these sweatpants stiff with yesterday's dried clay, and he remembers kneeling in it, tamping sod back down over a rectangle nobody wants to think about, the smell of cut earth that never quite leaves the cuticles no matter how long you scrub.

The nose ring is cold under a fingertip and gives you a flash of getting it done at nineteen, his mother's face when she saw it, the two of them laughing about it eventually, years later, over coffee she made too strong on purpose because he liked it that way.

Your own — his own — back finds the counter edge and the ink along his shoulder blades answers: an eagle, roses, a banner with no words in it, done over three appointments he paid for in cash from tips, a bold old thing that a boyfriend once traced with a fingertip on a Sunday morning and called beautiful, unprompted, like it cost him something to say. That was Marcus. That was five years of Marcus, a courthouse wedding, a ring that lived on this finger — the tan line is right there under your own gaze, pale as a scar that doesn't hurt anymore, only itches sometimes when you notice it.

The divorce wasn't loud. It was two men who loved each other tired in different directions, and one Tuesday Marcus took the last box out to a car idling at the curb and Danilo stood in this same kitchen and didn't cry until the car was gone, and then only for as long as it took the coffee to finish brewing, because he had a plot to open at nine and the dead don't wait on anybody's heart.

The counter under your palm is the one he leans on every night doing exactly this — the scroll, the watches, the rent math that never once comes out even, twenty-seven years old and still doing this math like it's new information every time. Catholic guilt sits in him low and constant, a low hum under everything, not about the watches, about nothing in particular, just there, like tinnitus. Somewhere behind a molar is the phantom taste of dip he had a pinch of on his lunch break at the cemetery, grass and cold metal and the particular ache of a body that is skinny everywhere except where the work has thickened it — forearms, low back, a strength that has nothing to do with a gym and everything to do with a shovel that knows his grip before he does.

His hands know things yours don't: how deep is six feet without a tape measure, how to walk on wet sod without your boot punching through, how to fold a green burial cloth so the corners meet.

None of it is dramatic. That's the thing about him — nothing sticks out, nothing you'd bring up at a bar. Just a man, tired in a specific ordinary way, standing in a kitchen he can't really afford, wanting a watch he'll never buy, still wearing the ghost of a ring he took off a year and a half ago and never replaced.

—

You lift the hand off the counter and look at it in the lamp light — the calluses, the clean short nails with clay ground into the half-moons no soap gets all the way out of, the pale band of skin on the ring finger catching the yellow light like it's the only clean thing in the room.

You turn it over once, slow, watching it be his.

Then you look up into the dark kitchen window, where your own reflection is the only thing to look at, and you say, quiet, like you don't want to wake anybody down the hall who isn't there:

"Okay. Let's see what you've got, Danilo."