Danny Kowalczyk

Marcus Deveraux's kitchen table is cold under your elbow, and the laptop is still open to the wheel when you make him stand up out of the chair he has owned for less than a minute. It is three in the morning in New Orleans and everyone in this house is asleep except you, wearing him like a coat you grabbed off a hook without checking the size — six-three, skinny fat, a scar through the eyebrow that isn't yours and never will be. He'd have liked a cigarette. You don't smoke, in him or anyone. That's the trouble with a body you didn't pick for yourself: it comes with wants that don't fit your hand. Thirty-eight spins and you still do this, still feel the itch under someone else's skin about ninety seconds after arriving, the specific greed of knowing there's a next one and it might be better. Not unhappy. Just already gone. You spin because staying anywhere too long starts to feel like a debt you didn't agree to.

The wheel spins him up: a line cook, Los Angeles, thirty-seven, dad bod, freckles like a kid who never grew out of them.

And you're on your side in the dark, phone six inches from a face that used to be Marcus Deveraux's and now is not, thumb still moving on a scroll it started before you got here — faster now, steadier, past a photo you'd stopped on for reasons that aren't yours to know yet. The mattress holds you at an angle that isn't his practiced late-night sprawl. Blue light lies flat across one cheek. Somewhere past the open French doors the courtyard palms are doing nothing in no wind, and it's almost midnight here, which means somewhere behind you there was a whole day already, a shift, a walk home, and you get none of that handed to you — you have to go looking.

The shirt is the first door. Black cotton, soft at the collar from a hundred washes, and putting your attention into it the way you'd put a key into a lock gives you an arm going up, sleeve first, this morning, in a bedroom with the blinds already up because he never bothers closing them — the body under it thirty-seven years old and carrying a stomach he's stopped fighting, shoulders that still remember two years of Saturday mornings at a gym he quit going to, forearms with a rope-strength from lifting hotel pans that has nothing to do with looking good. The tattoo on the right arm answers when your forearm brushes the sheet: a flash of the shop, twenty-four years old, broker than he is now, a friend's cousin with a steady hand doing a skull wrapped in roses in three sittings because that's what he could afford in installments, and the pride of it, dumb and real, every time a sleeve rides up in summer.

The phone in your hand is the loudest door of all. Warm from his grip, thumbprint oil already on the glass, and it gives you her name before it gives you her face — Erin, three years gone and still there in the account he never blocked, posting a beach he recognizes because they went to it together once. You feel what he felt an hour ago, lying here after a double, replaying a fight that ended a thing that had already been ending for a year before it ended, the specific tiredness of being thirty-seven and single in an apartment with a courtyard full of dry palms and a landlord who never fixes the AC. He is not devastated. He is just awake later than he should be, doing the thing everyone tells you not to do, because the alternative is lying there with nothing to hold.

The mattress under your hip remembers the shift that ended four hours ago — the heat coming off the flat-top even after close, the burn scar he doesn't have yet but will get eventually because everyone does, the particular ache low in the back that comes from standing on a rubber mat for nine hours calling out orders and eating them at the same time. His hands, when you let them go still a second, want to drum on something. Fingers already tapping a rhythm on the phone case that has nothing to do with any song, just motion for its own sake, the thing they do when the rest of him is thinking. Beard against your own jaw when you shift, trimmed close last night with the same clippers he's had four years, a habit from a father who kept his own that way, mainline Protestant and practical about grooming same as everything else.

You feel where his money isn't — the checking account hovering thin until Thursday's paycheck, the tip-out that was light tonight, a life built out of a job he's good at and doesn't love and can't easily leave, the kind of scraping that isn't crisis so much as weather, always there, always managed. No kids. No nicotine, tried it once at nineteen and hated the taste. A beer after close with the sous chef, nothing more, most nights nothing at all.

The thumb under your thumb keeps moving through the door you arrived holding, and somewhere in the scroll there's a photo of him at a barbecue two years ago, laughing at something out of frame, freckles catching the flash, and it hits you that this is the thing you'll notice about him before anything else does, every time you catch him in a mirror: the freckles, dead ordinary, the kind of face that used to run around some backyard in a town that isn't glamorous about anything, and ended up here instead, cooking other people's dinners under a hood vent at midnight after midnight.

You let the phone drop to the comforter. You bring the hand up in front of your face — his hand, wide-knuckled, a burn mark healing pink on the side of the palm, the skull tattoo running down toward the wrist in the low light — and you turn it over once, like checking it's real, which it is, now, however long that lasts.

"Didn't think I'd still be up," you say to no one, in his voice, and you don't know yet if that's true.