Danny Reyes

You're standing in a garage that smells like brake cleaner, ten minutes deep in a body that isn't yours, and it's already boring you.

Chris Delacroix has good shoulders and a bad radio station stuck on the shop stereo and a coworker somewhere out front who's going to want to talk about the Warriors. You picked him off the wheel for the arms, if you're honest, for the tattoo like a story someone else lived, and it took exactly ten minutes standing in his boots to understand that a body is not a life you get to skip to. He was about to open the hood of a Civic. His hands know the routine so well that yours, riding inside them, don't even have to try — and that's the problem. There's nothing left to learn here. You spun for a feeling and got a checklist.

So you go back. Same site, same wheel, phone in Chris's calloused hand, 6 a.m. San Francisco going gray outside the bay doors. You spin it again because the wanting came back faster than you expected, faster than it should, and you don't say that part out loud to anyone, not even yourself.

The wheel gives you Las Vegas, and gives you small.

The breathing changes first — ragged, then even, one clean breath that isn't a decision so much as a door closing behind you. The arm that was hanging off the mattress draws itself up without being asked. Hands fold at the chest. You are lying face-down in sheets that smell like someone else's sweat and someone else's fabric softener, and then you are on your back, and you have never once in this life slept this way, and you know that the way you know a room is cold before you open your eyes.

Streetlight comes through the gap in the curtain like a blade laid flat.

You are small. That's the first true fact of him — not an idea, a physical one, the mattress ending closer than you expect, the ceiling nearer, a compactness to the whole arrangement of you that reads, oddly, as coiled rather than lacking. Something in the shoulders and the forearms says this body works, works hard, every day, and is worth more than it looks like standing still. Your jaw aches in a specific way you don't yet have the word for. Your throat is dry in the specific way of a man who stopped breathing for a few seconds several times last night and doesn't remember any of them.

The girlfriend is asleep beside you and her arm is heavy across your ribs and touching it gives you nothing yet, because you haven't moved, because this beat is stillness — but stillness with your whole self roaring quietly to be let in.

Then your hand finds the sheet, and the sheet remembers before you do.

It's not sequence, it's flood: a strip club parking lot at nineteen with the desert heat still coming up off the asphalt at midnight; the specific grief-taste of Marisol's name, an ex he doesn't say out loud anymore but whose laugh still shows up sometimes in dreams shaped like a warning; a rosary his abuela pressed into his palm before Confirmation, the beads too smooth now to feel holy, just familiar. Your hand opens and closes on nothing and the leg — his leg, always, whether he's thinking about it or not — starts bouncing under the blanket, a motor that never got the message that the shift is over.

You reach for the shirt hung over the chair back without meaning to, just reflex, just something to hold, and it gives you the morning it was put on: 5 a.m., a locker room that smelled like two-cycle oil and coffee, chaps stiff with yesterday's sawdust, the particular ritual of buttoning a flannel one-handed while the other hand holds a thermos, sleeve rolled past the wrist because a sleeve too long is a sleeve that catches on something that will take your arm off. Boots that have been resoled twice. The whine of a saw starting up somewhere out past the loader, that specific quiet-before-noise that a cut block has at first light, cold enough to see your breath, the trunk beside you already scored where the wedge goes in. His hands know that saw the way Chris's hands knew the socket wrench — no thought in it, just muscle doing what muscle was built to do, and under it, always, the small tremor of the apnea nights, the tiredness that never fully leaves, the doctor he keeps meaning to call back about the machine he won't wear.

There's a rhythm underneath all of it, steady as the shift bell: this is a man who quit cigarettes and never started drinking and goes to Mass when his girlfriend asks and sends money home some months and has never told anyone the exact shape of what happened with Marisol, only that it changed which version of tenderness he trusts now. Twenty-six years old and careful with what he's built, which isn't much on paper — enough saved that he sleeps fine about it, when he sleeps at all — and none of that shows in the softness of the room around you, the cheap curtain, the unremarkable ceiling.

Her breathing beside you is slow. Somewhere past the window, a delivery truck downshifts for the loading dock four floors below, and it is a sound this city makes at every hour, because this city doesn't believe in mornings the way the desert outside it does.

You look at your hand in the gray light. It's smaller than the hand you left behind an hour and four hundred miles ago, but thicker through the palm, a callus along the base of the fingers that has never once been soft. You turn it over like it might have writing on it.

"Not yet," you say, quiet, to the dark, to her sleeping shoulder, to no one — and you don't know yourself if you mean the alarm, the wheel, or something further off than either one.