Darnell Osei

The dock smells like diesel and low tide, and I stand there in Colby's cheap flip-flops feeling twenty-one and hazel-eyed and completely wrong for this, one minute into a life I already know I'm done with. Cold before sunrise, gulls starting up, a boat that needs him in four hours and a beard that itches at the jaw like it's not mine, because it isn't, none of it is, I only just got here. That's the thing about this body — it works. Young, quick, nothing broken in it yet. And I hate it anyway, the particular way I hate all of them eventually, the way a minute is enough to feel the walls of somebody else's whole cramped life. I don't even remember why I spun into him. Doesn't matter now. My thumb finds the phone in his shorts pocket without being told to, muscle memory that isn't mine yet acting like it is, and I open the site instead. The wheel. Early morning here, nobody awake to ask where Colby went. I spin because I always spin, because 737 times taught me nothing except that the wanting comes back on its own schedule and today it came back fast.

The wheel turns and I go.

I land sitting bolt upright on a couch that isn't the one I left, in a room gone dark except for television light sliding blue and restless across a window with the curtains not quite shut. Middle of someone's night. My hand — heavier now, darker, a stranger's hand — is already moving on its own, setting a remote down on the arm of the couch with a small definite click, and the show keeps running in front of me, some rerun, a joke landing that a half-second ago made this face laugh and now does not, because I am behind it instead of him. Weight everywhere. Thighs solid against denim sweatpants, gut resting warm under a zip-up sweatshirt, boots — no, no boots, the feet are bare against the carpet, tired feet, wide feet, feet that have stood on linoleum for ten-hour stretches more nights than anyone's counted.

The couch under my palm is nubby, worn soft in one spot, and it opens first — an evening months back, him easing into this exact cushion at two a.m. after a double, a client's oxygen machine still ticking somewhere behind his eyes, too wired from the drive to sleep, the TV on for company because the apartment underneath the bay window is quiet in a way that used to bother him more than it does now. Below-grade, cold concrete under the rug, a driveway outside cut so steep his car scrapes going in. He picked this place because the rent matched what he could pay and told himself the light from that one high window was a feature.

The sweatshirt sleeve against my forearm gives up a morning — not this morning, an ordinary one, him tugging it on inside out first, swearing quietly, turning it right, the fabric gone soft from years of the same detergent. Under it, briefly, scrub sleeves, navy, the zip catching on the collar the way it always does, and a canvas gait belt cinched at the waist that isn't here now but that his hands still expect, fingers twitching faintly toward a strap that isn't slung across him tonight. That's the job coming through: a stranger's kitchen counter lined with pill organizers, Monday through Sunday, morning noon night, his voice low and patient explaining for the four-hundredth time which is the blood pressure one. He is good at this. Genuinely good, the kind of good that isn't taught, patient past the point patience usually runs out, and nobody pays him for what it costs him.

The eyebrow scar throbs faint under my own eyebrow now that I know to feel it — a bike, thirteen years old, gravel, a stitch he was too proud to cry during. Small thing. It came along with the face and I didn't ask for it and now it's the truest thing in the room.

He is thirty-two and single and there's no ex worth the name, no kids, no church on Sunday, no drink in him for years now by his own flat refusal, no cigarette since the year he decided he was done choosing things that cost him breath he needed for the stairs at work. What's in the bank wouldn't cover a bad month. None of that arrives as fact — it arrives as the couch fabric, as the taste of nothing in his mouth where a drink would have been on another kind of night, as the specific quiet satisfaction of a man who quit two things and is proud of both, quietly, to no one.

The window behind the curtain is full black, no cars, no one else awake in the house above him or the city outside it. Whoever last stood in this body for real chose this hour to disappear into a rerun because eleven at night was still evening to a body that clocks in when other people clock out, that sleeps against the grain of everyone it loves, if there were anyone to love it that way, which right now, tonight, there is not.

I look down. My hand — his hand — broad, scarred at two knuckles from Christ knows what job before this one, turns over in the blue light like it's asking me a question.

"Huh," I say, out loud, to the empty room, to the television still running its unwatched laugh, and I don't know yet if that's relief or disappointment, mine or something of his I haven't earned the right to feel.