Dean Kovacevich

Gordon Aiona's break room smells like flux and cold coffee, and you have been him for three minutes, which is exactly long enough to know the ache in the left shoulder isn't going anywhere and the coffee isn't either. You have his phone out. You have vessel.cards up on it, thumb already moving before the thought is finished, because that is the shape boredom takes in you now — not a feeling, a reflex, a door you keep opening because the last room got old before you'd even finished unpacking it. Fifty-four men and every one of them stopped being interesting around the time they stopped being new. Gordon's shoulder is going to hurt tomorrow the same as today. You pay. You spin.

The wheel turns him up out of the dark of it, and you go into him mid-breath, on his back, chest rising even, arms folded at his sternum like a man laid out for a viewing — a posture that is not his, that his own muscles have never once arranged themselves into, but you are not thinking about that yet. You are thinking about how heavy this one is, low and centered, a gut that shifts when the ribs move, a skull with no hair on it at all, not shaved-this-morning stubble but bald-clean skin against a pillow. Streetlight comes through a gap in heavy curtains and lies down the middle of the bed like a blade. Somewhere behind you, unclaimed, another arm's worth of empty sheet.

The room gives you the first of it before you even move: hotel air, recycled and metallic, a soundless hush that isn't home-quiet, it's building-quiet, hundreds of rooms breathing through the same vents. Your borrowed hand — his hand — twitches at your own chest and the earlobe under your fingers snags on something small and cold. A hoop. Silver. A flash comes with it, bright and unbidden: a mirror in a mall kiosk fifteen years back, a dare from a woman who is no longer anyone to him, a needle-gun click and the sting after, and him grinning at himself in a way he doesn't do anymore.

The mattress under your back is a hotel mattress, too broad, too neutral, and that wrongness cracks open a whole day. Not his bed. Not his house, where a woman named Priya is right now three time zones from noticing anything, asleep herself, or maybe just now getting up, because his morning and hers don't often line up either — that's a small worn groove of a thought, an old accommodation, not a wound. This room is a trade conference room, four nights, continuing education credits for the periodontal recert he's been putting off, and the reason he's asleep at an hour that isn't his own hour is that he pushed the last lecture block to catch a flight standby and then didn't sleep on the plane and then did the thing he always does, which is nap too hard, too early, and wake up wrong.

The T-shirt against your shoulder blades is his gym shirt, soft at the collar from washing, and it gives you the morning he put it on — not this morning, some other one, folding it out of a suitcase in this same room, sock in one hand, weighing whether to bother with the conference gym at all, deciding not to, the small daily failure of that logged and forgotten the way it always is. Waistband of his boxers at the hip gives you a flash of a doctor's office, a cuff tightening, a number read out that made the nurse's mouth go flat before she said it was nothing to worry about tonight, just something to watch — the blood pressure, always the blood pressure, a pill bottle rattling in a dop kit two feet from where you're lying now.

Your own hand finds your own hand at your chest, and the cuticles are torn on three fingers, raw at the edges in that specific way of a man who does it without knowing, in meetings, in waiting rooms, at the chairside while a hygienist finishes the prep — Dean picking, always picking, some low hum of a mind that never fully turns off even when nothing at all is wrong. Nothing is wrong. That is the strange, particular flavor of him: no grief sitting in him, no unfinished fight, a girlfriend who is easy to come home to, a practice that turns a profit, a body worth more sitting still than most men make working. He does not drink, hasn't in years, didn't so much quit as notice one day he'd stopped. Doesn't smoke, never did. Three nights a week he sits in a folding chair in a Kingdom Hall off Sahara and means it when he says the things they say there, in a voice that doesn't perform for anyone. He is, by every measure that would show up on paper, a fine and settled man, and the only unrest in him is a blood-pressure number and a habit of picking at his own hands like there's something under the skin he can't quite get at.

The overhead lamp of his own operating room flashes through, unasked — swung down, blind half open on afternoon light, a woman in the chair with her mouth propped and her eyes squeezed shut, and him leaning in with the mirror and the explorer, saying *just breathe, almost there*, in the gentlest voice he owns, a voice that has talked a thousand frightened people through a thousand small pains and never once gotten tired of doing it kindly. That's the thing underneath the nothing-in-particular of him: he is careful. He has always been careful. It is possibly the only interesting thing about him and it is not a thing that shows on a wheel's little portrait card.

You surface out of it slow, the weight of the gut and the shoulders settling into you like ballast, blood pressure a low pressure behind your eyes that isn't pain yet, just a promise of it down the road, his road, not that you plan on being here for the road.

You bring your hand up off your chest into the blade of streetlight and turn it over, the torn cuticles, the plain unringed fingers, a hand that has held a mirror and an explorer and nothing sharper than that in twenty years.

"Not bad," you say, to the empty side of the bed, to nobody, already half-wondering how long you'll let this one keep his own name in his own mouth before you go looking for the next.