Dean Osweiler

Esteban Marchetti's hand is on the register drawer when the itch starts, somewhere behind the sternum, in a place that isn't a place. He has owned this hand for less than a minute — the shop smells like cumin and cardboard, a delivery still half-unpacked on the counter, and some part of him, the part that is really you, is already bored of the smell. Forty-seven years, a cleft chin, a store that will still be here at closing whether you're in him or not. That's the trouble with a body you only just took: it comes with no appetite of its own yet, and yours is already somewhere else, already turning the idea over — somebody younger, somebody built different, somebody who isn't standing in a stockroom at midnight doing inventory he doesn't even remember learning to do. You don't decide so much as notice you've already decided. Your thumb finds the phone in Esteban's pocket before Esteban would have.

The wheel spins through colors you don't bother naming.

The arm that was hanging off the mattress draws itself up like a diver surfacing. Breath that was ragged — snoring, almost, open-mouthed into a pillow — goes level and quiet in the space of one inhale. Hands fold at the chest, fingers lacing, a posture this body has never once chosen for itself in sleep, and you are behind a face you did not pick, in a room that smells like fabric softener and the ghost of someone else's cigarettes from a car ride hours old, streetlight cutting one bright seam through blackout curtains. Short. Dense through the shoulders even lying still. Stubble that itches faintly against the pillowcase. You lie there a second inside him, feeling how compact he is, how the muscle sits close and ready even at rest, nothing like Esteban's soft forty-seven years.

It comes in through the sheets first — cheap cotton, washed too many times, and underneath it a flash: *her* side of the bed empty because she's on nights at the hospital this week, the two of you doing that marriage-of-schedules thing you've done for six years now. Her name arrives with the pillow smell — Priya — and the small ongoing ache of missing someone who is only in the next room over, technically, on a baby monitor, because one of the two kids down the hall still doesn't sleep through.

Then your folded hands remember the shirt that isn't on them anymore, peeled off before bed, slate-gray button-up with the sleeves already rolled when he bought it because he liked how it sat, how the color didn't fight with the gray coming into his hair early — thirty-five and already going silver, and he decided a long time ago to quit fighting that too and just slick it back, let it be a thing people noticed. The earplugs on the cord around his neck swing faintly against a memory of themselves: the extrusion line's roar, eleven hours of it, plastic spooling hot and endless off the die, the ache that lives permanently now behind his left shoulder blade from the same reaching motion four thousand times a shift. His hands know that machine without thinking — the exact half-turn of a valve, the heat-shimmer you learn to read like weather. Hands that are strong in a specific, used way, calloused along the first knuckles, a thin scar on the left thumb from a year he doesn't like discussing.

The tattoo on his upper arm gives up its own hour: a tiny shop in Montrose, a friend's shaky hand, something fine-lined and geometric because he wanted it to look like it meant math more than feeling, when actually it was the year his first marriage ended and he needed something permanent that wasn't a mistake. The nose ring is newer — Priya's idea, half-joking, and he liked that he still had it in him at thirty-five to let a woman talk him into something.

Under all of it, deeper, come the kids — not here, this week, with their mother, the one who got away, the one whose name still makes something in his chest tilt a little sideways even now, even happy as he is, even loving Priya the plain uncomplicated way he does. Church on Sundays when the shift allows it. A God he talks to mostly in the truck. A little money saved, not much, enough that he doesn't panic in October.

You feel all of it land in a body that is shorter than Esteban's, denser, younger by twelve years, and something in you that has been waiting all week for exactly this settles like a held breath let go.

Your eyes open. Streetlight, curtain-seam, a ceiling you've never looked at from this angle. You bring one hand up out of the fold at your chest and turn it over above your face, watching the fingers, the thumb-scar, the stranger's history still arriving in waves off the skin.

"Not mine," you say, to the dark, to no one, and you're smiling before you mean to — the dimples come in even at rest, even now — and you have absolutely no idea yet how long you intend to keep him.