Derek Salcedo

The screen is the only light on. Everyone else in the house has been asleep for hours, and it is that particular dead hour where a Tuesday hasn't decided whether it's still Monday, and you've scrolled through everything you already looked at twice. You have wanted this for years — not the site, the site is new, but the wanting is old, older than you can date, some itch about waking up on the other side of somebody else's face. Every version of it you ever found was fiction. This one has a payment field. You tell yourself you're only looking. You put in the card number like it's a joke you're playing on yourself. The wheel is ugly, a cheap CSS spinner dressed up with gold trim, and you watch it tick past faces too fast to hold, and you think, distinctly, *this won't work*, right up until it stops.

There is no sensation of going anywhere. There is a box, cardboard, corner biting into a hip that is not a hip you have ever had, and the smell of new carpet glue, and light coming sideways through a window with no curtains yet. Late morning light. You are standing. You are heavier than you have ever been, in a way that isn't fat, is just mass, shoulders you didn't ask for and got anyway. Your hands — his hands — are still closed around the box's flaps. Keys hang from a lock in a door that's standing open behind you. Nobody saw. Nobody was there to see.

You set the box down because the arms want to. That's the first thing you learn about him — the body already knows what it's doing, and you're a passenger behind the wheel of someone else's competence. You leave the keys hanging where they are and your feet take you along the wall, knuckles trailing the plaster, and it isn't your idea, it's a habit older than you, checking a room the way you'd check a pulse.

The shirt is what opens first. Chambray, soft from washing, and touching your own collarbone through it gives you a morning — his morning, hours before this one by his clock, dark still, his wife's shape asleep behind him while he stood at the closet not wanting to wake her, buttoning it slow, thinking about the listing on Sahara he had to open at nine and whether the seller's agent was going to lowball him again on commission. His hands did the buttons without him watching them. Muscle memory, thirty-four years of getting dressed, going back through boyhood shirts too big for him, a highschool letterman jacket, all of it folded into these forearms.

The keys, when your fingers finally close around them, hanging still in the lock — those give you the drive over. Boxes in the truck bed, a couch strapped down with cargo netting he was proud of himself for tying right. His wife two cars behind with their daughter buckled in, four years old, singing something off-key to the radio that wasn't even playing, just singing into the glass. He'd caught her in the rearview and felt something in his chest go soft and stupid the way it always did, no matter how many times.

The floor under his boots gives you the walkthrough with the agent last month, before it was theirs — how he'd run his palm along this exact wall for cracks out of habit, professional tic, the same motion he does now not for a client but for himself, because it's his wall now and some part of him still doesn't believe it. The scar through his eyebrow itches, faint, phantom, and comes with the memory riding it: nineteen years old, a bar fight he started for a stupid reason he'd rather not remember, a girl's name he genuinely can't recall attached to the reason, and his mother's face at the ER not disappointed so much as tired. He quit fighting. He quit smoking four years later, harder than the fighting, white-knuckled it through a whole summer chewing gum until his jaw ached.

The wedding band is warm from his own hand, and that one comes slow and full — a courthouse afternoon, nobody but her sister as witness, and how he'd been more nervous knotting his tie than he'd ever been showing a seven-figure house. And under that, quieter, something he doesn't examine directly and neither do you, out of an odd respect: a woman before her, the ex, a name that still puts a small flinch in his sternum when it surfaces, texts he shouldn't have kept and did, a door that isn't fully closed even now though he's never once acted on it. You let it surface and you let it go. It's his. You are only renting the ache.

And under all of it, the plainest thing: this is a good body, strong through the shoulders from moving furniture for other people's clients for a decade, a low ready pulse, a slight stiffness low in the back from lifting that last box wrong ten seconds ago, blond hair damp at the hairline from the effort, breath still catching up to itself. Comfortable in its skin in a way you've never once been in anything.

You look down. His fingers — your fingers now — spread against the light coming through the bare window, and you turn the hand over slow, both sides, like you're checking it's real, and somewhere very far under the surface you feel him, or the last shred of the shape he left, not screaming, not anything, just gone, the way a screen goes dark.

You lift your eyes toward the empty doorway where the keys still hang, and you say, out loud, in his voice, to no one:

"Okay. New house."