Desean Okafor

Todd Farriday's hands are on the countertop, gray hair in his eyes, and the granite is cold under his palms the way it always is at eleven at night in this kitchen that isn't his either — not really, none of them are — and Todd is only who you're wearing until you decide he isn't. Forty-seven years old, gray-blue eyes, a cleft chin you didn't ask for and got anyway, twice now, apparently, because the universe of that site has a sense of humor. Todd's back aches from a day of other men's houses. You spun this one up months ago for reasons that don't matter anymore. What matters is that sixteen minutes ago you were someone else — Marlon Etheridge, forty-four, muscled shoulders, a house in Phoenix with somebody's laundry still in the dryer — and you wore him for less than a minute before you spun again, restless, already bored of a body you'd paid to feel powerful in. Marlon has a roommate. You remember him the way you remember a room you walked through once with the lights off: Desean, some nights home, some nights not, always smelling like fryer oil and an ashtray. You didn't think about him then. You're thinking about him now, standing in Todd's kitchen with Todd's coffee going cold, because there was a door in that house you didn't open, and something in you wants to.

You pay. You spin. The kitchen goes.

You are on your side in the dark, knees drawn up, a phone six inches from your face throwing pale blue light across a cheekbone that isn't Todd's, isn't Marlon's, is new, is his. Your thumb is already moving — faster now, steadier, flicking through a feed he'd stopped scrolling to actually look at something, gone now, replaced by whatever your hand wants. The room smells like somebody else's cigarettes gone stale in the curtains. Your knees ache in a way that has nothing to do with age and everything to do with eight-hour shifts on a hard floor. You are here. You did not travel. You simply are, mid-motion, mid-breath, in Desean Okafor's body at the end of his Friday.

The phone is the first thing that opens. Six years of this exact model and the ones before it, the glass warm from his palm, and it comes up out of nowhere — a woman's voice, laughing, saying his name wrong on purpose because it made him laugh back, and the sting under that laugh now, because she's a "recent ex" in the part of him that still flinches at her contact photo when it used to make him grin. Marisol. Two kids between them, a boy and a girl, their faces flashing through in overlapping stills — a birthday cake, a car seat, a school drop-off he was late for because closing shift ran long. Guilt sits under all of it like a stone in a shoe.

The T-shirt against your back gives you the morning: gray cotton, thin from washing, pulled on after a shower he took at six a.m. before a double, one arm through the sleeve at a time because the shoulder's been catching since he pulled something lifting a tray rack two years back and it never really healed right, just quieted down into a permanent low hum he's learned to work around. The sweatpants at your ankles — his hand did that, hooked the waistband, stepped in one leg then the other, half-asleep, thinking about nothing, thinking about Isaiah — his boyfriend, three months in, a name that arrives warm and a little nervous, the specific ache of being both still hopeful and still gun-shy from Marisol, of not having told him yet about the tattoo on his left forearm, the small ugly one from a spring break he doesn't talk about, blurred green ink he covers with long sleeves at work and regrets every single day he catches it in a mirror.

The mattress under you gives up the apartment itself — Denver, a porch two blocks from here he doesn't have but wishes he did, mountains you can see from the parking lot if you stand at the right angle, and under it, the restaurant: chairs upside down on tables at close, the particular quiet of a dining room after the last table leaves, his knees screaming, a cigarette he'll smoke on the back step before driving home, a beer he'll drink two more of once he's there. The drink lives in his memory like weather, always coming, always about to arrive. His body holds all of it at once — thirty-two, six-one, the average build of a man who used to be an athlete and now just stands twelve hours a day, the cleft chin people always mention first, the buzzed scalp under bleach he touched up himself two weeks ago in a bathroom mirror, singing badly.

You feel all of it land in the same held breath — the ache, the ex, the kids, the boyfriend, the regretted ink, the twelve-hour shoes still by the door — a whole tired, loved, complicated man arriving into your hands sleeve by sleeve, faster than any of it can be sorted.

Your thumb stops. You turn your hand over in the blue light, look at the tattoo you didn't earn and now own, and you say, quiet, to no one, "Okay. Let's see what you've got."