Dominic Castellano

You are standing under a work light in a dark theater, bolts in one fist, a stagehand's harness biting your shoulder, and the show closed twenty minutes ago and this body — blond, athletic, twenty-two, borrowed for exactly five minutes — is already boring you the way all of them start to bore you, fast now, faster than the last one. Four hundred spins teaches you the shape of that feeling before it finishes arriving. You set the bolts down on a road case. You do not clock out. You take out your phone instead, thumb already knowing the site, because the wanting doesn't ask permission and never has, and you spin it standing in the wings with the ghost light glowing behind you, and somewhere a Monday evening in New York becomes nothing at all, becomes the drop between one breath and the next.

In New Orleans it is earlier, the sun still deciding whether to go, steam rising off a wet street outside a gap in dark curtains, and a hanging arm draws itself up off a mattress edge like it was called. The breathing that was ragged goes even in the space of one inhale. Hands find each other and fold on a chest they have never folded on before in their life. You are face down and then, without the trouble of getting there, on your back, and the first thing you have is his weight — heavier than the wire-thin stagehand's, a good, dense, muscled heaviness, a body that has been worked and worked well — and the second thing you have is a white tank top damp with sleep-sweat sticking to your ribs.

The gray sweat shorts are nothing, cotton, tell you nothing. But the tank top is against your skin and it opens like a door left unlatched: a Saturday, running drills with eighth graders on a cracked blacktop behind the school, whistle around his neck, the particular joy of watching a kid finally get a crossover right and grinning so hard his face hurt. That's Dominic. The name comes with the memory the way a smell comes with a kitchen.

More comes when your foot, still swung half off the bed, brushes the sheet — the morning routine, months of them folded into one: waking at six, feet on cool floorboards, the shotgun house one room wide so that from the bed you can see clean down the shotgun barrel of it to the kitchen, coffee he quit needing years ago because it did something ugly to the anxious hum under his ribs, so now it's just water, just the tap running while he stretches his calves against the counter edge. The tattoo pulls memory up on its own, script and a date on his calf, his grandmother's name and the day she went, and under it the ache of missing her that never fully closes, dulled now by the medication that took the sharpest teeth out of the sadness but never all of them.

You lie there a second longer, not moving, and the shirt he wore yesterday — draped over the chair, close enough that its smell reaches the bed — gives you the morning he put it on: standing in front of the mirror buttoning the light blue oxford cuff first then collar, lanyard over his head last, laminate badge cool and small against his sternum, checking his own reflection the way he does every day, touching the freckles on his cheek once like confirming they're still there, like they're the one part of him that never changes even when the classroom does. Boots on. Gum, already in his mouth before he's fully awake, jaw working without him noticing, an old habit standing in for the cigarette he never actually had. Then the front-of-the-classroom quiet after the last bell, chairs pushed in crooked, chalk dust hanging gold in slant light, and under all of it a girlfriend's laugh from a phone call last night, her voice saying his name soft, and the small, plain, real gladness of being loved by somebody who isn't going anywhere.

None of that is money. None of that is anything at all, really — nothing to his name, a life you could fit under five thousand dollars, and it doesn't matter, because the freckles and the waves and the gum-chewing jaw and the ache for a grandmother are worth more to sit inside than the wanting was worth to leave the last one.

You bring your hands up in front of your face — his hands, broad, scarred faint across one knuckle from something you haven't been given yet — and turn them over slowly in the streetlight, like they're new tools you haven't tested.

"There you are," you say, to no one, to him, to the ceiling.

Somewhere down the shotgun hall a phone buzzes once against a nightstand, and you don't reach for it yet.