Dustin Halbrook

Three minutes is nothing. Three minutes in Marcus Delacroix-Hensley and already you know it is nothing you want — the smell of primer never left his sinuses, his shoulder aches from a ladder he doesn't remember climbing, and there is a text on his phone from a woman named Renata asking why he never called her back last Tuesday, and you feel his guilt about it like it's yours, and it isn't, and that's the whole problem with him. Riding in someone is supposed to feel like nothing sticking to you. Marcus sticks. Three minutes and you're already reaching for the door out of him, because whatever this is — boredom, hunger, the plain itch of forty-five other men behind you and the promise that there's always a forty-sixth — it doesn't care that he just picked up a paintbrush an hour ago and was, in whatever small dumb way, happy. You open the site on his phone with his own paint-stained thumb. The wheel is already spinning before you've decided anything, which is a lie you tell yourself every time.

It lands on a kitchen in the middle of the night that isn't the middle of the night where you are.

The scroll under your thumb stops on a number with too many zeros in it. The thumb — his thumb, yours now — lifts off the glass and hangs there a half-second too long, and something underneath it isn't Dustin anymore. The phone goes face-down on the counter with a small flat sound and the hand that put it there just leaves it, fingers uncurling off the case like it burned. Overhead a single bulb hangs orange and stupid over a sink of dishes nobody's gotten to. The room smells like old grease and somebody's cigarettes from long before he quit.

The tank top is the first thing that talks. Thin cotton, worn soft, and it gives you a Tuesday — this Tuesday, actually, eleven, twelve hours ago now by his clock — pulling it over his head in a bedroom with the blinds still doing nothing against the Phoenix afternoon, second dresser drawer, the one that doesn't close right. Under it his chest is narrow, ribs close to the surface, a body that runs itself hot in ways he's had to explain to a doctor twice now — the pinprick meter on the bathroom counter, the number he doesn't love, the little foil packets of glucose tabs rattling in his glovebox where his sergeant would never think to look. Eighteen and already managing something his grandfather had, and he does it quiet, the way he does most things.

The jeans come with denim gone soft at the knee, a year of them: the academy graduation photo where his mother cried and his father, who never says much, gripped his shoulder hard enough to leave a mark that wasn't a bruise but felt like one anyway. The jeans remember a girl too — Paige, gone six weeks now, the smell of her shampoo that isn't in this kitchen and won't be again, the specific ache of driving past her apartment on a call that had nothing to do with her and everything to do with the fact that his radio still crackled the whole time like it didn't know anything had ended.

Your back finds the counter edge and the shirt — no, there's no shirt yet, just skin — gives you the tattoo before you even think to ask: a big sloppy back piece some guy in a strip mall did for cheap two summers ago, wings that don't match, and Dustin's own dry humor about it, the way he tells people it's "a work in progress" because the alternative is admitting it was a mistake he'll wear until he dies. The gray eyes blink and it's his blink, tired, the particular tired of a guy who works nights and can't make himself sleep past ten no matter how the department begs him to. He should be in bed. He's up because he always ends up up, phone in hand, doing this — pricing watches he will never own on a rookie's salary, rent already eating most of it, the diabetic strips eating the rest.

Somewhere behind that a church pew, folded hands, a boy who still goes twice a month because his mother would know if he stopped. Somewhere behind that his knuckles, cracking one after another without him noticing, a tic that outlives every version of him, and you feel your — his — fingers doing it now, unbidden, popping down the row like counting rosary beads.

You lift your eyes off the dark countertop and catch the black rectangle of the microwave door, your own reflection in it dim and strange, shorn scalp catching the one bulb's light. You turn one hand over in front of your face, knuckles up, then palm, like you're checking it's real, like some part of you that isn't Dustin at all needs proof this one has weight.

"Didn't know I had it in me to buy a Rolex," you say to no one, and it comes out in his voice, flat and a little hoarse from thirteen hours awake, and you don't laugh, because forty-six is a lot of men to have said something and meant none of it, and you are already, quietly, wondering how long you get to keep this one before the wheel starts pulling at you again.