Dustin Whitehorse

The screen has been on for three hours and you have nothing to show for it. Saturday afternoon, the kind that dissolves without a mark on it, and somewhere in the scroll you land back on the site you bookmarked last month and didn't believe. A wheel. A price. You have wanted this since before you could say why — every story where someone wakes up behind a stranger's eyes, every thread at two in the morning you told yourself was just curiosity. Tonight it isn't. You pay. The wheel spins with a sound like a slot machine pretending to be fair, and it stops, and there is no ceremony to it at all.

You are standing barefoot on a carpet you have never seen, a tie hanging open around a collar, a hand — his hand, and now yours — flat against a chest that is not the one you don't have. The air conditioning hums too loud for any hour with light in it, but there is no light here, just a bedside lamp doing its best. Your fingers are already moving before you catch up to them: undoing two buttons, done wrong, redoing them right, tying a knot into the tie that pulls itself into shape like muscle memory doesn't need you at all. Somewhere far off, a room away, a woman is asleep. You didn't do that. He would have.

It comes in through the shirt first — cheap poly-blend, laundered too many times, and there's his hands buttoning it a hundred mornings before this one, always the top two crooked because he does it half-asleep, because the shift starts at an hour that isn't a real hour, because Vegas doesn't care what time your body thinks it is. Dustin Whitehorse. The name arrives with the collar, the way a smell arrives before a memory does. He works nights at a casino now — a *casino*, not the trailhead the badge in his closet still smells like leather and pine sap from, the ranger job two states and one heartbreak ago, before the transfer, before this version of tired. The tie is a strange animal in his hands; the uniform doesn't usually need one, but tonight there's a supervisor thing, a meeting before the floor opens, and he's nervous about it in a small forgettable way that is somehow the truest thing you've felt all day.

The belt against your — his — stomach, worn soft in one spot, gives you a wedding. Not the wedding: after, years after, her hand flat where yours is now, laughing at how the top button never survives a full shift. Her name comes slower, held back like it matters too much to just hand over: Renata. The ring is already on the hand that isn't quite yours yet, plain, warmed from his skin before you got here, and it gives you the two a.m. feedings, a daughter who is four now and thinks the ranger hat in the closet is a costume, doesn't remember pines, only asks why Daddy sleeps when the sun is up.

The carpet under bare feet gives you the drive out here, years back, the ex-girlfriend who is a name more than a face now — Shelby, brief, a college thing, harmless in the way old things get once you've built something better on top of them. The freckles register as his own hand rubs across his nose out of habit, and with it comes a whole childhood of being told he looked like his mother, sun and dust and a reservation road, before the Park Service, before any of this fluorescent hallway life. His body is heavier now than the trailhead photo, softer at the middle, and it carries something else too, quieter, a pill bottle glimpsed on a bathroom shelf, a folded card in his wallet that says what to do if he goes down and can't say why himself. It has never happened on a shift. He prays a little that it never will.

The tie sits finished, correct, a knot this closet — this life — has never worn before, and you don't know that part is you and not muscle memory borrowing your certainty.

You look down at the hand on your chest, turn it over, freckled knuckles, a plain band catching the lamp.

"Okay," you say, to the empty room, to no one. "Let's see how long you last."