Dylan Marchetti

Gregory's knees are the thing. They wake you before anything else does — a deep ache in a body that spent thirty years under sinks and inside crawlspaces, kneeling on tile and gravel and the cold lip of a bathtub, and never once complained until it was fifty-two and every joint sent a bill. You are standing in his dark kitchen at three in the morning, San Francisco asleep outside the window, and the fridge light is the only thing on, and you are looking at his hand — square, thick-knuckled, a white seam of old scar across the first finger — and you are so tired of it. Not tired of him exactly. Tired of the weight of getting him anywhere. Five hundred and forty-two men and you always remember, somewhere in the first hour, that a body has a bill attached, and Gregory's bill has been due for a while. You didn't plan this tonight. You just found yourself at the laptop with the wheel already loading, the way you always do, telling yourself it's only a look.

You spin. There's no ceremony to it anymore, just the click and the color and the drop in your stomach that means it's happened again.

The stroke stops mid-motion — bristles pressed flat against a back molar — and starts again, slower, on the other side, and that slowness is the only clue anyone would ever get that something walked into the room behind his eyes. You spit. You rinse twice, out of a carefulness that isn't yours yet, and you stand the toothbrush up bristles-first in a plastic cup gone grey with mineral scale, the way it has apparently always stood. The tap is still running. You reach over — someone's hand, tan where Gregory's was pale, tattooed where his was bare — and shut it off, and the sudden quiet in the tiled little room is enormous.

The tank top is against your back first, and it opens like a door: a summer three years gone, this exact black cotton soft from a hundred washes, him lifting weights in a garage gym with two other guys from the shop, laughing at something, sweat darkening the collar, feeling strong and twenty and unkillable. Then under that, further back, the drawstring waist of the sweatpants against your hip bones gives you a rainier memory — him pulling them on after a shower at midnight, alone, the apartment too quiet since Marco moved his stuff out three weeks ago, the ring light from his phone throwing blue across the ceiling because he couldn't sleep without something talking in the room.

The mirror gives you his face before it gives you anything else — gap in the front teeth, the blue gone a little faded now, needing a redo, brown roots pushing through at the part. You feel the shape of that face from inside it, unfamiliar and immediate, the small vain pleasure he takes in the gap, how he used to hate it as a kid and then a boyfriend told him it was the first thing he noticed and he's kept it like a gift since.

The neck tattoo hums under your fingers when you touch it without meaning to — four chevrons, a rocker beneath, his brother's rank, inked into his own skin the year his brother came home from his second deployment different, quieter, and Dylan needed somewhere to put the pride that had nowhere else to go. The hand tattoo is newer, smaller, flowers he drew himself at the wet bench on a slow Tuesday, because he spends all day arranging other people's declarations and wanted one that was only his.

The bench itself arrives through the memory of his palms — stem-scored calluses, thumb permanently smelling faintly of chlorophyll no soap gets out, the particular ache across the shoulders from bending over buckets since five a.m., because Miami flower markets don't wait for anyone's night owl hours, and that's the crack in this moment you can feel without understanding yet: it is deep night here in this bathroom and his body is already coiled to be tired in the wrong direction, wound like a man who should be three hours from his alarm, not standing barefoot on cold tile in the dark for no reason he'd remember choosing.

You get the ex last, sourly, uninvited — Marco's voice saying something unkind and true in the doorway of this same bathroom, the toothbrush cup they used to share now holding only the one brush. The heavy pour of rum most nights since, more than he'd admit, the pack of cigarettes he quit two years ago and still dreams about on the bad ones. None of it dramatic. Just a life, mid-scrape, going along.

You look down. Blue thread of a vein at the wrist, dirt worked so deep into one knuckle it's stopped being dirt and started being a kind of tattoo of its own, small and permanent as the real ones. You turn the hand over once, feeling how light it is after Gregory's, how ready.

"Okay," you say to the mirror, to no one, to him. "Let's see what you've got."