Dylan Quiroga

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Ernesto's hands are wrong. That's the thing you keep circling back to, standing in his stockroom at two in the morning with the delivery invoices fanned out under the fluorescent hum, waiting on a shipment that isn't coming until six. Forty-three years of them. Thick through the knuckle, a permanent ache at the base of the thumb from decades of boxes, a beard shot through with gray you catch in the reflection of the walk-in cooler and don't recognize for a full second every single time. He built something real, this man, a manager's office with his name on the door, a Saints pennant, a daughter he calls on Sundays that you have not called, because she is not yours to call. You have been him less than a minute of his actual life and already the shift feels like it will outlast you. The knees complain on the concrete floor. There's a beer gut you didn't ask for pressing soft against the waistband. You are tired of feeling forty-three. You want, very specifically, to feel twenty-one again, and you know exactly how fast that fix can come. You pull the phone from Ernesto's pocket, thumb the browser, type the address you've typed nine hundred-some times before. The wheel loads. You spin it without even deciding to, the way you'd crack your knuckles.

The floor changes under your feet, except there is no floor — there is a mattress giving under a hip that is not the hip you had half a breath ago, sheets bunched at a knee, an arm hanging off the edge of a bed into cool dark air. The breath that was ragged goes even. The hanging arm lifts on its own, folds up onto a chest that is narrower, harder, younger, and you feel the whole body turn onto its back in one motion like something correcting itself, a posture it has never once held in sleep. Streetlight comes through a gap in the curtain in a single flat blade across the ceiling. Somewhere outside, water — not the drip of a walk-in cooler, something wider, moving, a creek maybe, and trees breathing in the dark.

You lie still inside him. Twenty-one. You can feel it immediately in a way that has nothing to do with thought — the joints don't ask permission, the stomach is flat, there's a leg already twitching faintly against the sheet even in sleep, a motor that never fully cuts off. Clean-shaven jaw against the pillow, smooth, no drag of stubble. Good. This is what you came back for.

The memories come slow, keyed to what the body touches rather than given outright. Your cheek is against the pillowcase and it smells like fabric softener and, underneath that, faintly like her — not gone yet, not from this fabric — and that's the ex-girlfriend arriving in pieces: her laugh in a truck cab with the windows down, an argument in a parking lot outside a Kroger that ended nothing and settled nothing, the specific ache of texting someone at midnight and deleting it before send. You didn't do the deleting. He did. It comes through anyway, his feeling, not yours, a low persistent ember of missing someone you've never met.

Your hand finds the sheet, the flash comes sharper — this exact mattress, unmade for three days because he sleeps alone now and there's no one to make it for. A hotel bed forty times better than this one, four nights a week, and how strange it always feels to come home to a mattress worse than the ones on his expense report. The lanyard on the doorknob across the room gives you something the second you're aware of it hanging there in the dark — a hand looping it over his head that same morning, the little card turning face-out, a lobby with a fountain nobody ever turns off, a man in a gray suit shaking his hand too hard and calling him "champ" like that means something. Sales. The particular fatigue of being liked professionally by strangers for eight hours straight.

The dresser holds a folded shirt from yesterday, and touching the memory of it — not the shirt itself, just its ghost through the room's air — gives you the whole morning: him buttoning it one-handed at a stoplight in the rearview, the cuff catching on a citation clip he'd forgotten to take off the visor, laughing once, short, alone in the car, because there was nobody to laugh at it with him anymore. The tie he almost didn't wear. The blazer that always sits a half-size generous in the shoulder because he bought it before he'd finished growing into himself, and he never quite has, not all the way, twenty-one going on trying.

There's money somewhere underneath all this — you feel it the way you feel the mattress, present but not urgent, a commission structure that pays better than it should for someone his age, a number in an account he doesn't check often enough to be proud of. No church in him anywhere, no prayer before the plane rides, just a leg that bounces through every closing dinner whether he's nervous or not, has always bounced, will bounce right now if he were awake to let it.

The drift in his eye you feel from the inside as nothing at all — no ache, no pull, just a faint permanent apology he's built into every photo, every video call, angling his face a few degrees before the shutter without ever fully deciding to.

You open his eyes.

Streetlight, curtain gap, a creek somewhere below the window running low and brown under trees he can't see from here. You lift the hand up in front of your face — his hand, twenty-one years of it, no calluses that came from boxes, just a faint white scar-less palm, clean, unmarked, young — and you turn it over slowly in the thin light like you're checking it's real.

"There you are," you say, out loud, to no one, and the leg under the sheet has already started bouncing again, on its own, like it never stopped.