Ernesto Villalva

Six minutes in Brett Halvorsen and already the apartment is telling you no. It's the light, mostly — Seattle gray leaking through blinds someone else chose, onto a kitchen someone else stocked, protein powder and takeout menus and a lease you didn't sign that's four months behind. Between jobs, the card said. You feel it now standing here: the low hum of a body that has been worrying about money in its sleep. Athletic, yes, light brown hair, a short beard you didn't grow, and none of it yours to want. You did not spin for this. You spun past this, twenty-three, forty-one, a fisherman, a dentist, always past whatever you're standing in, because the wanting was never about the man, it was about not yet being finished looking. You set his coffee mug down un-drunk. You open vessel.cards on his phone with his thumb, and you spin.

The bathroom arrives around you already leaning. Your palm — his palm — is flat on the edge of a white sink gone yellow at the caulk, and there is a razor at the corner of your jaw, moving, no hesitation where the mouth curves, cutting the second half of the job faster than the first because nobody is home to hesitate. Foam on one cheek, bare and close-shaved on the other. A window full of white Texas morning. A mole above the stubble line, dark, permanent, catching the light when you turn your head half an inch to check the line of your own throat.

The razor is the first thing that talks. Cheap plastic, drugstore brand, and it gives you Sunday mornings — early, always early, because this is a man who rises with the version of the day nobody else in the house is awake for. Mid-morning outside and he is only now getting to his face, and that wrongness sits in your palm as a memory of its own: nights. Warehouse nights, inventory nights, the fluorescent hum you know from a desk with two monitors folding itself into a different fluorescent hum, forklifts and clipboards, a shift that ends when the sun is already high and everyone else's day is half spent. He'd come home to this sink smelling like cardboard and cold coffee and shave before sleeping, not after waking, and something in that backwardness had always felt like it belonged to nobody else, a life run against the grain like the razor strokes he never gets right on the left side of his own chin.

The sink edge gives you weight — 5'7", built average, thirty-seven years old and starting to know it in the low back, the knees, small debts the body pays quietly. Hands that know a keyboard, a stapler, a coffee maker's buttons in the dark without looking, a whole silent competence in them that has nothing to do with anything you'll ever need from him.

The flannel shirt against your back — already on, sleeves rolled, worn soft — gives you a Tuesday: buttoning it slow, wife still asleep down the hall, the particular guilt of loving quiet mornings alone before a marriage that is, on the whole, fine, decent, a woman who packs his lunch and asks nothing hard of him and whom he has never once told about the texts he still hasn't deleted from a phone two devices ago, a name that isn't his wife's, an ex he thinks about more on his good days than his bad ones, which he understands is exactly backward and has stopped trying to fix.

The wedding band on the left hand, resting against cool porcelain, gives you the wedding itself in one white flash — her dress, his mother crying, a mariachi trio someone's cousin hired without asking — and then nothing, the way a ring gives you the ceremony and withholds the marriage, because that's not what rings are for.

Foam, half-scraped, gives you money: a ledger he keeps that isn't for work, a private one, numbers that don't move the right direction no matter which spreadsheet he opens them in, a debt with no bottom he's found yet, sitting somewhere north of what a house here is worth. He does the books for other people all day, clean columns, balanced totals, and comes home to his own that refuse to close. The vape on the counter, capped, gives you three thousand small exhales, the taste of something fake-sweet standing in for a beer he hasn't let himself have in years, a rosary his mother gave him coiled in a drawer he still opens some Sundays without telling anyone he's Catholic that way, privately, guiltily, like the smoking.

The razor reaches the last patch under his jaw, right where he always slows down, and doesn't.

You look at the hand on the sink. Ring, foam, a mole you didn't choose reflected back at you in a mirror gone soft at the edges with old water spots.

"Almost done," you say, to no one, in a voice with a Texas nights-shift roughness at the bottom of it that isn't yours yet and already is.

Somewhere behind that, small and constant as the vape on the counter, the wheel is still spinning in you, and you don't know for how long you'll let it wait.