Ethan Vollmer

You have been Andrés Beltrán for five minutes and already you are bored of him.

That is the shameful truth of it, sitting in his break room in Miami with his coffee going cold in his hand and his scrubs sticking to muscle that isn't fat but wants you to think it is, the kind of body that carries strength like an apology. Nurse. Good hands, gentle voice, a beauty mark near the mouth that a hundred patients have probably found sweet. You spun for this five minutes ago wanting something steady, something kind, and you got it, and it is already sitting on you like a coat you tried on in a store mirror and immediately regretted.

It's the beauty mark. Every time you catch him — catch yourself — in the reflection of the vending machine glass, it's there, and you think: not this one. Not tonight. There is no better reason than that, and you don't look for one. Your phone is Andrés's phone, but the site opens in a browser tab already logged in, vessel.cards, the wheel sitting mid-spin from last time, patient as a slot machine that never forgets your face. You set the coffee down on a table that isn't yours and you spin it again, right there in the break room, thumb doing it before the rest of you has finished deciding.

—

The rain hits you first, before you even have a name for where you are — cold and sideways and already down the back of a hood that isn't up anymore, because he pushed it back a beat too early, and now it's your face tipped up into it, water running off a jaw that is not the jaw you had four seconds ago in Florida.

You are smaller. That's the first thing the body tells you, before anything else — a compactness, a person built close to the ground, weight sitting low and soft over a frame that never quite got mean about a gym. Water on your eyelashes. A bus shelter light buzzing sodium-orange somewhere to your left, an arrivals board behind you that you can't see but can feel, the shape of the moment: a bus, three minutes, a decision already made to not wait for it under cover like a sane person.

Your — his — face is doing something you didn't tell it to do. Dimples, held there even now, even soaked, an expression that isn't quite a smile just sitting in the muscle by default.

—

The hood against the back of your neck is the first key. Wet canvas, and it opens like a held breath let go: this jacket, bought two winters ago at a store on Court Street with Mia, who held it up against his shoulders in the mirror and said it made him look like somebody's cool uncle, and he'd laughed the laugh that pushes his dimples in deeper, and that was back when Mia still said things like that to him, back before the recent quiet that has a whole geography of its own in his chest, an ex-girlfriend shaped hole he steps around forty times a day without meaning to.

The backpack strap crossing your shoulder — not on now, slung over one arm from when he shrugged it half off waiting — brings the laptop inside it, and with the laptop comes the lawn: green afternoon, a professor's voice going on about supply curves, him cross-legged in the grass with his sleeve pushed up because it's warm, sun right on the tattoo, a portrait in black and gray of a grandfather he never met, ported over from a photograph his mother kept in a drawer, a face he chose to wear on his arm because somebody should remember what he looked like at twenty-two in a soldier's uniform, even if it's only skin doing the remembering now.

The sleeve itself, cold and clinging to that forearm right now, gives you the tattoo shop: the buzz of it, the artist's radio playing something in Spanish, the shame afterward of how much it hurt for something that small, and the pride underneath the shame, steadier.

His jeans, soaked through at the shin, bring back this morning — because that's what mornings are, they're always closer than anything — him pulling them on half-asleep in a room with a window painted shut, the roommate's music already going through the wall, the vape on the nightstand he picked up out of habit and put down without using because his throat still hurt from the one last night, three of them on the stoop in the cold with somebody's decade-old speaker playing, all of them laughing at something none of them would remember by Tuesday. The shirt under the coat — his mother's Christmas gift, a size too big, worn anyway because she'd notice if he didn't — comes with mass this morning too, the incense-smell of St. Agnes's, kneeling because she was watching, meaning about half of it and ashamed of meaning half instead of all.

The shoes, canvas gone dark with water, remember nothing grand — just miles of sidewalk, campus to train to stoop to shelter, a body that walks everywhere because the subway makes him anxious in a way he's never told anyone, not even Mia, not even close.

You feel, underneath all of it, a mouth that wants a cigarette, hands that want something to bite, a body twenty years old and never quite at ease in itself, soft where he wishes it were hard, and dimpled in a way strangers comment on like it's a door prize, like it costs him nothing to have a face that looks like it's always halfway to kind.

—

You lift both hands out of his coat pockets and hold them up into the rain, turning them like you've never seen hands do that before — the nail beds bitten down past where they should be, a callus starting at the base of one thumb from a laptop trackpad, water running off the fingers in threads.

You bring your eyes up off them, into the wet gray light, and you say, to no one, in his voice, with his dimples showing even now, even soaked to the skin and shivering:

"Okay. Okay — new one."