Fetu Langi

You have never told anyone how long you've wanted this. Not the exact shape of it — not the nights spent reading forum threads about a body that isn't yours, not the movies you rewatched for one scene, not the strange ache of wanting to be *someone*, specifically, rather than yourself. It never had a name before, and it never had a price. Now it's eleven in the morning, a Monday, nothing on the calendar and nothing in the fridge worth eating, and there's a page open called vessel.cards with a wheel on it that looks almost like a joke. You don't believe it will work. You pay anyway. You spin anyway, because the wanting has been sitting in you for years with nowhere to go, and here, finally, is somewhere.

The wheel stops.

You are standing. You are heavy in a way you have never been, weight low and settled through the hips and gut, and your hand — his hand — is closed around a caliper, mid-adjustment, the little knurled wheel of it still turning under a thumb that already knows the exact pressure to use. Somewhere behind your eyes a motion almost goes wrong — jaws of the caliper closing a hair too far — and then corrects itself, slow and deliberate, and the fluorescent lights overhead hum against a version of two a.m. that your body insists is the middle of the day. The gear housing on the bench in front of you is a familiar half-finished thing you have never seen before. Somewhere outside this room the sun that should be up is not, because Houston is on the other side of the night from wherever you were, and his shift doesn't care what time your body call it.

The shirt is what gives you the first of it — flannel, red and navy, sleeves rolled twice at the forearm — and touching your own sleeve you get an unbidden flash: a bedroom before dawn, dark except for the closet light, a hand (his hand) buttoning this exact shirt one-handed while the other holds a phone up, texting the guy covering for him because someone's kid has a fever. The vest goes on next in the memory, zipped to the sternum, an old habit from a foreman years back who said a full pattern shirt reads as sloppy on the floor even if nobody official is looking. You feel the fondness in that memory like it's your own, except it isn't — it's a residue, a secondhand warmth, Fetu's own hands doing what they've done a thousand mornings, half-asleep, sure of themselves.

More comes; more keeps coming. The wedding band is warm from his own body heat and it drags a whole marriage up with it — Talia's voice, not what she said but *how*, dry and amused, the two of them at a taco truck the week they got engaged, her laughing at how seriously he explained torque specs to a man who had asked what time it was. A daughter's name arrives with a memory of a school play, him standing at the back in steel-toes because there hadn't been time to change, clapping too loud. There's church, a Sunday feeling more than a Sunday image — the particular quiet of a chapel, a testimony he gave once about patience that he privately thought was a little corny and gave anyway. There's a memory of a cigarette, the last one, seven years gone, crushed out in a parking lot on a bet with a coworker neither of them won. There's the tribal tattoo on the inner forearm, and touching it gives you a tattoo parlor in another city, twenty-four years old, a design he chose because his uncle had one close enough to it and he wanted something that pointed backward, toward people, not forward toward nothing. The hair — you feel it before you understand it, longer than yours has ever been, unevenly overgrown at the neck, and under it a small, specific vanity: he dyed it blue on a dare from his kid and kept dyeing it because she said it made him look "like an alien dad," which is, apparently, exactly what he wanted to look like.

The body underneath all of it is thick through the middle, strong through the forearms in the specific unglamorous way of a man who lifts things wrong for a living and gets away with it, and there's a low familiar ache low in the back that this body has clearly been ignoring for years. The hands are sure — surer than any hands you've had, though you've never had any — and they finish the measurement on their own, log a number on a clipboard in handwriting you didn't choose, cap a pen and click it twice out of nothing but habit.

You look down at those hands.

You turn one over, freckled across the knuckles same as the nose, the ring catching fluorescent light, and for a second it is the strangest and best thing that has ever happened to you — not because it's his hand, but because it's not yours, and you have wanted, for longer than you can date, to be able to say that and mean it.

You lift your eyes to the window's reflection instead of the lens, because there's no lens here, only a room and a half-built machine and a shift that isn't over.

"Hey," you say, to no one, in his voice, testing whether it answers back.

It doesn't. It's yours now. For however long that turns out to mean.