Gary Denholm

You are two minutes into being a florist named Colin Vasquez, and already you know it isn't going to work.

That's the thing nobody tells you about the good bodies — the ones with the dimples, the light step, the easy blue eyes — they still have to be *lived in*, and living takes longer than two minutes. You are standing behind a cash wrap that smells like refrigerated lilies, sun coming sideways through a shop window in Silver Lake, and your hand — his hand, twenty-nine years younger than any hand you've wanted in a long time — is resting on a card reader waiting on a delivery order that isn't yours to finish. You spun for this. You spun for the dimples and the forearms and the whole rest of a life you were about to not live. And here you are, still deciding whether to text the ex-girlfriend whose number came with the memories, still feeling the ghost of an ache in a shoulder that isn't actually sore, because the itch was never really about the body. It's Monday, early afternoon, and the wanting is already back, ticking like a taximeter. You spun three hundred and eighty-four times before this and you didn't stop then either.

So you go back to vessel.cards standing right there in the flower shop, thumb on the wheel before you've even decided, and it spins somewhere on the other side of the country's clock, into an evening that hasn't caught up to your afternoon yet.

The bed comes first — a queen mattress a little too firm, a comforter smelling of fabric softener and something staler underneath, an extended-stay smell. Weight drops into you all at once, heavier than Colin's, wider, older, a gut settling against a waistband, and your spine registers a low complaint you didn't ask for. There's a phone in your hand, screen bright, a stranger's face still smiling up out of it two full seconds after it should have faded — IT'S A MATCH shrinking at the top, refusing to finish shrinking. The screen dims on its own before you can decide to dim it. In the black glass, for half a second, your own reflection is caught trying on the smile from the card. Trying it once. Then again, like it's checking whether the mouth still knows how.

The shirt is what opens him first — flannel, a soft decade of washing in it, buttons pulling slightly at your belly in a way that feels apologetic. Sleeves you didn't roll yourself and yet remember rolling: a Tuesday, a hotel room outside Canton, cold coffee, a call with a regional manager who wanted the Q3 numbers restated by five. That's Gary. Gary Denholm, and the name arrives with the rest of it — the lanyard he'd hung by the door not an hour ago, the rental car he still can't get the seat memory to hold, the diner on Main back home that closed eighteen months ago and left the whole block a little more silent than it used to be.

The ring finger tells you the rest without you touching anything more than air. A pale strip where twenty-two years used to sit. Linda's voice comes with it — not unkind, at the end, just tired in a specific key, the kind of tired that outlasts the anger. Two kids, grown now, a daughter in Cleveland who calls on Sundays and a son who mostly doesn't. A house that isn't his anymore, an apartment that is, and evenings like this one, alone in whatever city the territory has him in this week, the television on for company more than for watching.

His body settles into you like a chair that's been sat in the same way for years — the low back that never really unlocks anymore, worse after the flights, worse still after the hotel beds; a hip that clicks getting up off low furniture; the particular fatigue of a heavy man carrying it up through the knees. His hands know things yours never learned: how to shake a buyer's hand a half-second longer than feels natural, how to hold a phone at exactly the distance his eyes still tolerate without the glasses he keeps forgetting on the nightstand. A drink or two most evenings, never more, poured out of habit around six no matter the time zone. No cigarettes, never took to them, though half the sales floor used to.

Somebody — a daughter, maybe, or a coworker feeling sorry for him — put this app on his phone last week, and this is the first time he's opened it past the tutorial screen. The photo that matched him belongs to a woman named Denise, forty-one, two towns over, and he was, a whole two seconds ago, feeling something that hadn't visited him in a while — not lust, nothing so simple, just the small ridiculous lift of being chosen by a stranger on a Monday evening in a room with a dead diner two blocks away and nothing on the television worth watching.

You feel that lift going out like a pilot light.

You look down at the hand holding the phone — thick fingers, the pale ring-mark, the screen dark now and giving nothing back — and you turn it over slowly, like it might explain itself from the other side.

Then you look up, into the black glass because there's no mirror in reach, and you say, to nobody, in a voice heavier and older than the one you left in the flower shop:

"Well. Let's see what you've got, Gary."