Gordon Aldrich

You are standing in a dorm room that isn't yours, in a body that isn't yours, at three in the morning on a Thursday nobody in this building is awake for. Connor Maslanka's roommate is snoring through the wall. Connor Maslanka's laptop is open to a economics essay that is not going to finish itself, and it is not your problem, because you have decided, the way you decide things at three in the morning, that twenty-five and broke and caffeinated is not what you want to be tonight. You had him for three minutes. Three minutes was enough to know his knees hurt from a soccer thing in high school and that he has a paper due and that his phone has eleven unread texts from a girl he's avoiding. None of that is the reason. The reason is smaller and worse: you liked the last one better, the one before this one, the model in Los Angeles with the good hands, and some traveling appetite in you that never quite settles has already moved past him too. You want to know who's next. You open the laptop, not to the essay. To the site. You spin.

The fork is already coming back down when you arrive, like it was always going to, like his hand knew before you did. Coat still on. Container warm and a little slick against fingers that are not the fingers you had four minutes ago — thicker through the knuckle, a ring snagging faintly at your palm when you flex it. The window in front of you is black and giving nothing back but a kitchen, a man-shaped smear of green coat, hair the color of nothing you were wearing a second ago.

The coat is what opens first — canvas and cold air still trapped in it from outside, and under that: a walk. Not tonight's walk, an old one, the day he bought this coat at a shop on Bedford with his girlfriend laughing at him for trying on four before this one, and the particular relief of her hand on his arm outside after, cold turning bearable. You shrug it off your shoulders — his shoulders — and the memory goes with the weight leaving them, the way a held breath goes with an exhale.

The shirt underneath is louder. ARCADE LIVES, worn thin at the collar, and it comes back in the order he put it on hours ago: sleeve first, right arm, the small automatic wince because the shoulder on that side aches in weather like this, a decade of hunching toward a keyboard finally billing him for it. Then the left. Then the collar over hair he'd just run a hand through, checking it in the dark phone screen because the camera light would be on in twenty minutes and forty, fifty, four hundred people would be watching whether he'd bothered. He had bothered. He always bothers, a little, though he'd never say the word vanity out loud — his church doesn't have much use for it, and neither does he, mostly, except for this, except for the eleven o'clock hour when the light comes up and he becomes the version of himself people log in for.

Sitting is next — the stool, the counter's cold granite edge against a forearm, and the mail underneath his elbow gives up its own small flash: a letter from the diocese newsletter he means to read, a cable bill, nothing that matters, except that sorting mail at midnight is a thing his girlfriend teases him for, night-owl bookkeeping, and the fondness in that teasing arrives whole and unearned in your chest like weather moving through.

Under all of it, the body: forty-one and carrying it well, the average build of a man who moves enough not to soften and not so much he'd call it discipline. The freckles are old sun, a childhood on some lake you haven't seen yet, scattered doubly now across a nose that's been broken never and sunburned often. No ache tonight beyond the ordinary drag of standing since eight recording, since ten answering chat, since always this shoulder. A throat clear rises up out of nowhere and does itself before you've decided to let it — his tic, not yours, doing his work without you.

And the food — plain, forgettable, a container from two nights back — comes with the last and smallest thing: he does not drink to unwind after a long stream, has not in years, and would tell you, if he told you anything, that eating standing up in his coat at whatever hour is its own kind of communion, small and stupid and his.

You look down at his hand around the fork. Freckled to the knuckle, a ring catching the stove light, a callus along the side of the middle finger that has nothing to do with any game and everything to do with years of a mouse. Not your hand. Not for very long, maybe, but not not-yours either, not anymore.

You look up into the black window, into the shape of your own reflected face, and you say, quietly, to nobody, in his voice:

"Okay. Who's hungry now."