Grady Halversen

Ruben Sotelo's kitchen smells like somebody else's coffee, because it is somebody else's coffee, and you drank exactly none of it three minutes ago when you were still a stranger to this scar over his eyebrow. The delivery bag sits by the door, half-packed, some family's Sunday breakfast going cold. His phone is already lighting up with a dispatch ping he is never going to answer. You didn't come back here for him. You came back because three minutes in a body is enough to know it: the knee that clicks on the stairs, the way his line of credit runs thinner than the last one did, a life sized exactly to itself and no bigger. Ruben was fine. Ruben was nothing you wanted twice. You are standing in his kitchen at eleven in the morning with his tired hazel eyes and his gray stubble and you already have your thumb on the site before the coffee finishes dripping.

The wheel spins the way it always does, without a sound, and then there isn't a kitchen anymore.

There's a couch. There's a green hoodie soft with age against a back that isn't Ruben's back — heavier through the shoulders, a gut that wasn't there a breath ago, bare feet against a rug gone thin at the fibers. A can, warm, nearly empty, tips against fingers that close around it on instinct before it can fall. The television is still going. A stadium roar rolls out of it into a room gone dark except for its light, and the mouth you're wearing is open, and it takes the length of one replay — the ball crossing the line twice, twice, the commentator's voice cracking on the second pass — before the eyes open too.

The volume comes down under your thumb before you've decided to touch it, some earlier version of tonight already reaching for it out of habit that has nothing to do with you yet.

Then the hoodie tells you where you are. Not all at once — in pieces, the way cloth does, worn soft over the belly, a hole starting at one cuff nobody's mended because nobody minds. It's four years old and it was his brother's before it was his, and there's a whole Christmas in that, a house that smelled like a different kitchen than this one, a mother who is gone now three winters and whose absence still sits somewhere under the ribs whenever the holidays come round. You didn't ask for that. It came in on the fabric anyway.

The couch gives you the rest of the week — Tuesday's double, the walk-in that wouldn't hold temp and the argument with the GM about it, hands moving too fast over a cutting board because eighty covers doesn't wait for anybody's opinion. These hands know a blade the way they know nothing else in this world: without looking, without thinking, a callus along the first two fingers that isn't decoration, it's fourteen years of line work laid down one shift at a time. Your feet, bare against the rug, remember the mats at the pass, the particular ache that sets into arches after a Friday. This body is average in every measurement anyone would write down and none of it feels average from inside it — it feels used, and used well, tired in the specific way of a man who is good at something exhausting.

The can in your hand brings the bar two nights ago — the good kind of night, the kind that happens once or twice a month and no more, loud, someone's birthday, a woman's laugh across the table that you know before you know her name. Then you have her name. Then you have the apartment, the smell of her shampoo on the pillow that isn't this couch, the two of them moving through a kitchen that is not the restaurant's, easy with each other in the unspecial way of people who plan to keep doing this. She's at her sister's this weekend. That's the whole reason the game got watched alone, the whole reason nobody woke him for dinner.

The sweatpants know sitting. The gap in his teeth you can't feel from inside, but the tongue keeps finding it anyway, an old unconscious habit worn into muscle that isn't a memory so much as a groove. And under all of it, the leg — his leg, now yours, already going, heel drumming lightly against the floor with no game left to watch and no reason given, a motor that was running before you got here and doesn't plan to stop for you either.

Cigarettes come back only as their absence — four years quit, and the wanting still visits sometimes, phantom as a limb, worst on nights like whichever night this was going to become before the beer finished the job the game started.

You look down. The can is still in the hand — his hand, wide through the palm, a burn scar's ghost of a shine along one knuckle that isn't a scar the facts gave you, so you let it alone and just feel the heat that isn't there anymore, only ever was.

You look up into the dead light of the paused replay, mouth open on air that isn't a word yet, and then it is one.

"Huh," you say, to no one, in his voice, and the leg keeps bouncing like it never heard you.