Grant Novosel

You are still standing in Brendan Coyle's kitchen, in Brendan Coyle's body, with the scar through the eyebrow you gave yourself a name for years ago and never earned. Small-town Ohio, Monday afternoon, sun coming through a window over a sink full of somebody else's dishes. Three minutes was nothing. You barely got your hand around a beer bottle before the itch started again, and now you're standing here holding it, still tasting the last body's cigarettes he never smoked, thinking about the guy in the photos on this refrigerator. Grant. Best friend. Groomsman. The one in the Phoenix scrubs, blond, laughing with his arm slung around this exact neck at somebody's wedding. You know things about him you have no right to — not because Brendan told you, but because for three minutes you were the hand that grabbed those photos off a shelf to show a stranger which one was you and which was Grant. Boredom didn't do it. Curiosity did. You want to know what it's like to be looked at by this man's own memories from the inside, to stand on the other side of a friendship you just borrowed. You set the bottle down mid-swallow and you're already gone.

The couch takes your weight before you know it's a couch. A can, warm, tips against your palm, sweat-slick aluminum going soft in your grip. Basketball noise fills a room you didn't choose. Your mouth is open. There's drool at the corner of it, cooling. Somewhere behind your eyes a horn sounds, tinny and far off, and a body that is shorter and denser than the one you just left settles its own weight for you, without asking, the way a body does. You wake on the second replay. A thumb — his thumb, quick and sure even half-drunk with sleep — finds the volume knob before you've caught up to owning it.

The can is the first key. Warm beer, the smell of it rising up sour and familiar, and under that: him, months of him, popping tabs on this same couch after twelve-hour shifts that ran into night shifts that ran into more of the same, some rotation that keeps eating his mornings. It's the middle of his morning right now and he's asleep in front of a game because that's what night shift does to a Monday — flips it inside out, makes eleven a.m. feel like last call. You feel how tired the muscle is, good tired, the kind that comes from actually working a body all night — turning patients, running down a hall, holding somebody's hand through something bad at four a.m. and then charting it under lights that hum.

The shirt against your back — no, not a shirt, a worn gray tee, soft as an old bandage — gives you the morning he put it on, except it wasn't morning, it was the tail end of a shift, scrubs peeled off in the locker room, this shirt pulled on inside out and fixed with the tired laugh of a man who's done that twice this week. Sleeve caught on the tattoo on his upper arm — the crest, his college team, inked on a dare with Brendan standing right there egging him on, both of them twenty-two and certain nothing would ever hurt. That's where the ache starts, small and specific: Brendan. You just wore Brendan for three minutes and left him standing in his own kitchen not knowing anything left him. Grant's memory of him arrives all at once and enormous — camping trips, a hospital waiting room the year Brendan's dad went in, the two of them not saying anything for hours because they didn't have to. You are, right now, inside the exact love that man's memory holds for the man you just were. It sits strange and heavy, like drinking two different cups of the same coffee.

The can rocks in your hand and gives you more: a girlfriend's laugh from a doorway, an ex who still texts on his birthday and who he still, some nights, misses in a way he'd never say out loud to the girlfriend. Cuticles — his fingers already worrying at the one on his thumb, a habit that isn't yours and starts anyway, muscle doing what muscle does. The couch under you gives you rent split with a roommate who's out right now. The remote in his hand, worn smooth at the buttons he uses most. The white streak in his hair — cold water from a Scottsdale well, his mother's superstition, a story he tells at parties that isn't quite true and he likes it that way.

You feel the height of him now, properly — 5'4", but solid, more muscle packed into less room than the last man you wore, shoulders that have hauled patients twice his size out of beds without asking for help. Feet bare, one propped against the other on the coffee table. A body that has never touched a cigarette and doesn't miss it. Hands that know, without you telling them, how to find a vein in the dark.

You look down at those hands — blunt, strong, a thumbnail bitten to nothing — and turn them over slow, watching light from the TV slide across the knuckles like it's the first light that's ever touched them.

"Hell of a nap," you say, out loud, to no one, in a voice that isn't the one you had seven minutes ago.

Somewhere down the line there's a girlfriend who'll call this afternoon, an ex who might text tonight, a shift starting again after dark. You don't know which of them gets him first, or how long you'll let them.