Gregory Pastula

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The espresso machine hisses behind you and Danilo's shoulder aches with it — a small, sharp, permanent complaint from an ear that healed wrong years before you ever climbed into him. You have had him less than a minute and you already know you are not going to want him for long. Five-foot-three of counter and steam and a manager named Priya calling out a name that isn't yours, in a body that has to reach up on its toes for the good cups. It isn't cruelty. It's just that you spun him last, and last is not always want. Boredom arrives faster in a small body — you noticed that on your fourth spin and it has never once been wrong since. You wipe your hands on Danilo's apron, feel his forearms, thin and quick, and think: not this again, not yet. There's a phone in his pocket that isn't his to check and a whole life you haven't touched, and you don't reach for a single thread of it. You go straight to the site instead, thumb finding the shape of it like muscle memory that belongs only to you across a hundred and forty bodies. The wheel loads. You spin it in the middle of Danilo's shift, mid-latte, apron on, and somewhere else a man's foot leaves the ground.

The stumble that never lands. Two steps of a stranger's stride correcting itself under you, and then you are running.

Cool wet air in a chest built bigger than any you've wanted lately — you feel the size of it immediately, the reach of the legs, the way the ground gives up faster under this stride than it ever did under Danilo's. Earbuds warm in his ears. A watch buzzes against a wrist you did not ask to move, some pace it has never recorded, and the arms swing low and easy, trained, older than they look. Freckled forearms. A tattoo's edge damp with sweat where the shirt gaps at the collar. Canal water on the left, a lamp still lit and losing its argument with the coming light. His body absorbs the surprise before you can — that's the strange grace of the good vessels, the ones with fifty-three years of practice at simply continuing — and for a second there is nothing in you at all, just momentum, borrowed and enormous.

Then the shirt. Damp gray fabric clinging along your back, and it opens like a door: an early morning in a stucco apartment, quiet so as not to wake her, one arm and then the other into short sleeves, the small tug of the zip at the throat that never quite sits right over the tattoo — an eagle, wings taking the whole chest, ink laid down thirty years ago in a shop that isn't there anymore, colors gone soft as an old photograph. His hand had rested flat on his chest a second before he left the bedroom, over the bird, the way it did most mornings, not quite a prayer and not quite not one.

The wedding band on the left hand comes next, cold, then warm, and with it — her. Denise, fifteen years married, her voice saying *you'll wreck those knees* every morning he laces the shoes by the door, saying it fond, not stopping him. A daughter's laugh from some kitchen, some age you can't pin exactly, gone as fast as it came. An old ex from decades back, a name more than a face now, surfacing only because his mind still keeps a drawer for her, mostly closed.

The keys. Not on him now, but the ghost of their weight on his hip is enough — a school corridor at ten at night, buffer humming, fluorescent light over waxed floor, the particular ache of standing eight hours that the run is supposed to fix and never quite does. His back, always his back, a low steady complaint under everything, and the knees Denise warns him about, and beneath all of it a leg that would be bouncing right now if he were sitting still instead of moving it the only way it wants to move. He prays before some shifts, not out loud, mostly gratitude edged with asking for the pain to ease off. He has never had a drink, never wanted a cigarette, and there is a plain relief in that, something solid he's built his whole life around leaning on.

The watch buzzes again against your wrist, insistent, a stranger's split.

You look down. His hands — big-knuckled, freckled to the wrist, the band catching gray light — swing into view like they belong to someone you're being introduced to.

You say, out loud, breath still short from the running he was already doing: "Denise?" — and there is no one there to answer, only the canal, only the lamp going out.