Hamza Odeh

Danny Prusak's apartment smells like takeout and unwashed hoodies, and none of it is yours, not really, not even the four hours and thirty-two minutes of it. You are standing in his kitchen holding a spoon over a pot of something you don't intend to finish. The moustache itches. It has itched the whole time. Danny was fine — a body that works, a body with a whole semester's memory of some girl named Reagan you never met and never will again — but fine isn't why you came back tonight. It's the itch. It's that you spent five hours and forty-one minutes as Cody Fenwick twelve spins ago, less than a minute of it actually lived, just enough to feel the shape of a house with two different toothbrushes in the cup by the sink, a photo on the fridge of a wedding that wasn't Cody's, a name that came up in Cody's own head unbidden — *Hamza* — with a warmth that had nothing to do with you and everything to do with him, and you have wondered about it ever since, the way you wonder about a door you walked past once. You set the spoon down. You open the site on Danny's cracked phone with Danny's thumb. You spin.

The recliner under you is a couch you've never sat in, upright now, spine snapping forward on its own, and your hand — his hand — is already moving to a remote with a certainty that isn't yours, thumb finding the volume wheel and turning it down two clicks while a stadium roars tinny and distant on the screen. A can sweats warm against your palm, three-quarters full, going flat. The replay shows a ball dropping through a net for the second time. You did not see the first time. Somewhere behind your sternum a whole person you have not yet met is still mostly asleep, and you are wearing him anyway.

The shirt comes first, because it's what's touching you — no, wait, he's in a t-shirt now, off the clock, but the memory the couch fabric gives you anyway is navy, is this morning, is a hand smoothing a collar down in a bathroom mirror with the fan going because the exhaust in this apartment never worked right. *Bismillah* under his breath, small and automatic, not devotion so much as habit worn soft as a coin. Sleeves rolled twice, not three times, because three looks like he's trying. A wedding band already on, never comes off, cool then warm against his finger by the time he's out the door. The gap between his front teeth catching on his tongue the way it does when he's tired, which is always, lately, because the desk job is quiet in the body but loud in the head — eight hours of people leaning on the counter of a glass lobby telling him their names like it's his fault they're waiting.

The rest comes slower, layered, the way rooms full of years do. This couch — bought secondhand with Yusuf, his husband, the year they got the apartment, a fight about the color that wasn't really about the color. The Xbox under the TV that Yusuf plays and Hamza mostly watches, contentedly, uninterested in the game but loving the noise of somebody he loves being happy near him. A drawer somewhere with a stack of unopened cigarettes he bought once for a coworker and never smoked himself, never wanted to, the smell alone enough to turn his stomach. No glass in the house that isn't water or juice — he doesn't drink, has never once wanted to, has stood at other people's parties nursing a soda and never once felt like he was missing something.

And under the couch fabric, under the memory of the shirt, is Cody. Not a girlfriend, not anything the mosque or his mother would ever need explaining — just a friendship so old it has its own furniture, Cody's laugh coming down a phone line at midnight, Cody's hands (you know those hands, you wore them, calloused and too big for anything delicate) steadying a ladder while Hamza hung string lights he insisted on for no occasion at all. A closeness that never asked to be anything else, because Hamza never wanted it to be, and Cody never once made him feel strange for that. You reach for more and get only warmth, no scandal, which almost disappoints the itch in you and then, oddly, doesn't.

His body is compact and finished-feeling under you, twenty-five and kept that way on purpose — gym twice a week in a windowless room above the hardware store, the ache in it real and satisfying, shoulders that carry the pen and the phone and the headset all day and don't complain. A stiffness low in the back from the desk chair that's never been the right height. Feet that ache in these exact shoes, black and cheap and broken in only where his own steps have broken them.

You lift the can, feel how light it's gone, and set it on the side table without spilling it, a small competent motion his hand already knew before you asked it to. Then you turn your palm up in the dim blue light off the screen and look at it like it belongs to someone else standing just out of frame.

"Hey," you say, to no one, to the empty apartment, to Yusuf wherever he is. "I'm home."