Isaac Delvalle

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Colton Ashworth's kitchen smells like a fryer that never gets a day off, and that's the thing you notice three minutes into being him — the smell in his skin, in the grout of his knuckles, no matter how hard he scrubs. It's Saturday, mid-morning, and he should be at the diner in twenty minutes for the lunch rush, and some tired, distant part of you that used to be other men keeps saying *this is fine, this is a life, dimples and all* — but three minutes isn't enough to want a body, it's only enough to remember why you don't. Line cook, thirty-two, a body that aches in the wrists already. You spun the wheel to escape a Tuesday six men ago and you've been running from Tuesdays ever since. Boredom isn't even the right word. It's more like hunger that resets itself the second it's fed. You reach for your phone — his phone — on the counter still spattered with pancake batter, and you open vessel.cards with a grease-shined thumb, and you spin.

The room changes before you do.

You are on your side in the dark, and the dark is wrong for the hour — you can feel that much immediately, the specific thickness of a bedroom sealed against daylight, blackout curtains, a Saturday morning shut out on purpose. A phone is six inches from your face. Blue light on your cheek. Your thumb — his thumb — is stopped mid-scroll, and then it isn't stopped anymore, it moves, faster than he had it moving, flicking past a photo of a woman he was clearly about to sit with for a while. You blink and the blink comes out wrong, missing whatever rhythm his eyes were keeping before, and something in the room's air — stale, sweet, a little chemical, vape flavor gone flat — tells you before anything else does that this man works nights or doesn't sleep on purpose, that eleven in the morning is his midnight.

The shirt comes first. Not this shirt — he's shirtless now, in an old gray tee and sweatpants — but your palm brushes the collar of yesterday's oxford, slung over the desk chair by the bed, and it opens like a door: a Friday morning, sleeve by sleeve, buttoning it one-handed in a mirror with a coffee going cold, the lanyard looped over his head last so the badge wouldn't catch on the collar. Ms. Ferreira in the front office joking about his hair. *Isaac, you're going gray at twenty-three, mijo, what happened to you.* Nothing happened to me, he'd said, laughing it off the way he always did, because the streak came in the summer he turned nineteen and nobody in his family has an explanation and by now he's decided it isn't going to be the interesting thing about him.

The empty classroom comes next, riding in on the smell of chalk dust and hand sanitizer that's baked into everything of his you're wearing. Friday, last bell, the room clearing out in that stampede-quiet way rooms full of teenagers clear out, and Isaac Delvalle standing at the whiteboard erasing Thursday's homework with the heel of his hand because the eraser's missing again, thinking about nothing, thinking about the weekend, thinking — underneath, where he doesn't look straight at it — about Marisol, who left in March and who he still calls the one who got away though she'd probably laugh at that, calling it that, since she's the one who ended it. He types things to her he doesn't send. He types things to other women he doesn't send either. Mostly he just scrolls, three, four hours some nights, thumb moving through a version of the world with no weight to it, because the real one has a diagnosis in it now — something with a name too long for casual conversation, something that flares in his joints on the bad weeks and makes him grip the marker wrong, makes fists mean something they didn't used to mean — and a paycheck that covers the essentials of a life and nothing past them, and a six-pack in the fridge that's never actually six by the time he needs it to be.

His hand, under yours, drifts on its own to his opposite thumb and starts working at the cuticle, an old tell, worn into the muscle so deep it doesn't wait for permission. You feel how thin the skin's gone there. You feel the mattress under you, cheap and familiar to him, the specific give of it. You feel twenty-three in the joints — younger than Colton's thirty-two but somehow further along in a couple of the ways that matter, the ache pre-installed rather than earned. Good build for a man who doesn't work at it. Brown eyes he's been told are his best feature by exactly one person who mattered. Faith he doesn't practice much but still crosses himself over, reflexively, in cars that stop too hard. A vape pen somewhere on the nightstand he'll reach for the second he sits up, if he ever gets to sit up as himself again, which he won't.

You feel all of it arrive and settle, a stranger's life laid into you like a coat you didn't try on so much as get zipped into.

You stop scrolling. You lift the hand off the phone and hold it up in the blue light, turning it, watching the thumb that was picking at itself a second ago go still, the white streak catching faint light at the edge of your vision where the hair falls forward.

"Okay," you say, to the dark, to no one, to whoever spins next. "Okay. Let's see what breaks first."