Justin Feng

Wallace's shift ended forty minutes ago and his knees are still telling him about it. You feel them the way you feel weather now — a permanent low front moving through hips that have hauled pallets since Reagan was president. The gray in the beard itches where sweat dried in it. You are standing in his kitchen with a glass of water you don't want, and the phone is on the counter with the site already open in the browser, because you never actually close it, not in 887 spins. You tell yourself it's boredom. It isn't only that. It's that Wallace's hands ache when he makes a fist, and somewhere there is a body that doesn't, and you are so tired of counting down the hours to a shift that isn't even yours. You didn't build this ache. You didn't build this life. You just live in it until you don't. Your thumb — his thumb, thick-knuckled, the nail on the index cracked from a strap that snapped last March — taps the wheel. It spins the way it always spins, colors bleeding into a blur, and you don't even watch it land.

The room isn't Wallace's kitchen anymore. It's dark, and it's colder in a way that has nothing to do with temperature — a stillness, a late-hour quiet — and there's a weight in your hand, small and warm and lit from underneath. A phone. Your thumb is already moving on the glass, faster than the moment before it, flicking through a scroll some other momentum had started and stopped. A pillow under a jaw that isn't bearded. A window behind you with one streetlamp burning white through it. You are lying on your side, and the shoulder under you is thicker through the fat and muscle of it than any shoulder you've wrenched in for two hundred spins, but shorter too, folded closer to itself, a compact heaviness that Wallace's long rangy frame never had.

The shirt is the first thing. A soft, worn-thin crewneck, navy, and touching it — no, wearing it, which is a kind of touching that never stops — brings a hand up out of nowhere: his hand, this morning, pulling it over his head in an airport hotel room three states from here, tag scratching once at the base of his neck before it settled. That was this morning. A different city. A flight, a lounge, a laptop balanced on a ledge with a charging cable snaking under someone else's rolling bag. Justin Feng, back from a client site in Denver, a deck he didn't finish, a partner named Whitfield who talks over him in every call. The name arrives with the shirt the way his own name always feels — obvious, unglamorous, his.

The sweatpants next, gray, elastic gone soft with washing — and through them, a whole year: the gym he stopped going to as much once the travel picked up, the fifteen pounds that sat down in his face and his gut and never really got up again, the way his mother says nothing about it and his aunt says everything. His body under your hands, under his hands, is stocky and strong in the way people don't compliment — the kind of strength that carries luggage up three flights without complaint, that can hold a plank longer than the trainers half his weight — and it is also soft at the middle, tired around the eyes in a way that has nothing to do with sleep and everything to do with the particular exhaustion of being twenty-five and already good at a job that costs him something he can't name on quarterly reviews.

The phone gives you more, because a phone always does: a text thread near the top with a name — Elena — that isn't recent but isn't old either, the kind of thread you keep because deleting it would be a decision and he's never been ready to make it. Two years together, ending a year ago, and the ending wasn't ugly, which somehow made it worse, made it a thing he still turns over some nights instead of sleeping. There's a photo he took himself for the site, or would have, in another version of tonight, standing in this same gray suit against a wall in his apartment, chin level, trying to look like someone a stranger might want — and under that thought, a small, private ember of something: that he wouldn't mind, some night, being chosen by a man as easily as a woman, that this has never been a question he needed answered by anyone else.

The dark presses in and the streetlamp throws its little coin of light on the ceiling, and there's a ring — his own hand finds it on the nightstand without you asking it to, muscle memory older than tonight, a ring he isn't wearing, that he took off before bed like he does every night, and his fingers — your fingers now — want to pick it up and turn it, an old tic, something to do while the thumb works the phone. It was his grandfather's. That comes through last and heaviest: a funeral three years back, a small warm hand — his grandmother's — pressing the ring into his palm at the reception, saying nothing, because there was nothing that needed saying. He has wanted, since, never to lose it, and never quite to wear it either.

His jaw is smooth under your palm when you finally sit up — shaved that morning before the flight, a routine as automatic as breathing, the razor two swipes he's done ten thousand times — and his hair falls forward, mid-length, brushing the collar, and the whole compact weight of him settles differently than Wallace's did, lower to the ground, denser, twenty-five where Wallace was sixty-one, no ache anywhere yet, just a body that still answers when asked.

You bring the ring up in front of your face, turning it between two fingers the way his hands have always done without him watching them do it, and the gold catches the one streetlight outside doing its whole job through a bedroom window in Philadelphia.

"Okay," you say, to no one, in his voice, which is lower than Wallace's and completely unfamiliar in your own mouth. "Okay."