Kalani Freitas

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Gregory Vantine's office chair creaks under you when you lean back, and you hate the sound of it, the same as you've hated it every time you've sat in it for the last fifty minutes. You are forty-four years old in this body, red-haired, blue-eyed, a name on a brass plate, and none of it is the problem. The problem is you spent it on Marshall Auduboin first — that great gray-haired giant, hazel eyes, hands that knew forty kinds of stem and thorn — and you were him for less than a minute before you spun again, because a minute was enough to know you didn't want the flowers, you wanted whoever else was in that house. The roommate. You caught the edge of him in Marshall's memory the way you catch a name at a party, gone before you can hold it, and it itched at you the way nothing has itched in six hundred and fifty spins. Not lust exactly. Curiosity with teeth in it. You want to know him from the other side, now that you've already stood in his kitchen wearing somebody else's height.

So you open the laptop, already someone new-old, already tired of Gregory's tie loosened around Gregory's throat, and you go to the wheel.

—

The box leaves your hip and lands on the floorboards with a sound like a held breath let out, and the door is still open behind you, keys swinging faintly on their ring, and light is coming into the room sideways, white and heavy the way it only gets here. Your shoulders are not the shoulders you had a second ago. They are lower, tighter, used. Something in your forearm aches in a way that isn't new — it's old, it's years old, it's just arrived with you. You are standing in an empty front room in a house on posts, tin roof somewhere above you holding the heat, and you don't know yet that it's morning here and afternoon in the place you left, only that the light feels wrong for what your body is telling you it wants, which is coffee, a cigarette, sleep it didn't get.

You set nothing down because it's already down. You leave the keys where they hang.

—

The t-shirt is the first thing that speaks. Navy, thin at the collar, and it gives you a closet in gray dawn-light, a woman's arm thrown over your — his — chest, the smell of her hair, the sound of the shop calling him in at an hour most people are asleep at. Ipo. You get her name before you get anything else, and it comes with a warmth that isn't yours and that you take anyway. He works the graveyard line at the fab shop because the overtime's better and because he likes the quiet of it, the shop empty except for the hiss and the dying orange of sparks on concrete, and this morning is his morning, eleven a.m. is his midnight, and he came home to her sleeping and did not wake her, and he dressed in this shirt in the dark by feel, one arm through, the fabric catching on the tattoo he never has to look at to know is there — Evelyn, 10.12.0—, a name and a date that ache going on, worse than the shirt, worse than anything: he had a sister, he does not have her anymore, and the ink is the only room in the house that still holds her. You feel it pull tight across your shoulder the way it pulls every day, an old grief worn thin as cotton.

The keys, still swinging in the door behind you, hand you the whole morning in one motion: loading the truck alone because Ipo had to work, the last box wedged against his hip exactly the way it sat a second ago, the drive up through Kalihi with the windows down, red dirt kicking up off the tires into a yard he already loves though he's owned it four hours. He is thirty-two. His hands, when you feel them properly, are a welder's hands — nicked, a burn scar gone silver on the left thumb, strong in a specific practiced way, the strength of a man who spends his shifts holding a torch steady against gravity and heat and his own tired arm. Nothing in this body is soft. Everything in it is used exactly as much as it should be and not more.

The floor under your — his — sneakers gives you the emptiness of the room itself, how he walked it before the boxes came, corner to corner, knuckles trailing the wall, checking for damp, for cracks, for the small failures a house hides from a buyer. He does this in every new place. He did it in the last apartment, the one before Ipo, the one he shared with a roommate he still half-misses in a way he'd never say out loud — Marshall, tall as a doorframe, always smelling of cut stems, a good man, patient with him in the year after Evelyn when patience was the only thing keeping him upright. You feel that gratitude arrive sideways, unbidden, and you nearly laugh, because you know exactly how patient Marshall was, you were inside that patience fifty-one minutes ago and it felt like standing in a warm room.

He does not drink. He smokes a pack a day and the taste of the last one is still faintly in the back of his throat, stale, familiar, almost comforting. He believes in something, not a church, just a sense that the ocean out past the tin roof is paying attention. He has some money put by that nobody talks about because talking about it feels like tempting something. None of this is dramatic. It's just a life, built plank by plank the way this house was, and it is, right now, entirely and only yours.

—

You look down. The hand is scarred at the thumb, freckled to the knuckle, a stranger's hand doing exactly what you tell it, which is nothing yet, just open, just turning slowly in the white glare coming off the yard.

"Home before the lights are even on," you say, to no one, in his voice, and it comes out amused, and low, and not entirely his.