Kenta Osei

Gary Dunmore's hand is on the mouse and the hand is sixty-two years old whether the driver's license says fifty-nine or not — calluses gone soft from decades of other men's typing, a wedding ring that was never yours to wear, carrying a weight you have been carrying for less than a minute. The office smells like printer toner and a scented candle somebody's assistant bought him for a birthday he didn't attend. Through the window, scrubbed blue Arizona sky, a watered lawn too green for the desert. You spun this man up out of a boredom so total it had its own gravity — fourteen bodies deep and this one came with a corner office and a company and absolutely nothing left to want inside it. The itch under his good gray suit is already yours: not his ambition, not his tiredness, just the old appetite, the one that has outlasted fifteen different pairs of lungs. You open the laptop. You open the site. The wheel is already spinning before you've finished deciding to let it.

It lands on him mid-breath.

The arm that was hanging off the mattress draws itself up like a tide coming back in. The body rolls from its stomach onto its back — a posture this body has apparently never once chosen for itself, you'll learn in a second, but for now it is simply where you are: eighteen years old, muscle still humming with sleep, a mouth gone dry, a leg already twitching once under thin blanket like a motor that never fully switches off. Streetlight slats across the ceiling through a gap in beige curtains. Somewhere outside, a vending machine hums its small blue hum into the empty lane. It is the middle of the night here. It was the middle of the morning where you were. The gap between those two facts sits in your chest like a held breath, because you have never arrived into the deep of someone's night before, always daylight, always the middle of some doing — and his doing, you understand within the first full second, was only ever this: sleeping, the ordinary unimpressive thing bodies do for a third of their lives.

Nothing comes yet. You are new in him, and there is nothing in your hands to open him with, no shirt, no key, no cup — just sheets, just the pillow going damp at one corner from a mouth that was breathing into it a moment ago.

Then your palm finds the hem of the T-shirt twisted up around your ribs, navy cotton gone soft from a hundred washes, and it comes in through your fingers before you've even thought to feel for it: Kenta, size M, bought off a cart outside Yoyogi stadium two summers ago, the day Aiko laughed so hard at something he said that she had to sit down on a curb, holding her side, and he'd stood over her grinning like he'd won something. Aiko. The name arrives whole, with a smell of her shampoo and the particular warm annoyance of her texting him at midnight about a problem set neither of them had started. Girlfriend. Second year, same faculty, different major — she does art history, he does economics he is not sure he wants, and that uncertainty lives in your chest now as a low familiar static, the kind you stop noticing until a professor asks you directly what you intend to do with it.

The sweatpants under your hands, gray, drawstring loose — these were the ones from exam week, four nights of library vending-machine coffee and legs bouncing under library tables so hard a proctor once asked him, not unkindly, if he needed to step out. He didn't. He never has. It isn't nerves exactly; it's just a motor that runs whether or not there's anything to run from, the same one that is already, right now, in this bed, in this second, jittering one knee half an inch under the blanket though there is no exam, no deadline, nothing but 2 a.m. and a body that doesn't know how to be perfectly still.

The sheet under your back gives you the morning he last changed it — three days ago, hungover, the big night with his roommate's friends from the hockey club that happens once or twice a month and leaves him moving carefully the next day, vaping on the balcony in the cold because his throat wanted a cigarette and his lungs, raised Baptist by a mother who would have skinned him, wanted absolution instead. He got neither. He got a headache and a text from his mother in Scarborough asking if he'd been to church, and he lied the way he always lies to her about it now, gently, because eighteen feels too old to still be afraid of her disappointment and too young to stop being afraid of it.

The pillow gives you his own face pressed into it an hour ago — the patchy beard he keeps meaning to either commit to or shave off entirely, gaps along the cheeks that make him look, he thinks, like a plan that got interrupted partway through; the afro he dyed jet black freshman year on a dare and has been growing out unevenly ever since, roots coming in the brown they always were, a small daily argument with the mirror he has mostly stopped having. None of it troubles him much. He is built compact and strong from nothing more deliberate than walking everywhere in this city and an old habit of push-ups before bed, a habit his body is already, underneath you, halfway through forgetting it did tonight.

Last comes the backpack strap — not on him now, slung over his desk chair across the room, but near enough that something of it reaches you anyway, the ghost-weight of it on his shoulder this afternoon, campus lawn, laptop balanced on crossed legs, Aiko's head on his thigh while he pretended to read and actually watched a groundskeeper argue with a sprinkler for ten straight minutes. A good day. An unremarkable one. The kind he has had hundreds of and will, by every reasonable expectation he does not get to keep, have hundreds more of.

You open your eyes in the dark and lie still with his heart going even and slow, Aiko's shampoo-smell receding, the vending machine's hum coming faint through the glass.

Your hand comes up off the blanket on its own, the leg under it still going, that small tireless bounce, and you turn the hand over in front of your face like you're checking it's real — this hand, young, unmarked, a callus only where a pen sits — and you don't know yet if you'll be checking it again tomorrow or if the wheel will already have taken it from you by then.

"Huh," you say, to the dark, to nobody. "Okay."