Kevin Nakamoto

The wrench is still warm from your hand — Travis's hand — when you decide you're done with him. You're crouched under a kitchen sink in Western Kansas, water shut off, the customer's dog sniffing at your boots, and something about the smell of PVC primer and old grease just closes the door on it. Twenty-nine minutes of freckled forearms and a bad lower back that isn't even forty yet. He's fine. He's nothing. You stand up too fast and his knees complain and you think, not this one, not today, and you're already reaching for the phone in his coverall pocket, already on vessel.cards with primer still tacky on your thumb, already spinning past him like he was a red light you caught on the way to somewhere better.

The wheel doesn't ask why. It never does. It lands.

You come up through sleep like breaking the surface of water you didn't know you were under. There's a mattress under you, unfamiliar in its firmness, and your arm — his arm — draws itself up off the edge of the bed and folds over your chest without you asking it to, like the body already knows how to arrange itself for someone new. Breath goes even. Streetlight through a gap in blackout curtains lays one pale line across the ceiling. Somewhere above, through a floor, a house is still asleep too — because this is a garage, you register, under a bay window, driveway cut steep outside, cold and blue at an hour that has no business existing.

You are small. That's the first thing, small and light after the plumber's bulk, and there's a leg already twitching under the sheet, a nervous engine that never turns off, and you haven't told it to do that either.

Then the shirt — his t-shirt, gray, worn to softness — gives you the first flash: him pulling it over his head three nights ago after a party he didn't want to go to, laughing at something a girl named Priya said about his dimples, the fabric smelling like a stranger's cigarette smoke even though he doesn't smoke, hasn't ever, the one habit he skipped when everyone around him picked something up. Kevin doesn't smoke. Kevin drinks like it's a second major. That comes in through the sheets themselves, a memory of stumbling back from a bar on Irving with two friends holding him up, the shame of it dull and familiar, not even shame anymore, just Tuesday.

The mattress gives you more: nights on this exact bed with a laptop propped on his knees, blue light on the dimples that show even when he isn't smiling, an econ paper due at nine that he started at two. The under-house garage isn't glamorous — his parents live upstairs, he lives in what used to be storage, and there's a whole small grief folded into that arrangement that isn't dramatic, just there, a family that loves him and a room that says exactly how much money there is and isn't.

Your forearm itches — the tattoo. Script letters and a date, and touching it, even just the drag of the sheet across it, brings back a grandmother's name and a funeral he went to at sixteen in a suit that didn't fit, and how getting the ink at eighteen felt less like grief and more like keeping something from slipping all the way under. That one comes in heavy, full-length, unhurried: her kitchen, her hands, the specific version of quiet that follows a person out of a room forever.

The hoodie on the chair by the bed — you can smell it before you're touching it, campus laundry and old backpack canvas — brings the lawn, the classes, a boy who is bright enough and tired enough and drinking enough that nobody's worried yet, not really, not out loud. Dressing it, that morning two days ago, sleeve by sleeve, the small ritual of it, backpack strap over one shoulder because the buckle on the other side is broken and he's meant to fix it for a month.

Your hands come up in front of your face. Smaller than you left them, unmarked except for the one line of script, knuckles a little raw from something you don't have the memory for yet.

You look toward the gap in the curtains, toward the blue nothing-hour outside, and you say, out loud, to no one, in a voice that still has sleep caught in it, "Okay. Not yet, then."