Kevin Nakashima

The site loaded slow, the way cheap magic always does. A wheel, spokes worn thin with waiting, a button that said SPIN in a font that wanted to be taken seriously. You had been circling this for years — every forum thread, every story where someone wakes up behind another face, every late night wondering what it would actually feel like, not read about, felt. Saturday morning, nothing on, the blue light doing what it does to a face at that hour. You didn't believe it would work. You paid anyway. You spun.

There is no falling, no tunnel, no in-between. There is a fork, halfway to a mouth that isn't yours yet and then is, and a kitchen that smells like fryer oil gone into fabric. His arm — thinner than you expected, wiry — stops on its own first, like the body hesitates a half-second before you do. Then it's yours to stop. The fork comes back down. It sets itself on the edge of the container with a small plastic click, and you feel the coat still on his shoulders, heavy through the arms, and a bone-tired ache sitting low in the legs that has nothing to do with you and everything to do with him.

You shrug the coat off. It slides down and you catch, in the collar going past your face, a flash — not a memory yet, just a smell, detergent and char and something floral underneath, a fabric softener a girl picked out for him once and he never changed.

You sit. The chair is patient with your weight, its give worn into a specific shape.

You keep eating, because his body wants to, and each bite is a small door.

The fork itself — cheap, bent slightly at one tine — gives you a flash of a walk-in freezer, condensation on steel, someone laughing at something off to the side, ticket rail printing white curls of paper faster than hands can grab them. Service. The word arrives with the memory attached to it like a tag: eight hours on a line, a pass yelling table numbers, the particular burn of oil on a wrist he stopped flinching at two years ago. His hands know a knife the way your hands have never known anything — not thought about, just done, the rock and roll of a chef's knife through an onion, muscle doing the counting.

The jacket, draped now over the chair back, gives you more when your shoulder brushes it: a girl's laugh in a car with the windows down, her hand finding his on the console, and then — later, a different flash, colder — the same hand not being there anymore. Emma. The name comes with no last name attached, just an ache shaped like a doorframe she used to lean in. Recent. Recent enough that some nights he still reaches for his phone before he remembers there's no one to text. You feel that reaching, phantom, in your own borrowed fingers.

The studs in both earlobes prickle faintly, cold metal warming to skin, and with them: a shop on Fremont, sixteen years old, his mother's voice saying absolutely not and his own stubbornness winning anyway.

The tattoos on his forearm — you can see them without looking, just from the tightness of certain skin, healed wrong in one spot — bring the worst one first, the one he regrets, done cheap at nineteen by a friend's cousin with a machine that buzzed uneven. Shame, small and specific, every time a sleeve rides up in front of someone who'd judge it.

Under your tongue, a nicotine pouch he must have tucked there before the coat, before the container, before any of it — mint gone mostly to nothing, and with it the memory of the counter at the gas station, the exact bored voice of the clerk, a hundred nights like this one stacked on top of each other until they wore a groove.

The counter under your palms is cold, chipped laminate, and it gives you the whole apartment at once if you let it: dishes stacked because there's no dishwasher and no roommate to blame, a neon sign in the window shaped like a word that only reads right backward from outside, the particular hour-less quality of a place where the blinds never quite decide whether it's night. He works nights. He sleeps mornings. Somewhere else, in some other apartment with real daylight in it, a version of a person is waking up at a normal hour and would find this whole scene, if they could see it, deeply strange — a man mid-dinner at an hour when dinner shouldn't exist.

The container in your hand is warm at the bottom, going cool. Chicken, rice, something orange-sauced from the place two exits down that he doesn't love but is close and open. Even mouthfuls. You keep eating because stopping felt, for a second, like it would break something.

You look at your hand. Fork gone still against the container's foil edge. Small tattoo, the regretted one, catching the low light. Studs cold in your ears. Drumming fingers you didn't ask to drum, tapping once against the counter out of a habit that belongs to someone else and is, for now, yours.

You lift your eyes to the dark window, where the glass gives you back a face you're wearing and did not choose and did not earn.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to no one. "Okay."

Somewhere a wheel is still spinning in your head, even stopped. You don't know how long you get him. Nobody does.