Liam Gorecki

Before the spin you are Declan Brophy, and Declan is a good body, tall in the right places, dimples and a goatee, a freight handler's back that never complains. You wore him for less than a minute. It wasn't his fault. You had him standing on the loading dock in the blue before work, forklift ticking as it cooled, and you felt how easy it was, and the ease was the trouble. Nothing in him pushed back. You wanted something that would. You paid, and the wheel turned, and Declan's hand left the rail.

Then the bench is under you, slats pressing the backs of your thighs, and a rack of coats hangs over your head. The room smells of iron and old radiator paint. Your forearms rest on your knees. A water bottle sweats on the concrete beside your boot. Your pulse is high and thick in your neck, and your breath has just stopped going out through your teeth.

His jacket is canvas, stiff at the cuffs, and when you rub the cuff between finger and thumb it gives you the morning. Liam, in a dark kitchen, one arm and then the other, shrugging the jacket on the way he always does, left shoulder first, because the right one clicks. The flannel under it was a Christmas present. His mother bought it two sizes big and he never told her.

A toothpick is wedged in the corner of your mouth. Your tongue knows it. You didn't put it there, and your jaw keeps working it anyway.

The bench slats give you a school corridor at night. The floor machine hums, and the long shine drying behind him is the only thing he has made all day that stays made. You feel his pride in it, small and private. Then comes a woman's voice on a stoop in the rain, under sodium light, saying she's sorry, and the thing in his chest that folded and has not unfolded since. Not yours. You carry it anyway.

The keys on his belt are cold against your hip. You press them and get a ring of doors, every one of them his to open and nobody's to thank him for. Under the grief he is steady. He is a man who finishes things.

You are 6'3" in this body, and your thighs are heavy and warm. Your shoulders ache, pleasantly, from a bar you haven't touched yet. Your hands are wide and cracked across the knuckles, and the calluses sit where a mop handle sits.

You open them and look. Red hair on the backs of the fingers. You turn them over. Then you lift your eyes.

"Okay," you say, and your voice comes out lower than Declan's. "Let's see how long you last."

You don't mean him.