Liam Okafor

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Nestor Vandenberg's apartment smells like the inside of a toolbox, and you have been sitting on the edge of his bed for twelve hours and forty-four minutes hating the smell of it without knowing why until just now. It's the scar through the eyebrow. Every time you catch the mirror you flinch at it a half second before you remember it isn't yours to flinch at. He's a good body — big, strong, the kind of shoulders that open jammed doors and stuck locks without a crowbar — but a scar is a story that happened to someone else, and you didn't get the story, only the face doing the remembering for a man who isn't home anymore. Thirty-nine times now you've done this, and the good ones you keep a while. This one you keep checking like a receipt, waiting to see if it's wrong. It's midnight. You're tired of him in a specific, itchy way that has nothing to do with tired, and your thumb is already on your phone, already at vessel.cards, already at the wheel, before you've admitted to yourself that's what you're doing.

You spin.

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The room arrives before you do — tile counter, a bulb in a cage throwing yellow light across a mirror scummed at the corners — and then the weight of a smaller man drops onto you all at once, five inches shorter, lighter through the shoulder, a stranger's razor already moving. It doesn't stop at the corner of the mouth. Whoever was steering this face a half-second ago always hesitates there — you can feel the ghost of the hesitation, a habit shaped into the jaw like a scar of its own — but you don't have it, so the blade just goes, smooth, fast, up against the grain, and the second half of his face gets done in half the time the first half took.

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The razor is the first thing. Cheap, plastic-handled, twin-blade, and it's been dragged over this jaw maybe four hundred times and every single one of those mornings comes up through your palm at once and then sorts itself — early, half-asleep, a dozen different bathrooms that all turn out to be this one bathroom on different mornings, because Liam Okafor has lived here longer than the caulk around the tub has been white. He is twenty-one. He has never once loved this apartment and never once thought seriously about leaving it, and that particular kind of staying — not stuck, just unbothered — comes through the porcelain under your other hand, cool and familiar as a tooth you keep running your tongue over.

The T-shirt gives you a whole year in a breath: a concert nobody remembers the opener for, a boyfriend named Dre who took the shirt off him laughing and never got around to hating him, months later, only to distance, the specific quiet kind where the texts just get shorter and then stop, and Liam never figured out which of them did that first. The man who got away isn't a wound exactly. It's a low hum, something Liam turns the volume down on by vaping on the tailgate of his truck before a job, not because he's sad, just because the thought showed up and the vape was closer than the thought.

The waistband of the sweatpants, worn soft, tells you he sleeps in these and has for years and doesn't care that they've got a hole starting at the hip. The studs in both ears itch faintly with a memory of a shop in the Heights and a friend who dared him and a mother who said "cute" in a voice that meant it and also meant she'd been braced for worse. Historically Black Protestant, she is, still, every Sunday, and Liam goes twice a year and never tells anyone at work because the guys on-site talk like church is a thing your grandmother does. The forearm — the tattoo arm, the one holding the razor — knows a slightly different history: an afternoon in a shop that smelled like antiseptic and a friend's laugh in the next chair, fine lines, geometric, chosen because it meant nothing and could mean anything later, which is exactly what he wanted at twenty.

His hands know conduit. They know the particular twist of stripping twelve-gauge wire without looking, the weight of a bit driver, the give of a stud when you've found the right spot the first time instead of the third. Under a half-finished ceiling today, before this, before the shave — he stuttered once, badly, in front of the foreman, mid-sentence about a load calculation, heat crawling up his neck while three older men waited, patient in the specific way that is its own small cruelty. His hands are fine under a panel. His mouth is the part of him that still sometimes isn't. He is well-off in a way none of the guys on his crew know — a grandfather's money, quiet, sitting in an account he barely touches, because touching it would mean explaining it, and explaining things is the stutter's whole domain.

He is twenty-one and gay and has told exactly the people who needed telling. He is single and it doesn't bother him most nights. He is standing in his own bathroom with foam going stiff on one cheek doing the last ordinary thing before he goes out for the evening, whatever that evening was going to be, and he does not know, has no way of knowing, that the hand moving the razor up his own jaw right now belongs to someone else entirely.

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You set the razor down. Rinse it under the tap the way his hand already knew to, out of habit that isn't yours but is doing the driving anyway. Foam clings to a jaw you did not choose and did not earn, and under the yellow bulb you lift both hands out of the water and hold them there, dripping, turning them like they're a rental car you're not sure fits in the space you parked it.

You look up into the mirror. Not at him — there's no him left in there to look at — at the face, which is doing the thing your face does now, whatever this one turns out to be.

"Yeah," you say, quiet, to no one, to the bathroom, to the bulb. "Okay."

Somewhere south of here a locksmith's apartment sits empty at what would be midnight, and here it's evening, still light enough at the edges of the blinds to call it evening, and you have no idea yet how long you get to stand in this one before the itch comes back and you're looking at the wheel again.