Malik Denard

Wesley's hands smell like brake fluid at eleven in the morning, and that's the whole problem.

You've had them less than a minute — dimples, average build, forty-one years past their prime tow truck permit — and already you know this isn't the one. Not because of the hands. Because of the garage bay behind you, fluorescent and half-lit, and the guy on the phone yelling about a repo that should've happened Friday, and the particular ache low in Wesley's back that says he slept wrong on a couch he doesn't own. You spun the wheel yesterday hoping for something with a little more air in it. You got a man whose whole life is other people's stalled cars. There is nothing here you want to keep learning. You've learned it already, in the sixty seconds you've had it.

So you go back. Middle of a Monday, Honolulu light coming in hard and flat through a garage door left up, and you thumb the site open on a phone that isn't yours, on a plan that isn't yours, and you spin.

—

The foam is cold at the corner of your mouth.

That's the first thing — not sight, not thought, just temperature, and the razor already moving before you've caught up to whose arm that is. It goes up the jaw against the grain, smooth, unbothered, past the place where a hand usually stutters at the corner of the mouth. This one doesn't stutter. The second half of the shave happens faster than the first ever did, like something got out of its own way.

You're bent over a sink. White tile, small room, a window somewhere behind you throwing gray afternoon light across the mirror. Your — his — bare shoulder holds a tattoo you didn't put there: a man's face in gray ink, realistic, staring back at you from skin that isn't cold yet, still warm from a body that was alive in it three seconds ago and is nowhere now.

—

The razor's handle is the first thing that talks to you.

Ridged grip, worn smooth on one side where a thumb sits every morning — and it comes with a small flood: a bathroom in a rented unit under somebody else's house, a bay window upstairs he's never even stood in front of, this sink with a crack running under the caulk that he's meant to mention to the landlord for four months running.

The belt against your — his — stomach remembers standing in a dark truck cab at four in the morning, buckling it one-handed while the engine warms, breath showing in the cab light, a thermos of black coffee (he doesn't drink, hasn't ever wanted to, doesn't understand the men at the stops who need three cups just to function) balanced on the dash. The freckles across his nose — yours now, though you didn't earn them — used to get him called "the young one" at the CDL yard even after two years hauling loads up and down the 5, because a spray of freckles reads eighteen no matter what's under it.

The jeans on your legs know the shape of a driveway cut too steep for anything but this exact truck, the one waiting somewhere close, blue-gray in early light, and they know the particular embarrassment of a girl at a truck stop outside Redding who looked at his face and asked if he was even old enough to be doing this job, and he'd laughed it off, said something about freckles lying, and thought about it the rest of the drive to Stockton.

The shirt — flannel, folded over a hook behind the door, plaid gone soft at the elbows — comes back sleeve by sleeve, this morning, his morning, hours before yours: pulling it on over the gray tee, rolling the cuffs twice because his forearms run warm even in the city's gray cold, tucking nothing in because he never does. Underneath the shirt's memory is the body itself, and it tells you plainly: eighteen years old, strong through the shoulders in a way that came from loading straps and not a gym, a soreness low in the back that belongs to a man who's been driving more hours than he's slept, skin that freckles instead of tanning, black hair faded tight at the sides, left long enough on top to push a hand through. Good hands. Steady hands. Hands that know how to back a forty-eight-foot trailer into a space with six inches of grace on either side, and don't know yet, will maybe never need to know, how to do much else.

The tattoo on the shoulder gives you the deepest thing, last: a face inked from a photo he wouldn't show anyone, a portrait he paid for out of a first real paycheck, of a man who isn't in his life anymore and whose name doesn't come with the ink — just an ache, private, evangelical-quiet, the kind you carry to church on Sunday and never once bring up at the diner counter.

The mirror in front of you is fogged at the edges from the water still running, and in the clear center of it, foam gone from one whole cheek, is a face you did not build and did not ask for: freckled, young, brown-eyed, entirely unbothered by what just happened to it.

—

You shut the water off. Look down before you look up — the razor first, held loose in fingers you're still getting the weight of, then the hand itself, turning it over in the bathroom light like it might have a seam somewhere you could find with a thumb.

There isn't one.

You lift your eyes to the mirror instead of a lens, but it does the same work — his face, wet at one cheek, looking back at whoever's driving it now.

"Guess I finish the other side," you say, out loud, to no one, in a voice that isn't cracked or dramatic, just quietly, completely someone else's.