Marco Reyes

Dean Rutledge's break room smells like burnt coffee and the inside of somebody else's shoes, and that's when it happens — standing there with a Styrofoam cup halfway to a mouth that isn't yours, forty-seven years old and dad-bodied and blond, a nurse's badge clipped crooked to scrubs that have seen three codes this shift alone. You have been him less than a minute. That's the thing nobody warns you about, how fast the wanting comes back once you've had a taste of being nobody in particular. Dean's life is fine. Dean's life is a rental car. You did not spin the wheel to become a man who alphabetizes patient charts and eats lunch standing up. You spin because Dean's hands, when you look down at them, have never done anything you wanted to watch them do. You take out your phone in the break room, thumb already moving, and somewhere in Anchorage a man you'll never be again keeps standing there mid-swallow while the page loads: vessel.cards, the wheel already spinning before you've decided anything, the way it always is.

The television cuts to a bright frame — some commercial, blue light flooding a dark room — and you are sitting up straight on a couch that was not there a half-second ago, in a body that is not Dean's, setting a remote down on the arm of the couch with a hand that has ink crawling up both forearms in the dim light. Short. Compact. The couch cushion under you is broken in on one side in a way that says this is where he always sits. Your foot is bare against the coffee table's edge. Somewhere behind your sternum there's a want that has nothing to do with you yet — an ache like hunger, low-grade, that belongs to whoever this is.

The shirt is what opens first — soft gray cotton, worn thin at the collar from washing, and it comes with a whole morning riding in on it: him pulling it over his head in a bathroom with a cracked mirror, humming something off a playlist, a woman's voice from the bedroom asking if he'd seen her keys, and the small easy warmth of answering *coffee table, babe* without having to think. Marco. The name arrives with the shirt like it was stitched into the seam. Marco Reyes, twenty-seven, and the couch under him is the one he and Priya picked out secondhand two winters ago, hauled up three flights of stairs under the L tracks cursing the whole way, laughing harder than the job deserved.

The remote in his hand is heavier with memory than a remote should be — nights just like this one, lights off, some rerun neither of them are really watching, her feet in his lap before she went to bed early and left him here alone, which is where he is now, and which is fine, mostly fine, a small solitary hour he doesn't examine too hard. Gloves. His hands ache faintly with a soreness that isn't soreness exactly, more like muscle memory of holding a machine steady for six hours: he did three sessions today, a peony on a ribcage that took forever, a small skull on somebody's wrist that took ten minutes and made him happier than the big piece did. The shop's smell comes back through his own skin — green soap, rubbing alcohol, the particular quiet of a chair reclined between clients, him scrolling his phone with the lights turned low to save his eyes.

The freckles across his nose itch faintly, the way they do in winter when the radiator dries everything out, and with that comes his mother's voice from some Christmas years back, telling him he got those from her side, from Puerto Rico, from a grandmother he never met. Faith arrives quietly too — not devout, but the rosary his abuela gave him still living in a drawer he doesn't open, guilt he doesn't examine on the Sundays he skips.

There's a girl before Priya — there's always a girl before — and she comes back through nothing he's touching, just surfaces on her own the way the important ones do: Camila, who left for Austin four years ago and whom he still thinks about on nights exactly like this one, when the apartment is dark and quiet and his mind wanders somewhere it shouldn't. He loves Priya. He does. But some nights the wanting that moves through his chest right now isn't his own — it's hers, it's old, and you're only a passenger in it.

And under all of it, the body: five-six, compact, strong in the forearms from the machine's steady vibration hour after hour, a callus worn into the pad of his thumb from decades — no, seven years — of gripping a tattoo gun the same way each time. Twenty-seven feels different from Dean's forty-seven in every direction at once: lighter, quicker, no ache in the knees, a metabolism that hasn't slowed, but also nothing put away in the tank the way Dean's steadier years had. His free hand drifts up without him — without you — asking it to, and runs once over his scalp, over the dark curls, an old unconscious habit that surfaces the second there's nothing else for the hand to do.

You look down at your hands — his hands, ink climbing both forearms in tangled black lines, calluses on the fingers that never held a phone or a gun or anything but a tattoo machine and a life he built himself. You turn one over slowly under the blue television light, like it might tell you something the memories haven't.

Then you lift your eyes to where a camera would be, if there were one, and you say, quiet, testing the voice: "I don't laugh at this part."