Marco Villanueva

Yusuf's beard itches. It has itched for three minutes, ever since the light dimmed behind his eyes and came back on with someone else holding the switch, and now you are standing in his kitchen in Denver at eleven in the morning, not eating the eggs cooling on his counter, staring at the gap in his front teeth reflected in the microwave door like it belongs to a rental car. His phone has four texts from a woman named Priya who thinks he is coming to dinner Saturday. He has a job he is fine at and a body that does what he asks without complaint, and none of that is the problem. The problem is that three minutes is not enough to want anything, and you have wanted things inside 798 men before this one, and the wanting is back before the coffee's cold. You set his phone face-down. You open the laptop already logged into vessel.cards, because Yusuf, bless him, never signs out of anything, and you spin.

The chalk dust is still coming off your fingers when the room changes without moving. Same tile floor, same window with the neighbor's truck parked crooked in the drive across the street, same board half-erased under your palm — but the hand on it is darker, thicker through the knuckle, a cross and praying hands inked up the forearm in black lines you didn't put there. The eraser drags wrong, a half-inch too far, and you correct it, slow, deliberate, like a man relearning where the end of his own arm is. Then you do it again. And again. Ten strokes, each one checked, on a chalkboard some other man has wiped clean ten thousand times without looking.

The lanyard is the first thing that gives you anything — plastic laminate warm from his chest, a keycard swinging, and under it a flash: him clipping it on this same morning, still dark out, a mirror in an apartment with someone else's toothbrush in the cup because she stays over Wednesdays. Marco. The name arrives with the shirt, oddly, not with a voice — chambray, worn soft, a bleach fleck on the left cuff from a chemistry demo two years back that never came out in the wash and he stopped minding. Your — his — shoulders remember rolling the sleeves this morning, twice, precise folds, because he likes them at three-quarter and his mother taught him a man rolls his own sleeves right or not at all. Ada, tightening the top button for him half-laughing before he left, the two of them still new, four months in, and underneath that laugh a smaller, colder memory surfacing on its own: Camila, the ex, texting him at midnight two weeks ago just to say she missed the way he made eggs, and him not answering, and the not-answering costing him a full night's sleep he didn't tell Ada about.

The belt is his father's old one, cracked leather, cinched exactly where it's been cinched a thousand mornings, and it gives you the gym before school — 5 a.m., the bar loaded heavy, this build not vanity but discipline, something his hands know the way they know the eraser and the chalk and the eight-count before dismissal. The boots on the linoleum remember standing at this exact spot at the end of every day for two years, empty desks, chairs stacked wrong by a kid who never learns, and a quiet in the room he has come, privately, spiritually — not religious, he'd correct you, just something he feels in an empty classroom at this hour — to actually love. His right forearm prickles where the ink sits, cross and praying hands, done the summer his abuela died, and the grief comes up through the tattoo like heat off the ink itself, old and settled and not yours to carry but carried anyway. His knuckles want cracking. You let them, one hand then the other, an old tic returning to a body that missed it for three whole minutes it never noticed passing.

You look down. The forearm is his, the ink is his, the light through the window is Texas light, wrong-angled and too early for how tired the room feels. You lift your eyes to the window's reflection instead of a mirror, and that's enough.

"Okay," you say, to the empty desks, in his voice, testing the shape of it in your mouth like a new pair of boots. "Okay."

Behind you the truck sits crooked in the driveway, patient, going nowhere, the same way you are, for now.