Marco Villanueva

You have been Dale Whitehorse for twelve minutes, and every one of them has felt like standing in a suit that belongs to someone else's better life.

The office is empty at this hour, the desk lamp throwing a small gold circle on paperwork you didn't write and don't care about, and you sat down in his chair after the spin only to feel the wrongness settle in immediately — not pain, just fit. Dale Whitehorse is thick through the shoulders, bearded, comfortable in ways that have nothing to do with you. He built something here, over years, with patience you don't have and never intend to borrow. You spun the wheel for the rush of arrival, not for the twelve minutes after, and the twelve minutes after are always the same: a stranger's chair, a stranger's ache in a stranger's lower back, and the small ugly fact that whatever he had going for him is not yours to keep enjoying. You want the next second, not this one. That has always been the shape of your wanting — not what a body has, but what it feels like in the instant you take it.

So you open the laptop, find the site again, the wheel sitting there patient and unbothered on its plain white page, and you spin without much ceremony, the way a man reaches for a second drink he already knows he'll regret less than the first.

The fork is halfway to your mouth and then it isn't. It comes down onto the rim of the plastic container with a small definite click, and your arm — his arm — sets it there gently, like laying down something borrowed. The coat is still on your shoulders, heavy canvas, smelling of cold and diesel and something like glass cleaner. Warm kitchen light instead of a lamp's cone. You shrug the coat off in one motion his shoulders already knew before you did, feel it slide and drop half onto a chair behind you, and you sit.

The chair holds you at a different height than Dale's did — you are shorter now, lighter, more compact, and the counter's edge meets you at a place that feels correct, familiar to a body that has leaned on it a thousand mornings. You eat in even mouthfuls without hurrying, looking at nothing in the dark window in front of you, and behind that nothing his life starts arriving in pieces, carried in through your skin.

The fork first — cheap metal, a slight bend near the tines from being used to pry something once — and with it a flash: a forklift's tine bar, a coworker named Higgins laughing about it. Then the counter itself, laminate worn pale in a half-moon where forearms have rested for years, and under that a long low hum of a hundred solitary dinners, a hundred nights of eating standing up because sitting felt like admitting the day was over.

The jacket, draped now on the chair behind you, gives you more: waxed canvas going soft at the elbows, a plaid collar rubbed shiny, and in it the memory of a cold that isn't like any cold you've worn before — real cold, the kind that gets into a harness buckle and makes your fingers stupid at height. You feel, distant and borrowed, the swing stage lurching gently forty floors up, glass sliding clean under a squeegee, Anchorage laid out gray and white below like a photograph nobody bothered to color in. Marco. The name arrives with the jacket, plain as a work order. Marco Villanueva, twenty-nine, and this coat has been through four winters with him.

The stubble under your jaw when you touch it — no, you don't touch it, but you feel it there anyway, two days of it, the itch of it against a collar — brings a girl's name half-formed and then gone, an ex he still thinks about on nights exactly like whichever one this was going to be before you took it, a woman who used to tease him about the dimples, said they made him look like he was always halfway to forgiving somebody. You feel the dimples now yourself, faint grooves at rest in cheeks that haven't done anything to earn them, and something in his memory aches pleasantly at being teased for them, safe and old and a little sad.

The boots under the table, still laced, still cold at the soles from being outside this morning, hand you the shape of his whole working day: the harness settling onto his hips before dawn, the carabiners' cold bite through gloves, the particular economy of movement a man learns when the wrong motion forty stories up is the last one he makes. Calluses along the pad of the thumb from the squeegee handle. A knee that clicks going down stairs, not injury, just years. He is Catholic without much ceremony about it, crosses himself out of habit more than belief when the stage sways harder than usual, says a small silent thing on the ride down that isn't quite a prayer and isn't quite not one.

He never drank, never smoked, decided both a long time ago for reasons the counter doesn't hand you and you don't go looking for. His hand, when it isn't doing anything, wants a pen to click — there's one somewhere in the coat pocket, you can feel the ghost of the habit in your fingers even without it, an old tic from some job application season, some classroom, something.

You finish the container in the last few even mouthfuls his hands already knew to take, set the empty thing down, and only then do you actually look — down, at your own hand, his hand, turning it palm-up under the kitchen light. Calloused at the base of each finger in a way no office chair ever asked of Dale Whitehorse. Small scrape healing pink across one knuckle. A working hand, a young one, nothing in the bank behind it and nothing on it either — no ring, no ink, nothing to mark whose it used to be.

You lift your eyes off it, into the dark glass of the window where his reflection is starting to hold still, dimples showing even though nothing in your face is smiling.

"Okay," you say, to no one, in his voice. "Let's see what you're worth."