Marco Villanueva

Kaleo Freitas's field is quiet at this hour, cane leaves ticking in a breeze you can't feel because you never actually feel anything that belongs to him — you only borrow it, the way you borrowed the ache in his lower back an hour ago, standing in his kitchen with the lights off so his wife wouldn't wake and ask why he was up. Farming is fine. Farming is honest, tiring, slow, and forty minutes ago that was exactly the problem — the slowness of it, the sameness, a life that fills up whole days with weather and soil pH and a body that is forty-two and athletic and asks for nothing interesting. You've had five hundred and seventy-nine men before him. He is less than an hour old to you and already you are bored in him, the specific boredom of a good life that isn't yours, and your thumb finds the site out of pure reflex, the way his hands, you'll learn later, reach for a rake without being told to. You don't decide so much as arrive at the decision already moving. The wheel is right there. You spin it.

The scroll keeps going under your thumb — faster now, steadier, a rhythm that isn't the hesitation it was a half-second ago. The screen's blue is on one side of a face that isn't stopping to blink when it should. You are lying on your side. There is a phone six inches off your nose and a body around you that is shorter than the one you left, softer at the middle, warmer somehow, tucked into a blanket that smells like fabric softener and, underneath that, someone else's shampoo two pillows over. Outside this room the sky is doing something gray and early that the room hasn't let in yet. Your thumb stops scrolling. It just holds the phone now, the way a hand holds a thing it no longer has a reason for.

The mattress is what gives you the first of it — not words, just the specific give of memory-foam under a body that lies here every night at an hour most people are getting up, and with it comes the fact underneath the fact: he works nights, has for six years, closing books for a logistics company that runs its numbers on West Coast time against a home office three hours ahead, and this, this stretch before actual morning, is his wind-down, his version of an evening, phone in bed instead of TV because the TV wakes Elena. Elena. Her name arrives with the pillow smell, unbidden, whole: fourteen years married, a wedding in her mother's backyard in Redwood City with string lights that kept shorting out and everyone laughing about it afterward instead of being annoyed. The ring is on your hand — his hand — a plain band, and touching it with your thumb, an old habit that isn't yours yet but is already starting to feel like it could be, gives you the day he put it on, sweating through a rented jacket, and every ordinary Tuesday since where it caught the light at his desk between two monitors and a mug that says WORLD'S OKAYEST GOLFER, a joke gift from a coworker, and he laughed at it every single morning anyway.

There's a kid somewhere in this — one, a boy, maybe eight or nine, the memory not sharp enough yet to give you an age, only a school lunch made at an hour when most fathers are still asleep, a backpack by the door, a drawing on the fridge held by a magnet shaped like a pineapple, a joke from someone's Hawaii trip nobody remembers buying. The dimples come to you last and strangest — not a memory but a muscle habit, the corners of your mouth already pulling in at rest, an expression built into the architecture of this face whether he's smiling or not, so that even asleep, even dead-eyed doomscrolling at whatever-o'clock, he reads as a man about to be pleased about something. You didn't do that. His face did that before you got here and it's still doing it now.

Your body underneath all this is thirty-seven and carrying it fine — a little heavier in the gut than Kaleo's farm-lean frame, softer hands, no calluses worth mentioning, a life spent moving a mouse and a pen rather than a rake. There's a dull low-grade pressure behind your eyes, a headache that isn't quite a headache, that you'll learn later is the blood pressure medication he's supposed to take with breakfast and sometimes doesn't. Your knuckles ache slightly — his habit, not yours, cracking them without thinking, some tension he carries in his hands that a decade of ledgers never quite worked its way out of. He doesn't drink. He didn't smoke until an office friend handed him a vape at a going-away party three years back and now he does that sometimes, at parties, never at home, because Elena hates the smell and he loves her more than he loves the taste of it.

He was raised half-Catholic and let it go loose sometime in his twenties into something that doesn't have a name — a sense, when the cane fields of some other man's memory brush against your borrowed mind for just a second, that there's something underneath all of this holding it together, not a god exactly, just a shape. He never says this to anyone. It arrives now the way all the good ones do, at full length, unasked: him at nineteen, at his abuela's funeral, deciding privately that whatever she'd gone to wasn't nothing, and never going back to Mass to check.

The shirt is the last thing — not on him yet, this is a T-shirt he slept in, but the memory of getting dressed for bed hours ago comes through the blanket instead, his hands pulling this exact shirt over his head after a long shift of spreadsheets, the particular tiredness of a man who sits at a desk under fluorescent light until his eyes go dry, who came home and didn't want dinner, just wanted this — the phone, the dark, Elena's breathing somewhere behind him, the boy's door shut down the hall.

You look at the hand still holding the phone. It's not your hand, and it has never been your hand, and there is a wedding band on it that some other man saved up for and shook with nerves to put on. You turn it over once, slow, the way you always do, checking that it answers to you now.

"Okay," you say, quiet, to no one, to the empty blue-lit room. "Let's see what you've got, Marco."