Marco Villareal

Corey Blankenship's house is quiet at eleven at night, and that is the problem. The baby monitor hisses low on the kitchen counter. Your wife — his wife — fell asleep on the couch an hour ago with a show still running. You stand at the sink in his big soft body, rinsing a bottle you don't remember warming, and you feel it again: that itch under the ribs that has nothing to do with Corey Blankenship's life, which is fine, which is good, which is somebody else's good. You've been him a day and a half. His beard themselves itches you. His knees ache climbing the stairs. You did not come here for comfort. You came back to the site because somewhere in Ohio there is a man you've already stood inside once, seven days and two hours ago, for twelve minutes only, and you never finished what you started in him — you only visited. Dale Whitehorse's office, Dale Whitehorse's hands, and across the hall from Dale Whitehorse's desk, every day, a coworker you clocked without ever becoming: dark hair, cleft chin, a wedding band, somebody who stuttered when Dale put him on the spot in meetings. You remember thinking, from inside Dale: that one. You open the laptop at the standing desk you don't own, type in the address you know by now better than any prayer, and you spin.

The highway comes to you as a hum first, then a shape — a steering wheel under hands that are not Corey's thick ones, dash light pooling green-blue across knuckles that are leaner, darker, a ring catching it on the left. The car drifts a foot toward the centerline and then pulls itself straight, smooth as breath, and both hands come off the wheel for a half-second and resettle lower, wider, more sure, like a man adjusting a grip he's held ten thousand times. Somewhere behind that motion your turn signal clicks on for an exit that isn't his. Three miles from a house he doesn't know is close.

The shirt is first — long-sleeved, soft black cotton, snug at the forearms — and it gives you a Tuesday in March, early, him pulling it over his head in a bedroom with the blinds still down, his wife's voice from the bathroom saying something about the dishwasher, him answering around a yawn. The memory doesn't come as a scene so much as a weather: the particular quiet of a marriage five years in, nothing wrong with it, nothing thrilling either, just warm and worn soft like the shirt. Jeans next — dark denim, broken in at the knee from how he sits — and these bring a different year, a different woman: a girl named Teresa he dated at nineteen, the ache of her that never fully left even now, married, happy enough; he thinks of her sometimes on long drives like this one and feels guilty for it and does it anyway. The wedding band on the left hand is warm from his own skin, and it gives you the proposal, nervous, at a lake, him stammering so badly over the question that she said yes just to make him stop struggling and laughed about it for years after.

The wheel under your palms is the deepest thing in the car — his hands know this exact model, this exact road, the way it pulls faintly right if you don't correct it, five years of the same commute from the same office with the same standing desk and the same two monitors and the same coffee going cold while he debugged something at six and told himself five more minutes. He is twenty-six and his shoulders carry a muscular, compact weight — 5'5", built from a gym habit that is more discipline than vanity — and his jaw holds the two days of stubble he keeps meaning to shave, and under his tongue, tucked at the gumline, a nicotine pouch gone soft and sweetless, the fifth one today, a habit his wife hates and he hides half of. He does not drink. He never has, not once, through every work happy hour and wedding toast, and the clarity of that choice sits in him like a small stubborn stone.

And then — this is the part that comes last and lands hardest — the office. Fluorescent light. A conference table. A man across it, broad, bearded, patient in the particular way bosses perform patience: Dale Whitehorse, CEO, asking him a question in front of six other people, and his throat closing on the answer he knows cold, the stammer taking his tongue apart syllable by syllable while Dale waits, not unkindly, which somehow is worse. He has never told anyone how much he hates that room. He has never told anyone a lot of things. Dale doesn't know this about him. Dale never will, now — Dale is seven days and two hours gone from the body he traded for, and has no memory of standing across that table from this exact smaller, stammering man and marking him, quietly, as the next one.

You look down. The hands on the wheel are not off it now — they never came off, not really, muscle memory alone carried the drift straight — but they feel new under you, leaner than Corey's, a ring catching the dash light. You turn one over on the wheel, slow, like checking it's attached.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to the empty car, in a voice two shades lower than the one you had an hour ago. "Okay. Not Dale this time."

The exit sign for a street that isn't his slides past unused, dark, and three miles out the real one is still coming, and you don't know yet how long you'll want to be the man who takes it.