Marcus Adeyemi

Devon Ashby's kitchen is dark and it is the middle of the night and you are standing in his socks on his cold linoleum, and you have been him for less than a minute, and already you know you are not staying. It isn't the body — the body's fine, a little soft in the gut, a chinstrap that itches when you frown. It's that you know exactly where you are. Small-town Ohio. A teacher's house. A grading pile on the counter you can already feel yourself dreading. Nothing here is a question. You spun for questions.

And then there's the other thing, the real thing, sitting under it like a stone you keep stepping on: sixteen minutes ago you were Colin Yarnall. Twenty years old, Anchorage, a headset-shaped ache behind your ear, a leg that wouldn't quit bouncing under a call-center desk. Six minutes in him and you'd felt what he carried around all day without naming it — a friend three thousand miles off in Denver who used to call every night and doesn't anymore, not because anything ended, just because Colin's life got smaller and the other man's got bigger, wider, better-lit. You'd felt Colin miss him with Colin's own chest. You want to go stand next to that. You want to be the one he misses.

You go back to the wheel while Devon Ashby's coffee maker ticks on a timer nobody set right, and you spin.

—

The highway doesn't stutter. One second it's Devon's linoleum under your feet, the next you are three miles from a home that isn't Devon's, both hands coming off a leather-wrapped wheel of their own accord, resettling lower and wider, like they've done this a thousand times and simply forgot you weren't there for the first several hundred. The dash light is green-gold on a set of knuckles that are not the knuckles you had four seconds ago. A turn signal clicks on, patient, for an exit that isn't his. You feel the car's whole weight lean a foot toward the centerline and then get pulled straight, easy, like nothing happened. Nothing did. Not to anyone who could see it.

Your — his — chest is doing something under a black long-sleeve henley, snug across muscle you didn't have in Ohio, snug across muscle you definitely didn't have as Colin either. Bigger. Warmer. The seatbelt sits tight over it.

—

The keys are what open first, before you've even parked, before you understand you're going to. There's a jangle at your hip you're not touching, but you feel the ghost-weight of it anyway, the memory of unclipping them from the same hook by the same door for six years running. Restaurant keys. Forty of them on a ring gone smooth at the edges. You feel — not remember, feel — a Friday six hours ago, a dining room at ninety percent capacity and climbing, a hostess stand you were parked behind with a reservation book and a headset radio clipped to your collar, telling a party of eight the wait's twenty minutes when you both know it's thirty-five, and doing it with a smile that isn't fake, just efficient, a smile that's closed forty of these nights and will close forty more. Marcus Adeyemi runs that floor like weather. People orbit him without deciding to.

The steering wheel gives you his hands learning to drive at sixteen in his father's Buick, gives you the callus on the right palm from a chef's knife he still keeps at home though he manages more than he cooks now, gives you a leg that starts bouncing the second his foot's off the gas, a tic that's been with him since he was nine and nervous about a spelling test, that never fully stopped, that his girlfriend calls his motor.

His girlfriend. The thought of her comes in through the fabric of the seat, through a hundred drives home exactly like this one, headlights and dash glow and her porch light left on three miles up the road. You get an afternoon whole and unbidden: her laughing at something stupid he said while they painted the bungalow's trim, freckled forearm flecked white, her stepping back to squint at the line he'd botched, mountains stacked blue behind the roofline like they always are from that porch. You get, underneath that, quieter, a woman who isn't her — the ex, gone eight months now, a fight that was really about a hundred small things wearing one big coat, and how some nights, not many, this exact three-mile stretch of highway is where he lets himself think about her and nowhere else, because home is not the place to.

The shirt sleeve rolled once at each forearm gives you this morning — his morning, Thursday, a lifetime and six hours ago — pulling the black button-down off its hanger, top button skipped on purpose, phone wedged in the collar of the mirror playing something with too much bass while he brushed his waves flat with the palm of one hand out of habit older than the haircut itself. Pen clipped to the breast pocket because the host stand pen always walks off by nine. He remembers, or you do wearing him, the particular satisfaction of a clean-shaven jaw, blade going with the grain twice, no rush, Thursday being the one morning he doesn't have to be anywhere before eleven.

You get his body honestly, too, now that you're sitting in the weight of it: 24, and it costs him nothing yet to stand on his feet for a ten-hour Friday, though his lower back has opinions about it by close. Muscular in the plain unglamorous way of someone who lifts because it clears his head and not for an audience. Freckles scattered warm across his nose and cheekbones that his mother always said came from her side and nobody believed her. Hazel eyes that catch the dash glow strange, gold where Colin's brown never did.

The car finishes its own turn without you, into a driveway you didn't choose, under a porch light somebody left on for him.

—

You cut the engine. Your hands come off the wheel and land in your lap, and you look down at them — his hands, broad, a faint white seam of an old kitchen burn along one knuckle, freckles even here — and you turn the right one over slowly, like you're checking it's attached.

Then you lift your eyes to the rearview instead of the windshield, find his own face waiting there in the dark glass, and you say, quiet, mostly to see how it sounds in his voice:

"Wonder how long I get to keep you."