Marcus Odame

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Twenty-nine minutes is nothing. Twenty-nine minutes is barely long enough to learn a name, and already you are bored of Evan Sacharin's hazel eyes, his blond hair thinning at the crown in a way he clearly checks in mirrors, the ache in this stranger's once-broken nose when the weather turns. You are sitting on the edge of somebody's unmade bed in Allston, a guitar case against the wall that you have no urge to open, and the boredom is not really boredom. It is the specific itch of a body that has nothing left in it to surprise you. Two hundred twenty-nine men behind you and this one is thin soup — a working musician who mostly doesn't work, forty years old and coasting on a face that used to get him further. You spin because the wanting comes back faster now than it used to. It always does. You don't examine that. You open the laptop, you find the wheel already glowing on the screen from last time, and you spin it the way another man might reach for a second drink he told himself he didn't want.

The wheel gives you Boston again — a different corner of it, a different hour bleeding into the same Monday — and it gives you a body mid-motion, weight already committed forward, and that is the arrival: you are bent slightly at the hip, box heavy and square against you, and the door is still open behind you with keys hanging loose in the lock, and the light coming through two bare windows is the flat gray of an overcast afternoon going toward evening. Your arms know this weight already. They set it down before you do — some reflex of the body older than you are in it — and the box lands soft on bare floorboards with a sound that fills the empty room like a struck drum.

You leave the keys where they hang. You walk the edge of the room instead, knuckles trailing the wall, and it is his gesture, not yours — you feel yourself doing it a half-second before you understand why, the way a man checks a house is his by touching it.

The wall is cool and a little damp under the paint, new-place cool, and it gives you nothing. But your own shirt does — the blue T-shirt snug at the shoulders, worn soft at the collar — and it comes back to you in his voice, not yours: this morning, before six, feeding around it. Reaching past it in the dark closet of the old apartment for something clean while Danielle slept with her arm thrown over the space where he'd been, and the shirt was the one that still smelled right after the wash, and he'd put it on standing in the bathroom doorway so the hall light wouldn't wake her, working it down over his head one arm at a time, the second sleeve catching on the ball of his shoulder the way it always does because he's got more shoulder than the shirt accounts for. He remembers — you remember, wearing him — the softness of gone-slack muscle under skin that used to be tighter, the small private embarrassment of it that he doesn't say to anyone, that he tells himself is just what thirty-two looks like on a man who spends his days behind a camera and not in front of one.

The vest is a separate memory, arriving through the ghost-weight of straps he isn't wearing right now but that his shoulders remember anyway — the reflector shoot from earlier, propped crooked against a brick wall in bad light, him crouched to get the angle right, lens cap gone soft and gray with tooth-marks because he holds it in his mouth when both hands are full, has held it there since art school, a habit nobody's ever managed to shame him out of. The cap tastes like nothing. It tastes like work.

The tattoo gives you more than the others — your fingers find it without meaning to, tracing the raised script half-swallowed by the sleeve, and it opens all the way down: a delivery room four years back, fluorescent and too bright, a name being decided out loud between contractions, Naomi with an h or without, and then the without winning, and the date under it inked six weeks later while she slept against his chest in another room entirely. There is a second child now too, younger, whose name isn't on his arm yet, and the guilt of that gap sits in him like a low hum he's stopped hearing. Two kids. A woman he lives with who is not their mother — Danielle, whose laugh he can call up easier than her face right now, who helped him tape these very boxes last night with the radio on low so the kids upstairs wouldn't wake. And under all of it, quieter, an ex who still texts about pickup times and holidays, whose name he does not let himself think all the way through because there's a whole life folded into it he's trying to be finished with.

The vape is in his pocket — you feel its shape against your thigh before you feel wanting it, and that's its own small memory: church on Sunday, the elders who don't know, the quitting-drinking that stuck when the vaping didn't, God forgiving one vice easier than He'd have forgiven the other, or so he's decided, alone, without asking anyone to confirm it.

The floor under your — his — sneakers is bare pine, cold through thin soles, echoing slightly the way rooms do before furniture arrives to eat the sound. This is his. He signed for it Friday. He has been waiting all day, all week, all year for a room this empty to belong to him.

You look at your hands. They are darker than the hands you had this morning, longer in the finger, a callus along the trigger finger from a shutter button pressed ten thousand times, dimples denting into his cheeks though there is no one here to see them. You turn one hand over like it's a photograph you're checking for focus.

"New place smell's the best part," you say, out loud, to no one, in his voice, and you don't know yet if that's true, or how long you'll be the one saying it.