Marcus Teale

It is the middle of a Friday morning, and you are doing nothing in particular, which is the only kind of morning that leads anywhere. The site has been open in a tab for three days. You tell yourself you are not going to do it, the way you have told yourself that about a lot of things that turned out to be a formality. There is a wheel. There is a price, paid without much ceremony. There is a button that says SPIN in a font too friendly for what it is. You have wanted this since before you had a word for it — every film where someone wakes up wrong, every thread at two in the morning about whether the self is the thing doing the looking or just the eyes it happens to be looking through. You have never been able to buy it before. Now there's a button.

You press it.

You come up mid-sentence, and the sentence is not one you started. "—and I should've said something sooner instead of just, you know, sitting here," the voice says, his voice, carrying a little too far, loud enough that a woman at the next table glances over without meaning to. Your hand — his hand, dark-knuckled, a white half-moon callus riding the second finger — is on a water glass, and it turns a quarter turn on the wood and stops. Across the table a woman's face is doing something complicated, somewhere between pity and the exit. A bread basket sits between you, untouched, going cold under its cloth. You are sitting. You are tall even sitting, you can feel that, knees too close to the table leg, and thin in a way that isn't fragile, wire over bone. The room smells like garlic butter and candle wax and, underneath both, faintly, a sweetish vapor smell coming off his own collar.

The shirt is what opens first. It's a navy long-sleeve, soft, worn-in at the elbows, and the second your attention goes to it you're not just wearing it, you're pulling it on over your head in a bedroom with blinds half down and a ceiling fan clicking on its third notch — Thursday evening, six-forty, the appointment at seven-fifteen, a shower rushed because the crew change ran long and you came off the rig that morning smelling like diesel and salt no matter how long you stood under the water. Marcus Teale, twenty-six, two weeks off and one week on, Long Beach to the platform and back, and tonight is the first night in nine days he's tried to be a person a woman might want to keep talking to. The shirt remembers his arms going into the sleeves, the small satisfaction of a shirt that still fits right, the thought — fleeting, almost embarrassed — that he looked decent. The boots by the door, laced twice around because the left one's eyelet tore last year and never got fixed, carry the weight of three hundred feet of steel decking, the grip of a chain tong he doesn't need to think about anymore, hands that know torque the way other hands know a steering wheel.

The vape is in his jacket pocket, hung on the back of the chair, and touching the jacket at all brings the smell of it, menthol-mint, the habit he picked up to replace the whiskey he quietly let go of two years ago, no ceremony there either, just fewer bottles and then none. His chest remembers lungs that work hard and clean, rig air and ocean air, a cough that isn't there yet but will be someday and he knows it and vapes anyway. The chair under you holds the memory of other chairs — a barstool in Signal Hill, a folding chair on deck during safety briefing, the passenger seat of a car that isn't his, four years gone, a woman named Danielle who still texts him on his birthday and nothing else, and whom some stupid, loyal part of him is still privately comparing tonight's date to and finding her wanting, which isn't fair to anyone at this table.

The water glass gives you the most, strange as that is — his hand around it remembers a hundred other glasses, sparkling water at crew parties because somebody's always newly sober and nobody makes it weird, a champagne flute at his sister's wedding he didn't finish, his hand steady around all of them the particular steady of a man whose job is standing on something that moves. Freckles prickle faintly across your nose in the restaurant's low light, his own small vanity, the one feature strangers always mention first, and it comes with a memory of his mother's hand, years back, saying *mine too, see*, holding her wrist to his.

The date across the table is still waiting on whatever he says next. His face — this face, the beard trimmed close and even, the brown eyes that were mid-apology a second ago — holds its expression a half-beat too long, like a man listening to himself from outside a door. Then it resettles, unbothered, into something almost serene.

You turn the hand over on the tabletop, look at the lines of it, the rig-roughened palm, the white half-moon callus, like you're checking it's real.

"Sorry," you say, in his voice, to her, not really apologizing for the sentence anymore. "Lost my train of thought for a second there."

You don't know how long the thought will stay lost. You don't know if you'll still be sitting at this table tomorrow, or in this life next week, or whether the wanting that got you here will come back wanting someone else entirely. The wheel doesn't say. Nobody's ever told it to.