Marcus Threadgill

Brett Halloran's apartment is quiet at this hour, the ceiling fan clicking on its bad bearing, and you are sitting up in his dad-bod body at three in the morning because his body will not let you sleep. Something in his gut has been sour since dinner, some cheap taco truck decision that was his and not yours, and you keep almost drifting off and then not, and somewhere in that not-quite-sleep the itch comes back, the one that always comes back, the one that is not his and never was. You have been Brett for a day and fifteen hours. Long enough to know his ceiling fan and his heartburn and nothing else worth knowing. You get up in his boxers and go to the laptop glowing on the kitchen counter, and vessel.cards is already in the browser history, because some part of him — no, some part of you, wearing him — never closed the tab.

You pay. You spin. The wheel spins.

You are sitting forward on a couch that is not Brett's couch, thumb already on a remote, mid-motion, before you understand you have moved at all. The volume goes up two clicks with a precision that surprises you, though it will stop surprising you in a second. There is a can in the other hand, warm, nearly empty, the metal soft under your grip. A television plays a replay of a goal you did not see happen. The room smells like carpet cleaner and something fried hours ago. Outside these windows, wherever they are, it is not three in the morning. The light through the blinds is the flat orange of a desert evening cooling off, and your body — his body — is bald-headed and short and solid through the middle in a t-shirt gone soft with washing, and there is a weight in your neck and jaw, a tautness where skin doesn't move the way skin should.

The can gives you the first flash: his hand around a hundred other cans, except no — never around a drink, this is not that, his palm remembers Coca-Cola in a church basement, sweet tea at his mother's table, a lifetime of iced things and never once a beer, and yet here you are holding one that is his and not his, bought for a guest, maybe, or bought because on nights like this a man wants something in his hand even if he will not drink it. It has gone flat and warm because he fell asleep before finishing it, the way he does, the way his wife stopped commenting on years ago.

The remote gives you more. Sunday afternoons, a couch cushion worn to the shape of him, his younger boy's team on the screen sometimes, soccer more often because his daughter plays midfield in a league across town and he has learned the sport for her, learned to see runs and shape where he used to see just a ball and some running. There is a courthouse in the memory too, marble steps, a briefcase handle worn shiny at the clasp, thirty years of gripping it the same way, and the scar along his neck pulls tight when he turns his head to check a clock, an old thing, older than the family, older than the law degree, a story he tells exactly once to new colleagues and never again.

The t-shirt against your back opens the morning he put it on — not this morning, a hundred mornings compressed into one gesture, the reach behind with one hand and the practiced twist to find the second sleeve, hips already knowing how to angle for pants that are looser now than they were at forty. This body aches faintly in the lower back, a low structural complaint that has been present so long it barely registers as pain anymore, more like weather. Blood pressure medication on the bathroom counter, a habit of picking it up and swallowing dry, no water, because water is one more thing to manage in a life spent managing things — depositions, calendars, a marriage that has had its arguments and outlasted every one of them, the wife's laugh from another room down a hallway you have not seen yet, two kids you have only pieces of, a boy's height chart penciled on a door frame, a girl asking why can't we just eat like a family for once. The wedding band on your left hand is warm from his own skin, and it carries an entire wedding day inside a single band of gold — a promise made in a church that smelled like candle wax and hairspray, a woman in ivory he could not stop looking at.

His throat clears itself without you asking it to. A blink, too hard, mechanical, his tic doing what it does regardless of who is steering. Somewhere behind these memories there is a coworker's face you already know from the other side — a nurse in San Francisco you wore for two days, eight days ago, gap-toothed, easy laugh, and this man's memory of him arrives thin but warm, lunchroom jokes, a case that overlapped once with a hospital, nothing large, just a name that means something because you have stood inside it. The smoke and the vape both live in this body's lungs, a low familiar want already surfacing though you have not lit anything yet, a habit thirty years old that his wife has asked him a hundred times to quit and he has told her a hundred times that he will, next year, always next year.

The television shows the replay a second time. Somewhere in Phoenix, evening is settling into a house you have not walked through yet. Somewhere in Miami, Brett Halloran's body is sitting empty on a bathroom floor with the laptop still open, and you left him there without a word, because you always leave without a word.

You look down at the can, at the ring on this hand, at knuckles that are not the ones you fell asleep with tonight. You turn the hand over once, slow, like you're checking it's real.

"Not yet," you say to the empty room, to the game, to no one. "Not going anywhere yet."