Marcus Villanueva

You've had the tab open for eleven minutes without touching it, the way you do the nights nothing is on and nothing is wrong, just late, just quiet, just you and the same three sites you always circle back to. Threads about waking up in someone else. Forums for people who wish it were real. You have wanted this since before you could explain why — not this site specifically, just the idea of it, the door of it, for as long as you can remember wanting anything. Tonight the door has a price on it and a wheel drawn in thin gold lines, spinning lazily on the screen like it has all the time you do. You pay it before you can talk yourself out of being the kind of person who pays it. You spin.

There is no falling, no tunnel, no sensation of leaving anywhere, because there was nowhere leaving to happen from. There is only arriving — into foam-smell and warm skin and a hand that is not a decision you make, already moving, already three-quarters of the way through a stroke you didn't start. The razor finishes the pass up his jaw against the grain, no hesitation at the corner of his mouth, where apparently there is always supposed to be one. You do it faster than he would have. You don't know that yet. You will.

The mirror in front of you is spotted at the corners, screwed into a wall that has been repainted so many times the doorframe doesn't sit flush anymore, and behind you, through the open door, there's a room the color of early evening even though where you came from it was the deep dead middle of the night — the gap between his Tuesday and your Wednesday sitting there like a held breath, wrong in a way you feel before you think about it. He should be in bed at this hour, somewhere. Instead the window over the tub is going that syrup-gold that means the heat's just starting to break for the day, cicadas somewhere, a curtain of steam still hanging off a street he can't see from here. He works nights. Of course he does.

The razor is the first thing to talk. Cheap plastic handle, a drugstore three-pack, and it gives you a version of a hand running it under the tap the same way, blade angled the same forgiving degree, hundreds of mornings compressed into the grip — no, evenings, always evenings, always this same ritual before the same drive to the same rope outside the same doors, the leather jacket zipped to the throat no matter how hot it still is at that hour because the cold comes in off the river later and you learn not to fight it twice a night. The sink's cool porcelain lip under your other hand gives you weight shifting forward into it, years of the same lean, the same tilt of the head.

The t-shirt against your back — thin gray cotton, soft from washing — gives you her. Not all at once. A sleeve first: her hands smoothing the collar flat this morning before you left for the thing you were doing before this, before the shave, some errand already forgotten by the body wearing it, and her laugh at something you said, low and easy, the kind of laugh a marriage has in it after enough years that it doesn't need saying what's funny. Then more: an apartment two blocks up, a crib in the room that used to be for guests, your daughter's fist closing hard enough around your finger last week that you'd laughed too, surprised, proud of a grip that strong from something that small. The tattoo under the sleeve, where your fingers brush it without meaning to — a name, a date, hers, the day you knew — gives you the tattoo parlor's buzzing quiet and how nervous you'd been for something that didn't hurt at all.

And under that, quieter, guiltier: her. The other one. Not the wife — the one before, the one recent enough that her voicemail is probably still saved somewhere in this phone you haven't touched yet, a warmth that isn't finished being felt even though it's supposed to be over, the specific ache of a thing that ended well and still ended. It comes through nothing in particular. It just comes, the way some things do, uninvited, and sits there next to the wedding band cold on your left hand, the two of them not fighting exactly, just coexisting, the way they must have learned to.

Your jaw feels lean under your palm, five-ten of muscle held the way a body holds itself when its job is standing at a door being looked at, weight balanced forward on the balls of your feet even here, even now, even shaving. Your nails, when you notice your own hand, are bitten to nothing — a habit that isn't yours, that you're only now the custodian of. There's a dull ready ache low in your shoulders that isn't pain, just readiness, the kind you'd carry into a doorway at one in the morning without thinking twice.

You set the razor down. You look at your hand — his hand — turning it over slowly under the bad bathroom light, foam still drying in a line along one side of the jaw, the wedding band catching gold for a second before it doesn't.

"Okay," you say, out loud, to no one, to the mirror, to him, wherever he isn't anymore. "Okay."

Somewhere far off, another version of tonight is still going — the tab still open, the wheel still spinning slower and slower toward stopping — and you don't know yet if that was the only spin you get, or the first of many, or whether tomorrow you're still standing at this door in this jacket smelling of river damp, or somewhere else entirely, in someone else's hands.