Marcus Whitfield

Bryce Kellerman's phone is at four percent and the warehouse Slack is still lit up with tomorrow's shift schedule, and you hate it, suddenly and completely, the way you have started hating all of them right around day two. It is Sunday evening in Rural Texas, quiet enough that you can hear the box fan going in the other room, and Bryce's hazel eyes are dry from a double shift that wasn't even yours to be tired from. Nineteen years old, blond, average build, hands that smell like cardboard dust no matter how many times you wash them. Fine. Serviceable. Boring in a way that has nothing to do with Bryce and everything to do with you having done this now twenty-nine times and knowing already, in your gut, the exact shape of every day this one has left. You open the laptop. You go to vessel.cards. You do not examine the wanting too closely, because you never do — it's just there, low and constant, like a hum under a floor, and today it's louder than the guilt.

You spin.

The street tilts and rights itself and you are taller, heavier, standing wet-shoed on a curb you don't recognize, one hand slapped flat against the cold metal of a parked Honda that caught you before you knew you were falling. Streetlight buzzing pink-orange overhead. Coffee shop glow half a block down, closed, the neon OPEN sign someone forgot to switch off still burning uselessly behind glass. Your — his — jacket hangs open over a white undershirt gone soft with wear. There's a wrongness in your chest that isn't fear yet, just imbalance, like stepping off an escalator that never comes.

You straighten up. The scuff in your gait — third step, third step, third step — simply isn't there anymore. Your feet come down flat and quiet, forty of them, even as a metronome, and at the corner where home is straight ahead, you turn left.

The denim jacket is the first thing that talks to you. It's been through winters — you feel that in the fabric before you feel it in your head, a memory arriving sideways: a thrift store on Aurora, the guy behind the counter, six dollars, Marcus turning the collar up in the mirror and thinking *this one's got some age on it already, good.* Then more: mornings. Dozens of them collapsing into one composite morning, the routine of it — shirt over the head first because the sleeve always catches on the tattoo if he does the sleeve first, always has, ever since he got the fine-line geometric thing on his upper arm at nineteen from a guy in Ballard who undercharged him because Marcus fixed his transmission for free the week before. Barter economy. Small city, small favors.

The rag in the back pocket of pants that aren't these pants, but the ghost of the motion is in the muscle anyway — pulling it out, wiping a socket wrench, tucking it back, a hundred times a day, so automatic it isn't even a memory so much as a groove worn into the shoulder. You feel the garage before you see it: the raised car, the smell of brake cleaner and old coffee, the two bays, the particular ache that lives across his lower back from bending under chassis for eight hours, dad-bod softness over a frame that's still strong enough to break a lug nut loose with his bare hand. Nineteen and already carrying it in the spine a little. Nobody in the shop rides him about it. He's good at the job, quiet about being good at it.

The drink comes back through nothing you're touching — comes back through the taste still sitting at the back of his throat, sour, the fourth or fifth of however many, at a bar he doesn't remember the name of because he was choosing not to remember it while he was in it. That's the pattern lately. You feel it as *his* shame, not yours, arriving secondhand and diluted, the way all his feelings arrive: he'd meant to have two. He is trying, badly, to quit the cigarettes too — there's a half pack somewhere on him, unopened three days now, an act of willpower that keeps almost holding.

And under the jacket, under the shirt, his hands — you feel what they know without you asking. Torque, feel, the particular give of a bolt about to strip versus one that's just stubborn. And you feel what they do when nobody's steering them on purpose: how they stutter, fine motor coming apart under pressure, the time he had to redo a spark plug three times in front of a customer because his fingers wouldn't cooperate with an audience. Not fear exactly. Just a wire that doesn't run straight in him.

Then, walking, the roommate arrives — through the smell of the apartment that's still on this jacket somehow, cigarette smoke that isn't his, a stagehand's erratic hours bleeding into Marcus's own. Ruben. You know that name from the inside, because seven days and one hour ago you *were* Ruben Castellanos for two minutes, standing in Ruben's kitchen in small-town Ohio, and whatever happened in that kitchen, whatever you did wearing him for those hundred and twenty seconds, you carry it now the way you carry all of them — a debt nobody but you remembers is owed. Marcus doesn't know that. Marcus just knows Ruben as the guy who leaves dishes in the sink and covers rent when Marcus can't, who doesn't ask questions about the drinking, who once drove forty-five minutes to pick him up from somewhere Marcus won't say. Whatever's between them is soft at the edges, unfinished, the kind of thing that would have become something with time. You are standing inside the ten seconds before any of that gets to happen.

You look down. Brown hands, broader than Bryce's, a callus riding the base of the thumb that wasn't there an hour ago in any body you've worn. You turn them over once, like you're checking they're real, which they are, which is the whole point.

"Okay," you say, to the empty wet street, to nobody. "Not home yet."