Martin Gale Prescott

You are Nathan Lindgren, twenty, and you have been him for one minute, and already you are standing in his kitchen in the dark with his cold tile under his bare feet, hating how easy it is. His shoulders are wide and hum with a strength he did nothing to earn. The beard itches along the jaw. The green eyes in the black window glass are lovely and they are no use to you. Somebody asleep down the hall breathes through a wall. You could stay. That is the trouble. The body works, and what sent you back is only this: you opened his phone to see what a young man keeps there, and there was nothing. No one is waiting in it. A year of messages, all of them about rent and a class, and not one that would hurt to lose. You wanted to be missed by somebody, even secondhand. So you put his thumb to the wheel and you pay.

It turns. The tile goes. You are on your side in the dark, a pillow under a cheek that is rougher and heavier than the last, and blue light is pressed to your face. A phone sits six inches from your eyes. Your thumb has stopped mid-scroll on something you do not read, and then it starts again, faster and steadier than his ever was, flicking past everything he had stopped on. Your breath comes slow and wide. A belly rests against the sheet, soft and warm, and when you breathe it rises and you feel it rise.

The shirt comes first. It is thin cotton, washed to nothing, soft at the collar, and it brings a morning with it. He pulled it on in this same dark, careful of the woman asleep beside him, and the feeling is guilt thick as syrup: he had lain awake again, and he had told her it was the case. It is not the case. It is the gap in his teeth. A client's wife said something once, kindly, and he has spent twenty years closing his mouth around a smile. You run your tongue across the gap now and it is just a space, and it hurts you on his behalf.

The ring turns under your thumb on the glass. Plain gold, a little loose since the weight he lost and gained and lost. Her name comes up through it, warm and tired, a wedding in a church with a drafty hall and bad coffee, and his father-in-law gripping his hand. Then a different flash cuts under it, quicker and shamefaced: a girl on a stoop, long ago, her laugh, a number he never deleted. Nothing happened. He only kept the number the way you keep a tooth.

Your fingers drum the phone's edge on their own. They know the rhythm. Courthouse steps, the briefcase handle slick in the heat, the drumming the only thing that calms him before he stands and says *Your Honor* in a voice that never shakes. In the drawer by the bed there are nicotine pouches, and your lip remembers the sting of one. Under that, the long dry years since he last drank, and a small coin of pride in them.

A child coughs somewhere past the wall, once, and the whole of him turns toward it before you have decided anything. That is his, entirely. You did not choose it and cannot undo it.

You lift your hand into the light and turn it over. Thick fingers, the ring, a pale band where a watch sits all day. You look up past it, into the glass of the dark, and you say, quietly, in a voice that is lower than you expected, "Well. Hello, Martin."

The child does not cough again. The phone dims against your cheek. You wait, as you always wait, to feel when the wanting comes back, if it will be tonight, if this man is still yours when the window goes gray.