Marwan Kellerman

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Gregory Nakashima's apartment is quiet the way an office is quiet after everyone's gone home, and you sit in his good chair by the window with the city going amber below, and you are bored out of your skull inside his bald head. Fifty years old, green eyes, a body that carries itself like it apologizes for existing in rooms. Three minutes you've had him and already the itch is back — not for Gregory's mid-level competence, his condo, his tidy comfortable life, but for the wanting itself, the only thing that's stayed yours through thirty-nine other men. You open the laptop. The wheel is already glowing on the screen like it never stopped.

You spin, and somewhere in the fall between men you think, deliberately, of him. Bryce Kellerman's house in Texas, blond and hazel and nineteen, whose skin you wore for a day and eleven hours five days ago, whose life you know from the inside — his warehouse shifts, his truck, the argument he was having with somebody on the phone before you left him. You never met the brother. You want to.

—

The television cuts to something bright and you are sitting up straight before you know why, spine long, a remote settling out of your fingers onto worn brown leather. Weight. There is so much weight now, low in the gut, comfortable and thick, a body that has been carrying itself around for twenty-nine years without much complaint. Stubble drags against your palm as your hand — his hand — comes up out of habit to rub the jaw. Socked feet. A ring on the fourth finger, plain gold, warm from his own skin a second ago.

The room is dark except for the lamp by the curtain and the blue wash off the screen, and it smells like fabric softener and, underneath that, like joint compound that never fully washes out of a man's skin no matter how many showers he takes.

The thermal shirt is the first thing that opens. Sleeve against your forearm and there it is — Thursday morning, this exact gray shirt coming off a hanger, him pulling it over his head still tasting coffee, thinking about the Hendricks job, the ceiling texture that wasn't matching, the plaid flannel going on over it because the house always runs cold before the heat's been on an hour. Rolling the sleeves. Two flicks of a lighter he doesn't smoke — no, that's wrong, that's someone else's memory bleeding at the edge — he dips, always has, a tin in the truck's cupholder, and he'd packed a lip before he even had his boots laced.

The wedding band gives you more. Whitney. Her name arrives soft and complete, six years married, her laugh at a wedding in Franklin, the two of them dancing badly on purpose. A fight about money that resolved itself in the kitchen at midnight. And underneath that, quieter, a woman from before her — Dana, who left for Portland eleven years ago and who he still, God help him, thinks about on nights exactly like this one, alone with the TV on and nobody to perform for. That's why he laughed less at this show tonight than he laughed last week. You feel that ache land in a chest that isn't used to being watched from inside.

The couch gives you the shape of ten thousand evenings like this — knees that ache from kneeling on concrete pads all day, a lower back that clicks getting up, forearms corded hard under the softness, hands that know without asking how to float a joint of mud so it dries invisible. Strong hands. Tired hands. Dimples set into a face that shows them even doing nothing, a thing Whitney used to say she fell for before she fell for anything else about him.

And then — because you're holding all of it now, touching couch and shirt and ring at once — Bryce arrives sideways, unbidden, the way a name comes up in a memory you didn't ask for: a much younger brother in Texas, a phone call last month that went longer than either of them meant it to, Marwan telling him to quit that warehouse job before it wore him down like their old man got worn down, Bryce laughing him off the way nineteen-year-olds do. You were in that body five days ago. You know things about Bryce this man doesn't. You know things about this man Bryce doesn't. Sitting inside him now feels like standing at the far end of a hallway you've already walked from the other door.

—

You look down. The hand on the couch arm is thick-fingered, olive-toned, a plain gold band catching the TV light, and you turn it over slow, feeling the calluses on it like a language you're only now being taught to read.

You lift your eyes to the dark window, to nothing, to whatever is watching.

"Didn't figure I'd end up thinking about my brother tonight," you say, out loud, in his voice, and you have no idea yet how long you intend to let that be true.