Neil Brandvik

You are standing in a kitchen that is not yours and never was, in the dark, with a paring knife in your hand and nothing to cut. Samer Haddad's hands. Thirty-four years of them, burned and nicked, and you have worn them for less than a minute. Prep cooks wake before dawn. His whole body is built to be up at this hour, and it is wrong to stand in his kitchen with nothing to do.

You wanted something and you could not name it. The apron on its hook smelled like onions and bleach, and a flash came, unasked: a walk-in cooler, a boss's thumb on a clipboard, shame like a hot coin under the tongue. You did not want his shame. You wanted a body that did not come with a boss. You put the knife down and opened the laptop on the counter, and the wheel was already there, patient, turning.

You pay. You spin.

Then you are lying on your side, and the dark has a blue edge. A phone six inches from your face. Your thumb is stopped mid-scroll, and the glass is warm against it. You start it again, faster, steadier than his, flicking past everything he had stopped on. Your eyes have not blinked in a while, and they do it now, late.

Cotton under your cheek, a pillow gone soft with years of the same head. A T-shirt, thin at the collar. It carries him to you before you can stop it: a morning, these sleeves, a woman's voice from the next room saying *you're wearing the gray one again*, and him laughing, and the laugh was easy, the laugh of a man who has been forgiven for small things for twenty years. Somewhere in the house, someone is breathing. Three of them. You feel the count in your chest like a pulse, a tally he kept without meaning to, doors he checked at night.

The sheet is cold at the ankle. Your feet are bare, and the left one aches in the arch, an old ache, the ache of walking stairs to other people's doors all day. The phone's edge is a memory: a stairwell, an afternoon on an open walkway, waiting to be let in, a child's drawing taped inside a window. He had liked that part. He had liked being someone who got let in.

Your ring finger presses the screen, and the band is a small cool circle against the glass. Memory comes up through it slow and warm: a courthouse, or a garden, someone's sister crying, a vow he did not say aloud because it was too large. Then, sidelong, an old girlfriend's handwriting on the back of a photo, and a tug he never told anyone about, kept the way you keep a stone in a coat pocket. You let it go. It is not yours to open.

Your lungs are fifty years old and clean, never smoked, and they fill easily. The knees are the news: a faint grind when you shift. The tattoo on your forearm itches like a thing remembered, black barbed lines from a bad year, a good decision he stopped regretting. The earring tugs when the pillow moves. The house under you hums, cold white light under the door, a garage below, a steep driveway he curses every rainy morning.

Money is a quiet fact in him, a floor beneath the floor. He does not worry about rent. He worries about other people's. That is his whole kind of rich.

You lift your hand off the phone and turn it over in the blue light. Wider than Samer's, a thin pale scar of nothing, a wedding band, a fine weathered skin. It is warm, and it is yours, and it is not.

You look up, past the glass, and say quietly, "Hello, you."

Already something small is turning in you, the old itch, wondering how long before it comes back: this hour, this week, whether you wake as him.