Nicholas Guidry

You have been looking at the page for an hour without reading it. It is the middle of the night, a Sunday, the house asleep around you, and the evening has been nothing: work behind you, the phone scrolled down to its dregs, the dull hum of a night with nothing on. And then the tab you have kept open for weeks. A wheel. You have wanted this since before you had words for it, in the films, the stories, the threads at two in the morning about waking up as someone else. You did not believe it would work. You pay. You spin. The wheel slows, ticks, stops.

Dark. Road noise. The dash glow is on your knuckles, and the knuckles are his.

The car has drifted a foot toward the line. You pull it back in one smooth motion, and your hands come off the wheel and settle lower and wider, because this is how you hold it. Your thumb has already found the signal stalk. The click begins for an exit that is not his, and you don't know that yet. His breath is slow and a little sour with whatever he drank tonight. His left leg is bouncing against the pedal bank, and it will not stop, because it is not yours to stop.

The jacket comes first. Canvas, soft at the cuffs, and the collar rubs the back of your neck. A morning floods in, and it is his, not yours: a bedroom gone gray before light, a woman's shoulder under a sheet, and a small child's voice somewhere past the wall asking for cereal. He took this jacket off a hook by the door. He shrugged the left sleeve first, always the left. He felt guilty about something he hadn't said, and the guilt sits in your chest now like a swallowed stone.

The wheel is next. It is worn smooth at ten and two, and that smoothness opens a long afternoon: a glass-walled office, the door open because he wants to be someone people walk into. Schedules, a girl on his team crying about her rent, and his own voice going gentle and level in a way he is proud of. The pride is warm. It has nothing to do with you.

The seat belt lies across his chest. The memory it gives is of two children in the back, belted in, asleep, the car dark and quiet like this. Then it gives you the other thing, the recent thing: a woman who is not the one in that bed, standing in a doorway with her arms folded, saying his name in a tired voice. A year of her goes by in a second. It aches in a place that has no bone. He is still carrying it. He had a drink or two tonight to carry it better.

His body, honestly: five foot six, a compact weight, thirty-eight years in the lower back and a stiffness in the right shoulder. The beard is close and prickly under your palm when you scrub at your jaw. The hands are steady and know exactly what to do without you. Three miles from home, someone has been riding in his skin, and the signal ticks on.

You look down at your hands. You turn them over under the blue dash light, the fingers flexing, the ring finger with its pale band where a ring sits. They are strangers' hands and they are yours. Then you lift your eyes to the dark windshield and the long road, and you say it out loud, in his voice, low:

"Hello, Nicholas."

The leg bounces. The signal ticks. The exit comes up, and you don't know how long you have him, or when the wanting will turn over again, or whether you will still be him tomorrow.