Nikhil Parekh

You are standing in a kitchen in Denver, in the middle of the night, in a body that is less than a minute old. Terrence Holloway's silver beard is under your palm. There is a scar through his eyebrow and a cold floor under his bare feet, and a fridge hums as if it had been waiting for you to notice it. He was a good body. Thirty-four, tall, a foreman's shoulders. You could have kept him a year.

But his refrigerator is full of someone else's plans: a calendar with a dentist, a note about a crew meeting at six. A man's whole week is leaning on you. You do not want a week. You want the thing that happens in the second before a week, when the room has not yet decided who you are. You open the laptop. The wheel is already turning.

Then it is dark, and warm, and your face is pressed into cotton.

Breath is tearing in and out of you, ragged, and then in one pull it goes even. A streetlight is coming through a gap in the curtains and laying a stripe across the back of your eyelids. Your arm hangs off the mattress and your fingers brush carpet. You draw it up. The body rolls onto its back, and your hands fold on your chest, a way he has never once slept. You do not know that yet.

The sheet is under your shoulders, twisted, damp from his sleep. It gives you something. He pulled these sheets tight once, for his girlfriend, before she came over, and she laughed at the hospital corners. He learned them from a video. It was the happiest he had been all month, and the feeling goes through your sternum and is gone.

The shirt is soft gray cotton, washed thin. You pinch the hem and he comes up behind it: the back of a van at the end of a shift, the shutter rattling up, the cold of a box of someone's wedding gifts. A woman at a service door signed with her finger because the stylus was dead. He was kind about it. He is always kind about the small things and tired about the large ones.

The jeans are stiff at the knee. He did not undress. He lay down at some hour of the afternoon or dawn with his boots off and the jeans on, because the shift runs backward here: nights are his days and the whole city sleeps while he is awake. Now it is the dead hour and he is the one asleep, and the casino lights are still going outside like a fever.

Your thumb finds the edge of a nail, and it is already bitten to the quick. Your teeth want it. Something in this body reaches for the corner of the nail without asking, an old, anxious little appetite, and under it a memory comes up of his mother's kitchen, the small brass lamp, the smell of ghee and incense. She told him not to chew his hands. He is twenty-seven and still does.

Your lungs know a flavor, sweet and chemical, mango. He vapes. He quit drinking, and the vape took the place of the drink. There is a quiet pride in the quitting and a small shame in the vape, and he keeps both folded together like a letter.

Your legs are heavy and strong, packed with stairs and curbs, with ten thousand lifts from a van bed. Your lower back aches in a place that has learned its own weather. Your beard is thick under your hand, joined to the moustache, and your cheek is warm against the pillow.

On the nightstand, close enough to touch, are his keys. You have not touched them. You will. For now you only lie there, and the whole life of him waits one object away.

You lift your hand into the stripe of streetlight and turn it over. Calluses at the base of the fingers. Bitten nails. It is a stranger's hand, and it is yours. You look at it, then past it into the dark where the ceiling is.

"Okay," you say, and his voice is lower than you expected. "Okay. Who are you?"

Somewhere under the question is the other one, the one you never say: how long, and when does the wanting come back.