Octavio Lerma

You are standing at the sink of a Las Vegas kitchen with a glass of water you don't want, in the body of a man who has been yours for less than a minute. Forty-three, athletic, a delivery driver. Everyone in the house is asleep. His knees are good and his back is good, and the first minute in him was a pleasure. Then you picked up his phone from the counter, and the screen lit your face in the dark window, and you knew. It isn't the body. The body works. It's the quiet. The whole house is breathing in its sleep and none of it is yours, and the wanting you thought you had finished came back up your throat like water. You open the page. The wheel is already turning.

Then the sink is gone.

You are on your side in the dark, and the left half of your face is cold blue. A phone sits six inches from your eyes. Your thumb is stopped mid-scroll on something you don't read. Your thumb starts again, faster and steadier than it was, flicking past whatever he had stopped on. Your eyes have stopped blinking at his intervals. There is no travel and no warning. His breath is in your chest, slow and a little wet at the bottom, the breath of a man who ought to have been asleep an hour ago.

The weight comes first. Fifty-two years sit in the hip you're lying on, a dull, patient ache against the mattress. The shoulder under you has gone half numb. Your stomach is soft and warm under a T-shirt that has been washed a thousand times, and the cotton has gone thin as a handkerchief at the collar. The collar gives you the first memory, and it comes in his feeling. It's a morning, years back, his wife laughing in a doorway because he'd put it on inside out and walked all the way to the car before she called after him. The laugh is warm and it is not yours. You hold it anyway.

Under the sheet are soft work trousers, and your feet are in socks. The left sock has slid half off, and the heel is cold. The mattress dips toward the middle where two people have worn it, and you know without asking that the other side is her side. You can smell her in the pillow, or rather he can: some cheap lavender and warm skin. A line of feeling goes through you that is plain tenderness, tired and unfashionable and thirty years deep. You did not earn it. You are using it.

The phone is warm. You scroll back up, and the screen holds his night: a news story about a mine closing, a text thread with a name, Marisol, and the last message in it, *Did you eat?*, unanswered. The thumb knows the glass. The thumb knows this exact tilt of the wrist. And then you see why he's awake. A photograph, an old one, a girl on a hood in a parking lot, squinting, sunburnt, nineteen. It's the ex who still matters. He has been looking at her for twenty minutes and has not done one thing about it. The knowledge arrives whole through the hand that holds the picture: he doesn't want her. He wants to have been someone who might have. He wants the hood and the sun and the knees that didn't hurt. You know that exact thing, and it's why you are here, and you don't say so.

Your left hand lies on the pillow. The band on it is a plain gold ring worn smooth, and when your thumb finds it, a second flash comes up, a church in a small town, the wood of the pew under his palm, and her mother crying. The Catholic in him is still in there, folded small. It is a habit of looking up, a pocket of quiet. Then the trailer: the thin wall, the wind leaning on it, sagebrush right up to the step, the window gone black. Then the office, a glass box with the door always open because a manager's door is always open. Twenty-six years of saying yes to other people's emergencies. A small sum put away, a boy somewhere in his twenties who still calls on Sundays. An old cigarette-ache in the back of the throat, quit nine years ago and never entirely gone.

You lift the hand off the pillow and hold it in the blue light. You turn it over. Brown, square, the knuckles thick, the ring catching the glow. It is a good hand. It is not yours. You raise your eyes and look straight out, and your mouth, his mouth, shapes the words low so as not to wake her:

"Okay. Let's see how long you last."

Somewhere under the question is the wheel, quiet for now. You do not know whether it is minutes or years, and you hold still and breathe his air.