Oliver Benstead

The warehouse is cold the way Anchorage is always cold at this hour, before the forklifts start up and the light outside is still just a rumor behind the loading doors. You are stiff in Kyle Branford's shoulders — heavy, aching in a specific tired-forty-two-year-old way, the beard on this face itching where it meets the collar. Two minutes you've had him. Two minutes of this body's knees complaining on the concrete, and already you know you're not going to spend the morning in it. That's the thing nobody tells you about the heavy ones, the broad ones: they feel like a deal until you're standing in them. You liked the idea of Kyle more than you like being Kyle. Nine men behind you and this one already a disappointment, and that's reason enough, that restlessness is reason enough, it doesn't need to be better than that. Your thumb finds the phone in your borrowed pocket before your mind has finished deciding. The site loads slow on a warehouse wifi signal. The wheel is already spinning before you've picked a reason, because you stopped needing one around spin four.

It lands.

You are leaning on a kitchen counter that is not a counter you have ever leaned on, cream-colored cabinets, a kettle's chrome catching low gold light, and the hold music loops back to its first bright idiot bar — and your shoulder, not your shoulder, his shoulder, drops the phone out of the crook of your neck into your hand mid-loop, the motion already halfway finished when you arrive inside it. A pen is resting against an envelope, its blue tip stopped dead on the second digit of a reference number, 4 and then nothing. Your hand — his hand — is narrower than the one you had a breath ago, the knuckles clean, the grip loose around a cheap plastic pen. The weight of you has dropped ten kilos and twenty years in the space between one bar of hold music and the same bar coming back around.

The shirt is what opens first — green corduroy, soft with washing, and it comes in through your shoulders like a held breath: this morning, early, light through a thin curtain, him buttoning it one-handed while the kettle clicked off behind him, thinking about nothing, thinking about the gate time, thinking vaguely that he should eat something before the drive to the base. The cuffs were folded twice, out of habit, not care. Jeans worn soft at the knee from kneeling on hardstand concrete, checking tie-down chains in weather that comes sideways. Boots by the door, laced in the dark more mornings than not, the leather gone the color of strong tea.

Then the room gives you more, because the room is his too — a terraced kitchen, small, the cabinets older than he is, a knife block someone gave him as a leaving-home present and never once admitted liking. A council flat, shared lease, the kind of ordinary that doesn't photograph. He's on hold with the bank about a refund that's been chasing him for six weeks, a hundred and forty quid for a flight he cancelled, number after number after number, and the little flare of irritation at the music looping is purely, completely his, sitting under your borrowed ribs like something left on a low simmer.

His hands remember things your hands never did: the particular drag of a tow bar pin seating home, the flat crack of cold air off a Hercules's fuselage at dusk, the specific way ear defenders sit warm and used around the back of the neck between details. Standing on the flight line as the sun goes down behind the perimeter fence, breath showing, someone shouting over the whine of an APU, and him just — content there, in a way he never quite manages to explain to people who ask what he does for a living. A girl two tours ago who didn't work out, nothing bitter left over from it, barely a mark. The vape in his jacket pocket upstairs, the taste of it at the end of a long shift. A pen he clicks without noticing, clicks now even, the envelope corner going soft under his thumb from being turned over and over while the hold music plays, an old habit worn into the body like the crease worn into the jeans.

You feel the whole unremarkable good of it — twenty-one, a job he's proud of in a quiet way, a flat he can just about afford, nothing owed, nothing owned, nothing broken that you can find — and you feel how little that weighs against the itch that sent you back to the wheel in the first place. It was never about him being wanting. It never is.

You look down. His hand — narrower, younger, clean-nailed — turns the pen once between two fingers, and you watch it happen like it's someone else's trick, because for about four more minutes it still partly is.

"Hello?" you say into the phone, out loud, to no one, just to hear this voice do it — flat London vowels, not yours, not his anymore either — and then you lower it slowly from your ear, and you look up into the window glass where the kitchen light makes a mirror of the dusk outside, and you hold there, waiting to see how long you feel like staying.