Owen Patrick Marsh

You are standing in a kitchen in Nashville with a showing at one o'clock, and Nathan's hands are doing the thing they do, straightening the cuffs of a blazer that fits perfectly. He is five-eight and the world is the right height. Everything works. The listing app buzzes on the counter and you do not look at it. Less than a minute of him, and already you know the exact shape of the problem: you can feel how easily he moves through the day, and none of it is yours. Nobody here has asked you a question you did not already have the answer to. You came for something the wheel has not given you yet, and you could not say what it is, not even in his empty kitchen. You pay. You spin. The wheel clicks down through its slots, and the kitchen goes out like a pulled plug.

Light, white and sideways, through a tall window. You are standing, which is the first surprise, and your arm is out, reaching toward the second monitor, and your fingertip is a half inch from the bezel. Your weight sits on the balls of your feet. Something in the rhythm of the hand is wrong, and you correct it, slowly, the way a man corrects himself on a job that has never needed it. Then ten more small motions, each one checked.

The hoodie is the first thing that talks. Its cotton is soft and washed thin at the elbows, and the cuff against your wrist brings back a morning: a cold floor, the zipper catching halfway, a man swearing mildly at it and leaving it open. He liked this one because it had no logo. The headphones around your neck are warm from his skin, and their band pulls a night out of the dark: a train, a song on repeat, an ex's name he did not say aloud, a thumb pressing at the edge of the other thumb until the cuticle gave. You look down. The skin there is raw, pink, picked. He did it without knowing, and now you are doing it, and you stop.

The floor is old hardwood, and through your sneakers you feel the give of it. The marble steps behind you are worn into shallow bowls, and the memory that rises from them is not a person but a sound: the morning delivery guy, the first sun coming down the block, the one hour he is certain the city belongs to him. Your back is straight from the standing desk. Your calves ache pleasantly. There is a plastic cup of iced coffee sweating on the wood, and when your knuckle brushes it you taste the cold, too sweet, bought because the good place was closed and he was too tired to mind. Under the sweetness, a small steady fear about rent. Twenty-three, and the arithmetic of it sits in his chest like a swallowed stone. There is a little ink there, a triangle of fine lines, and it itches faintly under the collar where the shirt rubs it. He got it on a dare to himself, in a year he does not like to think about, and he thinks about it anyway. A drink or two most evenings, the burn of it, the loosening. The mole on your cheek tingles when you frown, and you realize the frown is his.

You take your hand off the monitor. You turn it over. The fingers are long, the nails bitten ragged, the palm warm and a little damp. A stranger's hand, and yours now. You lift your eyes to the dark glass of the screen and find a face there, and you hold it.

"Well," you say, in his voice, a little lower than you expected. "Let's see how long you last."