Perry Adelmann

The dorm room smells like instant coffee and somebody's gym bag, and you are sitting on the edge of a bed that isn't yours, in a body that isn't yours either, though it has been for six days now — 48, muscular, a gap in the front teeth you keep touching with your tongue like it's new, which it is. You like this one. You liked him yesterday. But there's a paper due you didn't write and a girl in the next room who keeps texting a name that isn't yours and won't ever be, and underneath both of those, quieter, the thing that actually decides it: the itch. Six days is long for you lately. You open the laptop already knowing you're not going to finish the paper. vessel.cards loads the way it always does, patient, gray, a wheel and a button, and you spin before you can talk yourself out of it, the way you always do, because talking yourself out of it has never once worked.

The wheel is still turning somewhere behind your eyes when it isn't your eyes anymore.

You're leaning into a mirror with foam on half your face and a razor stopped dead against your jaw, and the hand finishes the stroke before you've caught up to whose hand it is — up along the grain, no hesitation at the corner of the mouth, where apparently there is usually a hesitation, because some other, older habit in the muscle expects one and doesn't get it. The bathroom light is one bare bulb and it hums. Outside the window the sky is that flat pre-dawn blue that hasn't decided what it's doing yet.

The razor is warm from his palm and it hands you the first flash: this exact sink, years of it, cold porcelain edge worn smooth under his forearm, a wife's voice once calling through the door not to use all the hot water, and laughing when he answered that there wasn't a version of this where he didn't. Pittsburgh mornings before the sun, always. Night shift does that — flips your clock until dawn is bedtime and this bathroom is the last room of a day that started twelve hours ago, at a lobby desk, under fluorescent tubes, watching a door that mostly nobody comes through.

The flannel pajama pants against your legs bring the rest of it in pieces, the way cloth always does — worn soft at one knee where a kid used to climb up onto his lap and grip it for balance. Three kids, then. You get flashes of them like photographs shuffled out of order: a boy asleep against his shoulder at a Sunday service, a girl's fever-hot forehead under his palm at 3 a.m., another one — younger, or maybe the same one earlier — laughing so hard at something he'd done with his eyebrows that milk came out her nose. The scar in the eyebrow. He does that on purpose, he's done it his whole life, it's the family joke, Daddy's broken face, and every one of them has tried to touch it at least once as a baby and he's let them.

The slippers under his feet are flattened at the heel, years old, a gift from her that he wears until they fall apart because throwing them out feels like throwing out an anniversary. The wedding band on the hand holding the razor is warm too, and it opens the widest door of all: a woman he still, after this long, turns to look at when she isn't looking back, across a kitchen too small for the number of people in it, money always thin, the guard job barely covering what three kids cost, and none of that ever once making the marriage feel thin to him — that's the part that comes through loudest, not the scraping-by, but the fact that scraping by has never once felt like the point.

The undershirt against your back gives you this morning specifically, sleeve by sleeve, his own hands pulling it on an hour ago in a dark bedroom so as not to wake her, the mattress creaking anyway, her murmuring something without opening her eyes, him bending to kiss her hair before he even remembered to put pants on. Getting dressed backward, half-asleep, the whole ritual of it: shift over, shoes off at the door so the kids wouldn't wake, badge unclipped and set on the dresser next to a church bulletin from Sunday that he keeps meaning to throw away and doesn't.

His body under your hands is thin in a way that has never filled out no matter how many overnight shifts of vending-machine dinners he's put through it — 6'1" and built like a coat rack, a lower back that complains after eight hours on his feet at that desk, wrists too narrow for the watch he wears, which is on the counter, not on him, not right now. And under everything, even now, even mid-shave, one leg has started up its old bounce against the base cabinet, a small percussive thing that isn't nerves exactly, more like a motor that never fully turns off, that's been running since he was a kid in a pew somewhere being told to sit still.

You set the razor down. You look at your hand — his hand, the band on it, the small white line across one eyebrow that everyone who has ever loved him has reached up and touched.

"Almost done, hon," you say, to nobody, to the empty bathroom, in the voice you haven't earned yet, and you don't know if you mean the shave.