Peter Halloran

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Two minutes in Brandon Yee and already the itch is back.

You feel it in his fingers first, the way they want to be doing something else, tapping the edge of the desk, the mouse, anything. The stream overlay is still up on the second monitor, chat scrolling slower now that the trip was over, a couple hundred people still lurking on a paused screen, waiting for a body that already stopped being interesting to you the second you had it. Freckles across the bridge of a nose that was never broken. Black hair damp at the temple. Twenty-eight years old and rich in a currency you don't care about — mod hearts, sub counts — and the East Asian face in the monitor reflection is a stranger's face doing a stranger's small, involuntary things: blinking too much, jaw tight, the leftover adrenaline of somebody else's stage fright.

You didn't even get his name off anything yet. Doesn't matter. You never keep the ones you don't like the shape of.

The site is still open in the other tab. You never closed it. That's the tell, if you were watching yourself from outside: twenty-eight strangers deep and you still keep the tab open like a man keeps the fridge open after he's already decided he's not hungry, just to look.

You spin.

---

The toothpick is already between your teeth. That's the first thing — wood, faint mint, the small working motion of a jaw that has done this ten thousand evenings without asking permission. Weight is different, heavier through the middle in a way the last body wasn't, taller, a wrongness in the shoulders that isn't wrong so much as unfamiliar, like putting on a coat cut for someone with slightly more of everything. Your hand — his hand — is closing a briefcase clasp. Mid-motion. The little brass tongue was supposed to slide home and instead it catches, skips, and you feel the hitch travel up into checked, deliberate fingers that redo it slow and correct. Then again. Then eight more times on latches that have not needed checking in a decade, each one landing right, none of them trusted.

Marble under your shoes, worn into a shallow dish by a hundred years of other men's steps. Morning light coming low down the block, doorways still holding blue shade. Somewhere behind you a rowhouse door you don't yet know is yours.

---

The briefcase leather is warm where his palm has been on it and that's the first door — his father's hands, actually, a different case entirely, brown and cracked, *you'll ruin the good one carrying files, get a beater bag for the gym* — and the warmth folds forward into this one, bought eleven years ago at a shop on Walnut Street the week he passed the bar, paid for by a bonus he didn't tell his mother the number of because she'd have made him feel strange about it.

The toothpick gives you the doctor's office, thirty-one years old, a woman across a desk saying *executive function* like it explained something he'd spent his whole life calling laziness, and the relief of that appointment sits under his tongue even now, mixed in with pine.

The shirt cuff against your wrist — bought the same week as four others, all white, because picking shirts is its own small hell when your attention won't hold still on fabric swatches for longer than a held breath — and under that memory, a truer one: this morning, actually this morning, his wife's hand smoothing the collar down flat before he left, not because it needed it, just because her hand likes to. *You've got the Hendricks thing at eleven,* she said, not a question, because she keeps the calendar he can't. He kissed the part in her hair. She still smells like the same drugstore shampoo from when they met, and he has never once suggested she change it.

The ring is the deepest one. Left hand, plain band, and touching it — no, being it, wearing it as your own fourth finger now — brings a wedding in October, string lights on a rented rooftop, his best man's toast running four minutes too long because Danny always runs long, and Elise's laugh across a folding table when the DJ played the wrong song first and everyone forgave it instantly because the night had already decided to be perfect. Under that, quieter, an ex-girlfriend's name arriving with no photograph attached, just a feeling like the ghost ache in a bone that healed years wrong — nothing urgent, nothing current, just a door in the house he doesn't open anymore but knows is there.

His nose you find last, oddly, through the memory of touching it — a lacrosse stick, nineteen years old, the crack of it and blood down a white jersey, and the set afterward slightly off-true because the ER resident was tired and Peter, half-concussed, told him just to leave it, it's fine, and never had it fixed, and thirty-five-year-old you likes it now, likes that his face admits something happened to it once.

Body underneath all of it: soft where an athlete used to be firm, the give at the waistband more than the belt wants to admit, but the legs still know courthouse steps by feel, still climb them two at a time out of a habit older than the softness. Lower back a little tight from a chair that's wrong for him. Hands unmarked, uncallused, made for paper.

---

You look at your hands. Both of them, turning the left one over to catch the ring in the low sun, the wedding band strange and correct at once, the way a stranger's watch feels heavier than your own ever did.

You lift your eyes into the morning, toothpick still caught at the corner of your mouth, and you say, to no one, to the street, to whatever was watching:

"Okay. Let's see what you've got."