Peter Kaminski

You are standing in Danny Fuentes's kitchen at eleven in the morning, and his hand — a big, soft, ring-scarred hand that has been playing bar chords since before you took him — will not stop shaking around a coffee mug that isn't his.

You have been Danny for one hour and fifty-three minutes. Long enough to learn that his shoulder aches from carrying an amp up three flights, that his neighbor's dog barks at the wrong times, that somewhere in this apartment there is a guitar he loves more than most of the people he has actually kept. Long enough to learn what he can't do: the man cannot hold a coffee cup without his hand going tremorous and useless, some old nerve thing from a bar fight years before you arrived, and it has been driving you insane in a way that has nothing to do with him and everything to do with you. You did not spin the wheel for adventure this time. You spun it because you wanted, for ten minutes, to hold something steady, and Danny Fuentes's body would not let you.

So: the site again. The wheel, spinning under your — his — unsteady thumb.

You are lifting a mug that has left its ring on a counter that has never been yours, in a kitchen you have never stood in, and the light through the window is flat and gray and comes from very far south of Anchorage. There is a dog bowl by the door. Coats on hooks that are not your coats. And then there is no transition at all — no falling, no lifting — just the fact of a new floor under new feet, a spoon already in your hand from a drawer you didn't open, hips and shoulders set at a height you didn't choose, five inches shorter than you were a breath ago, and so much more weight held so much better, arms that don't shake, a body standing easily in the middle of a stranger's hallway with the lights coming on ahead of it like it already knows where the switches are.

The shirt is what gives him to you first — thin gray cotton, worn soft at the collar, and pulling it on this morning comes back sleeve first: a mirror in a room with a slanted ceiling, a hand — his hand, broad-knuckled, a callus riding the base of each finger from years of nothing in particular — dragging through hair still wet, giving up on it, letting it fall the way it wants to fall. Peter. The name arrives with the shirt like it was folded into the fabric. Peter Kaminski, thirty years old, a laptop with a cracked corner waiting somewhere on a campus lawn that he is not going to make it to today because he told his boyfriend he'd come by, just for an hour, just to feed Bruno and water the plant on the sill that keeps almost dying.

The jeans bring the boyfriend's apartment whole: two years of it, the specific creak of this hallway floor, the particular gray of this paint that Peter has opinions about and has never said out loud because it isn't his to have opinions about. A key that took him four months to get. The dog — not his dog, but his, the way a lot of things here are his without belonging to him — nosing his knee this morning before he left for what he thought was a normal Monday. Cargo pants at home, folded on a chair, traded for these because a friend's coffee always ends up on him and he'd rather ruin denim that isn't precious. A lecture missed on purpose. A group chat he'll answer later.

The boots on his feet know the walk from L stop to lecture hall, four blocks in wind that comes off the lake like something personal, and they know it as an act of will — Peter takes a small yellow pill every morning with the same water he uses to water the plant, and some mornings the walk happens anyway, and that is its own kind of victory nobody grades. His hand keeps drifting to his own jaw, unconscious, checking something that isn't there, the way it's done since he was maybe twenty, and you feel the muscle do it now without asking it to.

There's a warmth further back — not a memory so much as a temperature: a man's voice on the phone last night saying something that made this face, this exact face, go soft in a mirror nobody was watching. No ex worth naming. No wreckage behind him, just this — a person he chose, still choosing, three years in less time than most people get anything right.

You set the mug down inside its old ring, correctly, like you've done it forty times, because some second lower authority is running the motor reflexes and hasn't caught up to what you are. The spoon fits your — his — fingers exactly. You go down the hallway, and the lights come on ahead of you, room by room, like the apartment is grateful to have him back even though it was never him to begin with.

You stop in the light from the last doorway and hold your hands up — his hands, calloused only where ordinary life calloused them, no ring on the finger though there's a faint paler line where one visits sometimes, unofficial, promised. You turn them over once, like checking they're real.

"Wrong house," you say, out loud, to no one, and you don't know yet if you mean it as a joke.