Preston Vandegrift

Colin Farraday's hands are wrong in a way you have stopped bothering to name. Sixty seconds ago you were somebody else, and now you are a bald biologist standing in a kitchen in San Francisco that isn't yours either, staring at a laptop screen with a wheel on it, freckled forearms braced on either side of the trackpad, and the whole thing in you that made you spin the first time is already awake again, scratching. One minute in this skin was enough to know it: careful man, kind eyes, a life that runs on schedule and lab reagents and a beard he trims too neatly. Comfortable. Nothing in him is hungry. You are hungry. You have been thirty-five other men and the hunger has never once belonged to any of them — it is only ever yours, riding them like a passenger who never buys a ticket, and Colin's stillness after sixty seconds already feels like a room with no windows. You put two fingers on the spin bar before you have finished thinking about it, because thinking about it has never once stopped you.

The wheel doesn't ask why. It only takes.

The spoon is already moving the other way in your hand — his hand — before you understand that you are the one moving it. Steam off the pan, low blue light through a window with the evening still purpling in it, a hanging bulb throwing warm yellow over a strip of counter. Your shoulders are wider than they were a breath ago. The ceiling is closer. You salt the pan on reflex, on a rhythm that isn't yours yet, and don't taste it, and reach up into a cabinet without deciding to and bring down a second plate and set it beside the first one, and some part of you that arrived a half-second behind the motion thinks: why did I do that, and gets no answer, because the man who would have known is not here to give one.

Then the kitchen starts talking to you through his skin.

The shirt is what opens first — thin cotton, worn soft at the collar, and it gives you a closet in Koreatown with the accordion door that never sits flush, him picking this exact shirt off a hanger at seven that evening because the polo was still creased from the dryer and he couldn't be bothered with the iron for a Thursday he was spending alone. Undershirt, then this one, sleeve and sleeve, the small satisfaction of a day finally being over — nine hours in the glass-walled office, door propped open the way his director likes it, a spreadsheet argument with someone in Ops that he'd already forgotten by the elevator. The cargo pants next, worn at the knee from crouching to pull inventory boxes off low shelves, and with them a whole texture of a job that is fine, that pays enough, that he has never once loved and never once hated enough to leave — Preston Vandegrift, mid-level, six years at it, a title that changes slightly every performance cycle without the job underneath it changing at all.

The sneakers on the floor give you weight — his weight, 6'5" of it, average build stacked onto a frame built for a taller sport he never played, feet that ache faintly in the arches from a day of standing at his desk because sitting made his back worse this year than last year. Thirty-three does that, starts leaving small notes. The spoon handle, wooden, worn pale where a thumb rides it, gives you Sunday dinners at his mother's table growing up outside Fresno, a Protestant grace said too fast to mean much anymore, and the private, small-town habit — vaping, never drinking, a church youth group memory of a punch bowl he never touched even at eighteen — of a man who keeps his vices quiet and countable.

The stove gives you the actual recipe, half-remembered, a girlfriend two years gone who taught him this exact sauce and left before he stopped making it for one. That's the ex who doesn't matter anymore, not really, just a habit that outlived her — the second plate, tonight, is not for her ghost. It's only muscle, a groove worn into an evening: cook enough for two, eat alone, put the extra in a container he won't open till Saturday. The counter under your forearms gives you the courtyard outside — stucco going gold under a dying sun, palm fronds dry enough to click in wind, neighbors he waves to and has never had inside. No one is coming tonight. No one was ever coming tonight. He just always sets two plates, and has never once asked himself why, and now never will.

You feel how tall this is, how it costs him nothing to reach the high shelf, how his knees are the only complaint his whole body has yet accumulated. Comfortable, unremarkable, unbothered — a life with the thermostat set to mild and never touched.

You look down at his hands on the counter — long-fingered, a callus at the base of the spoon-thumb, no ring, no watch, nothing on them at all — and turn one over slowly like it might tell you something it hasn't already.

"Guess I'm eating for two again," you say, out loud, to no one, in a voice that isn't quite settled into being his yet, and you don't know if that's a joke or the truest thing you've said all week, and you don't know how long you'll be the one saying it.