Riley Kastner

The El Paso morning hasn't started yet, and neither has Colton Braswell's day, and that's the problem. Two minutes in this body and already you know it by its aches — a bad shoulder, a hitch in the lower back from forty years of hauling lines, blond hair gone thin at the crown under a ballcap that isn't on yet. You are standing in a kitchen that smells like old coffee grounds and fish scale, and you understand, with the flat clarity of a man who has done this ten times before, that you did not want this one. Freckles and blue eyes and a fisherman's patience were not what you were after. You wanted him for maybe an hour, tried him on the way you try on a coat in a store you already know you're leaving. Nothing wrong with him. Nothing here for you either. The boredom arrives before the coffee does. You find the phone, you find the site, the wheel already spinning behind your eyes before your thumb even touches it.

Then there's a path.

Fog over black water, trees still holding the last of the dark, and legs that are not Colton's legs, are not anyone's yet — thin, quick, cold at the knee where the shorts stop. Your foot comes down wrong for two strides, catches, doesn't fall, and the run keeps going on its own, like the body already knew how before you got here. A watch on the wrist buzzes a split. Earbuds feeding a song that means nothing to you yet. Breath coming out in a scarf of white ahead of your face.

The jacket is the first thing. Its sleeve slides against damp skin as the arm swings and something comes up out of that friction, easy as a name — Riley pulling this exact jacket off a hook by the shop's back door at five-forty, half-asleep, the zipper catching, the small private ritual of running before opening up, before anyone's called for an appointment, before his head starts up its low hum behind the eyes. He runs to keep the migraines down. He runs because sitting bent over someone's forearm for six hours does something to his neck that only motion undoes. He runs because his ex used to run with him and stopping felt like giving her the last piece.

The shorts against his thighs bring her more clearly — Dana, eight months gone now, her laugh across this exact stretch of towpath, the two of them matching pace without trying, before it wasn't that easy anymore. It ended quiet. No shouting. Just two people finding out they wanted different weather. He still runs her old route out of habit, or spite, or hope, he was never sure which, and neither are you, because it isn't your hope, it only arrives dressed as his.

The little hoop of metal in the earlobe, cold in the morning air, gives you a chair reclining in a shop with peeling vinyl, a client's forearm under his gloved hand, the particular hush of a needle going in clean. He is good at this. Thirty seconds of muscle memory rise up through the shoulder and wrist — the angle you hold the machine, the practiced economy of a man who has learned not to waste motion, learned it the same way he learned to run: because pain, his own, is a thing he has spent years arranging his life around avoiding, or absorbing, or turning into something with color and permanence on somebody else's skin.

The watch on the wrist is warm from his pulse and it gives you this morning exactly — three-forty, alarm silent so it wouldn't wake the empty apartment, standing in the dark pulling one arm and then the other into the jacket, the zipper catching same as always, the nicotine pouch already tucked and going numb against his gum, the closed diner's dark window sliding by, town holding its one red light on empty, nobody else awake to see a skinny redhead with ink up both arms breathing steam over black water at the one hour of the day that belongs only to him.

None of it is yours. All of it comes through anyway — sleeve, hoop, watch, thigh — a life delivered in pieces by a body that doesn't know it's being read.

Your stride breaks again, smaller this time, catching up to itself. You look down without meaning to, at hands you don't recognize — thin fingers, black ink curling up from the wrist into a knuckle, a stranger's hands doing a stranger's small, competent job of holding a wrist against the cold. You bring one up in front of your face, turn it over in the gray light, watching the freckles pattern like something scattered on purpose.

Then you lift your eyes to the fog ahead, and you say, out loud, to no one on the empty path:

"Okay. Not yet, then."