Ryan Holcombe

The bar in Jamal's mouth still tastes like the last drink you bought him, four hours and thirty-nine minutes into a life you already know you're leaving. His guitar's leaning in the corner of the apartment, unplayed since you took him, and that's the tell — you never once picked it up. You liked his hands, his gap-toothed grin in the mirror, the easy walk. But something in you has been itching since you climbed out of that trucker in New York less than five hours ago, since you felt Peter Holcombe's spine settle into a cab seat that wasn't his, since you left him mid-thought about a brother he hadn't called back. You didn't finish that thought. You want to finish it now, in someone else's skin, the way you finish things — sideways. You open the site on Jamal's phone, his thumb moving before his sense catches up, and you spin.

The room that arrives is dark and smells like cedar and low tide. Ragged breath goes even in a single pull of air, like a held note finally let go. The arm hanging off the mattress draws itself up on its own, unbidden, and the body rolls onto its back, hands folding over the chest like a man laid out for viewing. Streetlight cuts a blade through the curtain gap and lies across a face gone still — freckles dusted over a nose and cheekbones, a jaw shaved smooth hours ago and now rough with the first ghost of stubble. Somewhere outside, a bell buoy is knocking against the cold. It is deep in the night here, though where you came from the desert evening was still warm on Jamal's borrowed skin. That mismatch sits inside you for a second, mildly funny, mildly wrong, like clocks in two rooms of the same house.

The wedding band is the first thing that speaks. Plain gold, a little loose, warmed by nothing because the hand's been still too long — and touching brings a flood: an aisle in a church with too much AC, a ring pushed on by a woman with her mother's chin, her whispering *don't you dare cry* and him crying anyway. Ryan Holcombe. The name arrives with the ring, unforced, the way his own name always does last, as though even his memories are being careful with him. Younger brother. Peter's voice on the phone last Christmas, thinner than it used to be, going quiet whenever money came up.

The sheets under this hand are cheap cotton gone soft with washing, and they give you mornings — hundreds of them, four-thirty a.m., the alarm he never needs because his body wakes itself, the particular ache low in the back that forklifts put into a man over twenty years, both knees that pop like knuckles on the first three steps to the bathroom. He is forty-three and strong in the specific overworked way of a body asked to lift for a living — good shoulders, a gut he's still holding off, a leg that jitters under desks and truck cabs and church pews without his permission, has since he was a boy, bouncing now even in sleep, a small tremor at the mattress edge that has nothing to do with you.

The dark-dyed hair, roots gone gray and buzzed close — a memory of the drugstore box, his wife laughing at him in the bathroom mirror for caring, him saying something about not wanting to look done already, not with the numbers what they are, the house what it is, the boat payment what it is. That's the shirt on the chest now, plain and gray, and the shirt gives you this morning — no, yesterday's morning, him pulling it over his head one-armed at the closet, the same closet every day, work pants already stiff with yesterday's cold-storage grime, gloves on the dresser waiting like something that's owed him nothing and takes everything anyway. Under it, the numbers: a hole so deep he doesn't say the figure out loud anymore, not even to her, especially not to her.

There is a woman's photograph memory, warm, folded into pillow and mattress — his wife's hip against his in sleep, the shape of her gone now to the far side of the bed where she stirs but doesn't wake, and one child's laugh from somewhere in the house's memory, high and delighted, a birthday, a bike, something. And under that, quieter, an old ex he still thinks of on nights like whichever night this technically is — not guilt exactly, just a door in the house of him that he doesn't open, just knows is there. Church on Sundays, the collection plate heavier some months than others, a hookah lounge he goes to maybe twice a year with men from a job before this one, coughing, laughing, feeling briefly, foolishly young.

You hold all of it a moment — brother of the man whose hands you wore for less than a minute five hours ago, whose truck cab you sat in outside a gas station in New York not knowing yet you'd want this, this exact silvered dark, this exact debt, this exact bouncing leg gone still now only because sleep has it.

Your — his — hands come up in front of your face in the dark. You turn them. Freckled backs, a plain ring catching what little light there is.

"Pete," you say to the ceiling, quiet, not a question, not yet sure if it's an apology or just a name you wanted to say in this mouth before you decide anything else. Then you go still, listening to the house breathe, waiting to find out how long the itch stays scratched.