Ryan Holt

You are Marcus Deloit for the four hundred and ninety-eighth time, standing in a Detroit apartment that smells like somebody else's cologne, and you cannot stop touching this face. Twenty-four, cut jaw, blue eyes that are not the blue eyes you were born with — you were never born with any of them anymore. You've had this one for seven minutes, and you already know it's not the one. The mirror in the hallway keeps giving you back a face that looks *good*, objectively, professionally good, and you feel nothing, the way a man feels nothing standing in someone else's expensive coat. Seven spins ago you wore Manuel Ochoa — soft-bellied, gray-haired, a teacher who kept a photo of himself and another man on a fishing boat taped inside his kitchen cabinet where his own eyes would find it every morning. You remember that cabinet now, holding a phone that isn't yours yet. You remember whose face was in that photo. You didn't think about it for seven spins. You think about it now. That's the whole reason. Not boredom, not greed — just a door left open in a house you don't live in anymore, and a name behind it you want to go stand next to for a while, from the inside, the way you never let yourself as Manuel, because Manuel loved him too much to look at him clearly. You want to look at him clearly. You open the app.

The white comes up under your thumb and the room changes weight before it changes anything else — humid instead of dry, tin-roof light instead of a lamp, and the couch under you is a couch you've never sat on except that your body has, every day, for years. Your thumb is still hanging in the air above a dark phone. Blue hair falls into the edge of your vision, hanging where brown used to hang. The apartment in Detroit is gone the way a dream is gone, not remembered as lost, just gone. You are sitting. You are barefoot. Your knees are wider apart than Marcus ever held his.

The shirt is what opens first — a soft-worn tank top, no logo, and your shoulders know how many times it's been washed, that specific give at the seams. A flash: laundry day, a red plastic basket, humming along to something on a speaker propped in the window, alone, the house too quiet since the divorce went final and the quiet turned out to be fine, better than fine, a relief he didn't tell anyone about because it felt disloyal to say marriage-ending-was-a-relief out loud in this town. Ryan Holt. The name arrives with the shirt, unhurried, the way your own name never has to arrive. Thirty-four. A glass office two miles from here with his door propped open on purpose — he learned that trick from a boss he hated, an open door reads as generous even when you're not being generous, and it got him the promotion the closed-door guy didn't get.

The couch gives you more — its cushions worn to the shape of one man sitting always in the same spot, and under your feet the rug, red-dirt gritty no matter how many times it's beaten outside, and through that a whole string of Fridays: coming home, dropping his bag inside the door, the tin roof popping as it cooled, the specific gold color the light goes at four in the afternoon here that he has never once managed to describe right to anyone off-island. Beer maybe six times a year, never more, a vape always somewhere in reach — you feel the ghost-want for it now, low and physical, a hand that wants a thing to hold.

The phone in your palm holds the app that promised something else, sent by a name in his contacts he trusts without examining why, and under that, unlocked by the glass and metal of it, comes the ex. Not a fight. Worse — a good year, entire, arriving all at once: her laugh in this same room, her feet on this same coffee table, a specific Tuesday she stood at that window with the palm outside it and said something about staying that he believed completely and that turned out, eventually, not to be true. He does not talk about her. His hands, though, when they are empty, still reach for a shape that used to be there.

And under the couch's wooden frame where your fingers have landed without meaning to, the friend. Manuel. A fishing boat off Diamond Head, seven, eight years back, the two of them sunburned and loud, a photograph taken by a stranger that Ryan never knew was taped inside a cabinet two thousand miles away, would never know, has no way to know, feels only — through your hands, which are his hands now, restless, never still, tapping the couch frame in a rhythm that is entirely his and not yours — a warmth with no name attached, the specific ache of a friend you don't call enough, still there, unspoken, filed under the things he carries and wouldn't bring up.

You turn your palm over in the tin-roof light. The scar through the eyebrow doesn't show from this angle, but you know it's there the way you know your own name isn't Ryan and never will be.

You look up, into whatever is watching, and you say, "I know exactly whose couch I'm sitting on."