Ryan Petrocelli

The register drawer won't close right, and that's the last thing Marcus Deshawn Feltrin ever thinks with his own want behind it. Eighteen years old, standing behind a counter in New Orleans a little before midnight, black hair damp at the temples from the walk in, and you have been him for less than a minute — thirty-some seconds of a body you never got to learn, his phone lighting up on the counter with a name you'll never read now. He'd clocked out, walked to his car, sat in the driver's seat and opened the site out of habit more than hunger, the way a smoker's hand finds a pocket. You felt his fingers do it before you decided anything. Not boredom exactly. Not even greed, though there's some of that folded in — nine hundred and nine men is a number that stops meaning anything, and the only feeling left that still registers is the half-second before the wheel stops. He was young and it was his first night in that skin. You didn't know him either. You spin it anyway, because the wanting doesn't ask permission, it just goes looking for the drawer that won't close and pulls harder.

The wheel spins somewhere you'll never see the mechanism of.

And you are lying on your back, which is wrong before you even have words for wrong — arms folded on your chest like something laid out, not slept. Weight everywhere at once, heavier than the boy's, thicker through the middle, warm with sleep-heat trapped under a shirt. Dark. A gap in curtains laying one clean bar of streetlight across a ceiling you don't recognize yet. Breath moving in and out of you slow and even, someone else's rhythm your lungs are already keeping.

The room comes in through the mattress first — old coils, a give to it that a memory answers before you ask it to: box spring since college, never replaced, the low spot on the left side he always rolls into. Sheets against your forearms, cheap cotton gone soft with washing, and something surfaces with the touch of them — laundry day, a girlfriend's voice from the doorway asking why he still uses the extra-long cycle, him saying it gets the chalk dust out, it never gets the chalk dust out. Her name arrives soft and sure: Danielle. Two years now. She'd been over Tuesday, left her charger, he'd meant to text her about it.

Your right hand finds the ridge of a nightstand book spine in the dark, an inch away, not touching yet, and when your fingers do brush it — a whole unit on Reconstruction rises up whole, forty-one faces in third period, the particular ache of standing at a whiteboard for six hours in shoes that are wrong for standing. The classroom empty after the bell, chairs still warm, marker fumes, the quiet that isn't peace so much as the sound of nobody needing anything from you for one hour. It's a good tired. He chose it on purpose after his own father spent thirty years hating a different job, and something in that decision still sits proud in the body, low and steady, whenever a lesson lands.

The gray shirt against your back has its own memory, sleeve by sleeve — pulling it on this morning, or what was this morning to him, tugging the collar straight in a mirror flecked at one corner, the elastic waistband of the sweatpants because Thursday nights he doesn't bother with anything that has a button. A toothpick somewhere on the nightstand, and your jaw aches faintly for the absent weight of it between your teeth, a habit so old it isn't even a want, just a shape your mouth keeps.

Underneath all of it, the frame of him: five-ten, built heavy through the shoulders and gut both, a strength that doesn't show as much as it could because it's wrapped in softness, the kind of body that moves furniture without being asked and gets winded doing it. Beard itching faintly where it's grown a day past its trim. Twenty-one, and it sits in the joints like twenty-one does — nothing hurts yet, nothing has to be managed, everything simply works, and there's a dumb animal comfort in that you'd forgotten a hundred bodies ago.

A last flash, small and unimportant and entirely his: a Friday off tomorrow, no lessons to plan, a plan with Danielle for the weekend he was looking forward to with a plainness that had no strategy in it at all.

Your — his — hand comes up off his chest on its own errand, and you let it, and you look at it in the dark: broad, a little chapped at the knuckles, the nail beds still faintly gray with dry-erase dust nothing quite washes out. You turn it over once like you're checking it's real, and it is, and it isn't yours, and that's the part that never stops being the good part.

"Not bad," you say, to the empty room, in a voice that isn't broken in yet, low and a little rough with disuse — and you keep your eyes on the lens of nothing, on the dark, a beat longer than you need to.