Samir Haddad

The dad bod is the first thing you notice, again, every time you sit down in it — the way the desk chair in the rented room groans, the way the beauty mark on this cheek catches the window light like it's asking a question you've stopped answering. Forty-three years old and a student, God help you, sitting in a Small-town Ohio afternoon that smells like microwaved coffee and unread textbooks. You have been this man less than a minute. You already know you're done with him. Not because anything is wrong — the body works, the knees hold, the heart's fine — but because you spun four hundred and fifty-nine times to feel *new* and this one arrived old already, arrived tired, arrived a man who signed up for community college classes at forty-three like that would fix something. You did not come back for him. You came back because the page was still open in the other tab, the wheel still turning lazy behind the cursor, and some hunger in you that has outlived four hundred and fifty-nine men wanted to not be him for one more Friday. You click. You pay. You spin.

The lot exhales heat that has been building since noon and hasn't decided to let go yet, and you are standing in it mid-breath, a keyring warm and jingling against your palm, your — his — fingers already closed around it out of a habit ten thousand shifts deep. The motion breaks. You feel it break: a hand meant to slide the fob into a belt loop instead hesitates, drifts sideways, corrects. You do it again, slow, deliberate, like a man double-checking a lock he's checked a thousand times without thinking. Then again. And again, ten more times, each small task suddenly requiring proof it still works — keys, belt, radio clip, the door handle of the cruiser — checked, checked, checked, on a body that has not needed checking in years. Nobody watching would call it strange. A cop pausing before a shift. Dusk coming down orange and heavy over a taqueria sign, over a nail salon, over a Case Chevrolet lot going gold at the edges. He does not know. He will never know.

The shirt is what opens him first — navy, damp under the arms already though the sun's barely down, and the memory comes in with the smell of laundry detergent and his mother's kitchen: him at six, buttoning it wrong, her fixing it without a word, the two of them running late for something that mattered less than she made it seem. Then this morning — his morning, hours behind you and yet also right here in the fabric — pulling this same shirt off the hanger in a one-bedroom off Fondren, humidity already fogging the bathroom mirror, doing the buttons from the bottom because his hands know that order better than the top-down one they taught him at the academy. Eighteen years old and he still buttons like his mother taught him.

The keys carry his patrol partner's voice, easy and unbothered, calling him *rook* without malice. The belt against your hip carries the weight of a night three weeks back when he pulled a woman's car over on 610 and his hands shook so bad clipping the flashlight to his belt that she noticed before he did, and she said, not unkindly, *you're new, huh*, and he laughed because what else do you do. The boots carry the ache — feet that have not stopped growing into this much standing, arches that complain by hour six every single shift, an eighteen-year-old body pretending it's built for a job that ages men faster than it should.

And underneath the uniform, the body itself: five-five, compact, muscle laid down deliberately, gym-built rather than grown into, like he wanted more inches than he got and settled for density instead. The cleft in his chin is the kind of thing girls mentioned before they said anything else, and one of them — Marisol, gone six weeks now, the memory arrives with the particular ache of a phone he keeps almost texting — used to run her thumb along it like it was a secret only she'd found. He misses her more than he'd say to his partner, more than he'd say to anyone, and it sits in his chest like something swallowed wrong. His nails are bitten short, worried down past comfortable, a tell he's had since before the badge, before the ex, before any of it — something his hands do when the rest of him is trying to look steady.

Eighteen and already sworn to something bigger than him, already good at looking older than he is, already tired in the specific way of a body worked hard on purpose. You feel all of it land at once — the humidity, the boots, the missing girl, the mother's hands on a six-year-old's buttons — and it settles into you like weather.

You look down. The hands are small against what you're used to, nail beds pink and raw, a keyring still swinging faintly from two fingers. You turn one hand over in the dying orange light, watching it not-quite believing it's yours.

"Been a long shift," you say, to no one, in a voice eighteen years younger than the one you had an hour ago — and you don't know yet if that's a complaint or a relief.