Sammy Nassar

Boston gives you a body that stands post at a service entrance like it means something — Marcos Feliciano, gray hair going silver early, a scar splitting one eyebrow like a comma nobody proofread. Sunday afternoon, off shift, alone in the apartment that comes with the name. You have been him less than a minute and already the boredom is a physical thing, a tightness across the scar, because Marcos is a man who checks badges and drinks bad coffee and calls it a life, and you have had three hundred and thirteen better ones and you know it in your teeth. There's a duffel by the door with his gear in it, a rosary on the nightstand you didn't ask for, someone else's Sunday. It's not disgust. It's just that you've learned the taste of new, and this isn't it anymore. You open the laptop. The wheel is already loaded from last night, like it knew.

The middle of the morning, Las Vegas, and the breath under you goes from ragged to smooth in the space of one exhale. An arm that was hanging off a mattress lifts itself, folds up onto a chest that is not the chest you had a second ago — narrower, warmer, a wedding band pressing cold against a sternum. Streetlight cuts a blade through blackout curtains. The pillow smells like someone else's hair product. You are face down and then, without transition, you are on your back, and the body arranges itself into a shape it has apparently never once chosen on its own.

The sheets are the first thing. Cool cotton, expensive, a little too high thread-count for a man who — the memory arrives sideways, unbidden — used to sleep on a futon in a share house off Flamingo and thought four hundred dollars for a mattress topper was the funniest thing he'd ever heard, and now owns one and never says so out loud. Your palm — his palm — finds the ring on the way down and the ring gives you a wedding in a backyard in Henderson, string lights, his mother crying in a way that took him a full year to understand was happy crying, a man in a pale blue suit saying vows he'd rewritten four times because he wanted them exactly right and got choked up on the second line anyway. The husband's name comes up warm and complete — Idris — arriving with the specific weight of someone who is, right now, three feet away and still asleep, an arm slung low across the sheets like it belongs there even when it's empty.

The mole on the cheek itches, phantom, the way a thing does when you suddenly know it's been touched a thousand times by someone else's thumb.

You are lying in a body that is smaller than the one you left, tighter through the shoulders, a coiled kind of strength that has spent years being looked at on camera and learned what to do with itself because of it. Twenty-five. High blood pressure ticks under the skin like a low hum you weren't warned about, a thing his doctor keeps flagging and he keeps promising to deal with after the next tournament, the next sponsorship push, the next everything. No cigarettes ever, but the liver carries something — memory of bottles, of streams that ran until four a.m. because that was the audience, that was the room he built himself, chat scrolling faster than thought, his own face lit blue-green-red from three different lights while he laughed at something that wasn't funny because it kept people watching.

There's a t-shirt hanging off the desk chair across the room, dark gray, some tour graphic gone soft and pale from washing, and even from here, without touching it, something comes anyway, riding the tail end of everything else: this morning — no, yesterday morning, his yesterday — pulling it over his head between sets, headset still looped around his neck, mic bumping his collarbone, thinking about nothing except whether the lighting on his left side looked washed out. Small thoughts. A whole life built out of small thoughts stacked eight hours a day into a career, and it worked, and it exhausts him in a way he never says on stream. Underneath that, further down, quieter: nights he drank more than he meant to after the numbers dipped, sitting on the edge of this same bed with Idris's hand flat between his shoulder blades, not talking, just weight, just present.

The room itself is doing work on you now — recycled casino air, curtains that never fully block the desert light, the particular hush of a hotel-adjacent apartment four floors above a staff entrance where he clocks nothing, because Idris works the casino floor and clocked in hours ago, four a.m., and this — the memory surfaces fully formed, tender — is why the bed only has one of them in it most mornings, why Sammy sleeps until nearly noon most Sundays, alone, however he lands, because the man he married keeps different hours and neither of them has ever once complained about it out loud.

Your — his — chest rises and falls, easy now, no longer ragged, and you can feel where the ragged came from: three hours of sleep before this, a stream that ran long, a chat he didn't want to leave.

You bring the left hand up in front of your face. The ring catches the thin line of streetlight and throws it back at you, small and gold and entirely unearned. You turn the hand over once, slow, the way you always do, checking it's real, checking it's yours now, the way you've checked three hundred and thirteen times before and it never stops being strange and it never stops being the whole point.

"Okay," you say, to the empty side of the bed, to the curtains, to no one. "Okay, let's see who you are."