Sean Thrake

The trailer is quiet the way only a Kansas Friday at 3 a.m. can be quiet — no wind, no rigs on the highway, nothing but the hum of a refrigerator that Marion Tuttle has been meaning to fix for six months. You are standing at his kitchen counter in his boxers and nothing else, feeling the ridges of a foreman's hands, the ache already sitting in his lower back like a tenant who pays on time. Five minutes ago you spun a wheel and became a fifty-year-old man who has to be up in three hours to walk a slab site in the cold. You know this because his knees told you before his memory did.

It isn't boredom, exactly. It's that five minutes was long enough to learn the shape of the rest of it — the alarm, the thermos, the same argument with a subcontractor about rebar spacing you'll have four more times this month. Marion's life arrived in you already tired, and you haven't done anything in it yet and already know how it goes. Your thumb finds the phone on the counter, the site still open in the browser, the wheel still spinning lazy pixels in the dark like it's waiting. You don't decide so much as notice your hand already moving toward it, the way his hand must move toward his own thermos every morning without him asking it to. You pay again. You do not think of it as leaving him. You've barely arrived.

The wheel turns and something takes hold of you that isn't yours, and the last thing Marion's body feels is not fear but a kind of falling asleep standing up —

— and you are sitting forward on a couch in Los Angeles, a can gone warm in a hand that is not the hand you just had, thumb already finding a volume button with a delicacy that startles you before you understand why. The room smells like beer going flat and carpet that hasn't been vacuumed since the weekend. A ball hangs in the air on the screen, caught mid-arc in a replay, and some part of this body already knows how it lands, has already watched it land once, asleep, without knowing it was watching.

You are thinner-boned than Marion was, lighter on this couch, freckles prickling faintly under the lamp's yellow throw where you didn't know you had a nose that could prickle. Mid-length hair falls against the back of your neck, damp at the collar with a evening's worth of sweat that has nothing to do with exertion. The shirt against your back is thin cotton, worn soft, and when it drags against your shoulder blades it gives you a flash — this morning, or what was this morning to him: a navy polo going on over raised arms in a bedroom with the blinds already up, tugged down snug at the waist by hands that check a badge is clipped before they check anything else. Sean Thrake. The lanyard's plastic edge biting cool against his sternum for one second before it settles. He straightened the badge like a man closing a car door on a sleeping child — quiet, careful, out of habit rather than thought.

More comes, sleeve by sleeve, the polo peeling back into khakis that smell like a dryer sheet, into brown shoes that took four tries to lace because his left hand still doesn't fully trust its own grip since the wrist thing two years ago, a strain from moving a shelf that never quite went away, that flares faintly right now in this hand around the can. A glass-walled office comes with it — door propped open on purpose, always open, because he learned once, badly, what a closed door does to a team's nerves. A woman's voice from a doorway that isn't the office, warmer: Priya, who has heard him tell the story of his ex twice now and stopped needing to hear it a third time. The ex arrives too, unbidden, in the smell of the couch cushion under his cheek — Mina, years gone, a apartment they shared two courtyards over from this one, the particular quiet of a break that neither of them was cruel about, which somehow made it worse to get over.

His body is compact, wound tight even slumped like this, the muscle of someone who still runs stairs on weekends out of vanity as much as health. The freckles are the only wild thing about him, scattered like an afterthought across an otherwise careful face. His jaw is bare and smooth from a razor drawn that morning with the same unthinking competence as everything else he does — this is a man who has never once cut himself shaving. Under the tongue, phantom-faint, is the ghost of a toothpick he isn't holding, a habit his molars ask for and don't get tonight.

The game is loud enough to have covered his snoring but not loud enough to have covered a goal, and some numb, stubborn scoreboard part of him already resents having slept through it even as the rest of him surfaces into the replay like a man coming up through water.

You look down at the can in this hand, foreign and light, and past it to fingers with no calluses worth the name, clean nails, no wrist tape, nothing that has poured concrete in its life. You turn the hand over once under the lamp, freckles catching gold, and something in you — some leftover of Marion's ache, going quiet now, receding like a tide — lets go all at once.

"Who scored," you say, to the empty apartment, to the television, to no one, and you are smiling before you've decided to.