Shane Dolinski

The screen is blue and small and it is the only light in the room. Nothing has happened all evening and nothing is going to. That has always been the itch — not the nothing, the wanting under the nothing, the years of falling asleep to threads about waking up in someone else's skin, films with a body-swap in the third act, the specific hunger that never had a place to spend itself until a site called vessel.cards loaded on a phone with a wheel drawn on it in clean bright colors, cheerful as a raffle. You pay. You spin. It has never worked before because it has never existed before. You spin anyway, because that is the whole shape of the wanting: you always spin anyway.

The wheel stops.

There is a mattress under a hip that is not yours and a phone six inches from a face that is not yours, and the thumb — his thumb — is still moving, and then it is your intention moving it, faster, steadier, flicking past a highlight reel he'd stopped on and lost interest in three seconds ago. The room is dark and smells like fabric softener and old sunscreen that never quite washes out of anything. A ceiling fan somewhere on low. No noise from anywhere else in the house. It is the middle of the night and the phone says he should be asleep and he is not, and that wrongness is the first thing you get for free: a body clock dragged sideways, night-shift hours stacked on a Saturday, the particular emptiness of being awake when the whole world downstairs is not.

The shirt is what opens first. It's thin, worn to softness at the collar, and it comes with the SJ crest tattooed on the arm underneath — not the shirt's crest, his own, inked five years back in a shop on Lower Broadway with a guy from the beach patrol who kept saying *hold still, hold still* while Shane laughed through the worst of it, half a beer in, half proud already. The shirt itself is a road trip: Anaheim two summers ago, a hockey bar that let him wear his team's colors and buy the whole section a round when they won in overtime, a stranger's hand on his shoulder, *that's the spirit, man*, and under that memory another, quieter — buying it two-for-one because money was tight that month, because money is tight most months, a lifeguard's pay stretched thin against Nashville rent that goes up every June like a joke that stopped being funny.

The mattress gives you the rest. Sheets bought on clearance, a little rough, and a groove in them shaped like somebody who isn't there anymore — Colton, four months gone, and the body still hasn't unlearned curling toward that side of the bed. A whole year comes up at once, unbidden: the two of them at the same beach, Colton bringing him coffee at the lifeguard stand before shift because he liked watching Shane not be able to smile and stay professional at the same time; a fight in this exact room about nothing, about everything, about how Shane's leg wouldn't stop bouncing through the whole conversation and Colton finally snapping *would you just sit still*; the morning after, an apology, good months after that, and then not. The phone in your hand still has three unsent texts to that number, typed and deleted, typed and deleted. That's what he was doing when you arrived. Thumb stopped on a photo. You didn't stop it. You kept going.

There's a rosary looped once around the bedpost, plastic beads gone shiny with handling, and touching its shadow with your knee brings up Mass with his mother, a kid in a clip-on tie sweating through August heat, the particular calm of a confession booth at nineteen when nothing else was calming him down. There's a pill bottle on the nightstand, prescription label soft with fingerprints, and it brings a doctor's office, a diagnosis that didn't feel like news so much as a name for something he'd always had, and the relief of the first month it actually worked.

The body underneath all of it: thirty-five, five-six, compact and strong in a way built by nine-hour shifts and swimming laps before work out of habit more than duty, forearms more tanned than the rest of him ever gets, a unibrow he stopped fighting in his twenties, a heartbeat that runs a little fast at rest and always has. The right leg is already going, knee ticking against the mattress in the dark, an engine that never fully shuts off even when the rest of him goes quiet. He is exactly as tired as a person should be at this hour and not remotely close to sleep.

You bring the hand up in front of the face — his hand, wide-knuckled, a thin white scar along one thumb from a rescue that went sideways two summers back, that memory arriving too, fast and cold, someone's kid coughing up lake water while a crowd stood too close. You turn the hand over slowly, like it might answer a question you haven't asked yet.

"There you are," you say, to no one, to the dark, to the phone screen still lit on his own stalled name in a chat thread — and you don't know yet if that's the last thing you'll ever say in this voice, or if there's a year of it ahead of you. Neither does the wheel. It's already spinning somewhere else, waiting for you to want that more than you want this.