Shane Kozlowski

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You know his hands before you know anything else about the room. You watched them for years, or something like years — measuring lumber, snapping a chalk line, curling around a beer bottle at the end of a day you didn't earn the way he earned it. Now they're flat on a stranger's table, spread in candlelight, and you have been waiting so long to be inside them that the waiting has its own weight, like a nail bag on a hip.

The medium had said his name like it was nothing. Shane. Just a guy who answered an ad, who wanted to feel something on a Tuesday night, who sat down across a folding table in someone's dining room in Dorchester because his buddy dared him and he never says no to a dare. You knew him. Not this him — the him underneath, the one who took the promotion you wanted, who took the girl you wanted before that stopped mattering, who took, took, took with that easy blond confidence and never once looked back to see what he'd left short. You have hated him quietly and completely for a long time. You have wanted, more than the job or the girl, to simply be him for a while and see how the wanting feels from the inside.

The last candle gutters. The other hands peel back from the table like a tide going out. His stay.

You come in through the fingers first — that's how it always is, they say, the hands go still, then wrong, then yours. His fingers spread wider on the wood, deliberate, welcoming, and you feel the whole architecture of him arrive around you: the thick neck, the shoulders built by other men's houses, the cleft in his chin that you used to want to put your fist through. You feel the small hoop of metal in his earlobe like a foreign coin in your pocket. You feel, distantly, a version of him still in there, small and outraged, asking what the hell.

You lift his head. Somebody at the table gasps — his eyes have changed, they'll say later, though nobody can agree on how.

"Hey," you say, in his voice, testing the shape of the word in his mouth. It comes out steady. Bostonian. His.

You have a year. A year of waking up in his body in some triple-decker with a storm door that sticks, a year of walking onto job sites with sawdust hanging gold in the morning light, swinging a hammer with his forearms, his tattoos, that portrait inked into his skin of some man neither of you have ever met. A year of being wanted, maybe, by whoever wanted him — bisexual, single, free, no ex who matters, no kid tugging at the tool belt. A year of being the guy who got everything.

You flex his hand on the table. The candle smoke curls up between his — your — fingers.

It should feel like triumph. For one whole year, it will have to.