Sione Fetu

Marcus Whitfield's hands are shaking, and they aren't even yours by right yet — three minutes old, still warm from someone else's grip on the wheel, and already you're bored of them. Short. Thick through the middle in a way that took decades of desk lunches to build. The apartment smells like his cologne, unfamiliar and sweet, and the laptop glow on the kitchen table is full of claims he was supposed to review tonight. You didn't take him for the body. You never do. You took him because the itch doesn't care what you're standing in, and three minutes was long enough to know this one wasn't going to scratch it — heavy-limbed, slow to turn, a stranger's ordinary tiredness sitting in the shoulders like a coat that doesn't fit. So you open the laptop that isn't yours, find the site bookmarked in a browser that isn't yours, and you spin, because 903 has never once felt like enough and there's no reason tonight would be the one where it does.

The wheel doesn't ask why. It gives you a gravel road, a water tower going gray in the dusk, a mattress on the floor of a room with no bed frame around it — and a mouth mid-scroll, thumb stopped on something that stopped mattering the second before you arrived.

You're on your side. The weight is new immediately — more of it, denser, packed into a smaller frame than Marcus's, forearm thick where it braces against the mattress ticking. Phone six inches off your face, screen throwing blue up one cheek. The thumb, still his an instant ago, twitches once under you like a motor catching, and then it's yours: faster, flicking past a job posting for a warehouse forklift job forty minutes out, past a text thread gone quiet, past nothing in particular, because you're not reading it, you're just proving the hand answers now.

The room comes in through the mattress first — no headboard, no frame, just the bare pad on the floor and the particular give of it under a shoulder, and with that give comes a flash: him at nineteen, dragging this same mattress in from a cousin's garage because the old one had a spring poking through, laughing about it, calling it an upgrade with a straight face. The smell under it — dust, a little bit of the vape juice he keeps by the pillow, faintly of the barbecue his uncle ran two roads over last weekend — opens onto that afternoon whole: plates balanced on knees, someone's kid running through the sprinkler, an uncle asking when he's going to find work already and Sione laughing it off because what else do you do, and underneath the laugh a knot that's been sitting in his chest for six weeks since the plant let him go, a knot you can feel now like it's your own except it isn't, it's his, borrowed through his own ribs.

The T-shirt drags at your shoulders — too tight there, room everywhere else, the fabric telling you sleeve by sleeve about the morning he put it on: standing in front of the mirror over the dresser that's really just a folding table, working the eyebrow barbell a half-turn because it always sits crooked after sleep, dimples showing in the mirror even though there was nothing funny in the room, because that's just what his face does, at rest, always has, since before he can remember people telling him about it. Jeans stiff at the knee from yesterday, dust from where he crouched to look under somebody's truck for a friend, a favor, unpaid, because the friend's kid needed a ride to school and the truck wouldn't start. Feet bare against the sheet. Twenty-one years old and built like he still plays something, though he doesn't, hasn't since the knee gave a little warning twinge two years back and he decided not to find out what came after ignoring it — the strength is still there in the forearm, in how easy the phone sits in a grip that doesn't have to think about holding things.

No ring on the hand. No one waiting on the other end of a read text. A vape pen somewhere on the floor by the mattress, close enough that its ghost-pull is already in the back of the throat, a taste more than a memory, daily, unremarkable, his.

You feel the ordinary want of him underneath all of it — the scroll itself, hunting nothing, the low static hum of a Thursday with no shift tomorrow and no shift the day after that, a man waiting on his own life to start moving again and doing it lying down in the dark because sitting up took a decision he didn't have in him tonight.

Your thumb stops.

You turn the hand over in the phone's blue light, palm up, like you've never seen it, because you haven't — not from in here.

"There you are," you say to the empty room, and put the phone face-down on the mattress, already half-wondering how long the road outside this window gets to be yours before the itch comes back for someone else's.