Tanner Voss

The deputy's belt is heavy on my hip, and I've stopped noticing it, which is the problem. Marcus Dillard stands in a kitchen that smells of someone else's coffee, with a good body, a good job, and a badge in a drawer. Less than a minute of him. His freckles are on the backs of my hands. I look at them the way you look at a coat that fits and still isn't yours.

He can do everything. That's what I can't forgive. Last time I stood in a stranger's kitchen I thought, this is it. Then Marcus's phone buzzed on the counter and a woman's voice said his name, a name that isn't mine, as if she knew who was in there. She didn't. I stood holding it until it stopped. Some wanting doesn't care how well the body works. So I open the page with the wheel on it and pay.

It turns. Marcus goes out of me like a held breath.

Dark. Motion. I am already moving at speed, and the wheel is under my palms, hard and slightly tacky. The car has drifted a foot toward the line, and my arms bring it back in one smooth pull before I have decided anything. Both hands come off the wheel and settle lower and wider. A sound ticks: the turn signal, for an exit that isn't mine. I leave it on.

The dash glow lies orange across my knuckles. Eighteen. My heart is quick and young, and my legs are restless against the seat. My jaw is rough under my tongue when I press it to my teeth, and something in my throat wants clearing. I clear it. I blink hard, once, without meaning to.

The hoodie cuffs are worn soft against my wrists. The wheel gives me a flash: his thumb picking at the same seam on a bad night, a voice in his headset saying *I understand your frustration* for the ninth time since noon, and a script he could recite asleep. Then the hoodie itself. This morning he pulled it from the floor and sniffed the collar. Fine. He worked one arm in, then the other, the zipper caught once, and he left it open. The jeans were stiff from the dryer. The lanyard was already around his neck when he found his keys. He's tired in a way I can feel in the backs of my eyes. Under the tiredness he is strong, loose-limbed, and ready to run if anything asked him to.

The gearshift knob is cool under my right hand and gives me a girl in a passenger seat, laughing, her feet on his dash. Her name arrives with the feeling and not the other way round. He still checks his phone for her. He doesn't text. Rent is due on the twenty-eighth and he is short, and the shortness sits in his stomach like a stone. A balcony, pink stucco, neon in the wet tile. He drinks a little with coworkers and it never sticks to him. He believes in nothing in particular and sleeps fine anyway.

The ink on his forearms itches under the cuffs, fine lines he chose one at a time. I don't know what any of them mean to him. I won't be told.

I take my right hand off the shifter and turn it over under the dash light. Pale palm, a pulse in the wrist. Not freckled. Not Marcus's. I lift my eyes to the mirror, to the road, to whoever is watching.

"Okay," I say, in a voice that isn't mine either. "Let's see how long you last."

The exit slides by. I don't know if I'm talking to him or to myself, or how many miles of him I get.