Terrance Ojo

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You are standing in a light you did not choose, Andre's face turned toward a mirror that isn't there — just a bright white studio wall, the last set of a job that wrapped an hour ago, and you are still wearing him, still feeling the sting of the makeup girl's setting spray drying tight on his cheekbones. Twenty-six, freckled, beautiful in the specific rented way this body is beautiful, and none of it is yours and none of it ever was. You have had him less than a minute and already the problem is obvious: he is booked through Thursday. Someone will want him again tomorrow at seven a.m., call sheet, call time, a rack of jackets he has to fit. You did not spin the wheel thirty-five times to end up on someone's schedule. You want a life nobody is checking on. You want to disappear into an evening that belongs to no one else.

So you take out the phone — his phone, a stranger's passcode that your fingers already know without you deciding to know it, muscle memory arriving like a tenant's key still in the lock — and you go to vessel.cards, and you pay, and the wheel spins its bright dumb circle, and somewhere far off a kitchen goes dark around a hand that stops moving.

—

The thumb is already lifted when you arrive, hanging a half-inch off the glass, and you feel the whole rest of him arrive under it like weather: taller than Andre by two inches and thinner everywhere, no cushion of muscle over the forearm, a body built for standing in one place a long time. The kitchen is dim, one bulb going somewhere behind you, and the phone in his hand is warm from his palm and lit up with a watch he was never going to buy — $4,200, a strap the color of dried blood — and the price is still glowing when the hand turns the phone face-down on the granite, on its own, the gesture already finished before you fully have the arm to finish it with.

You do not pick it back up.

—

The countertop is cold under his forearm where it rests, and that cold comes with a smell — dish soap, the particular mildew of a sponge left too long in the sink — and with the smell comes a Tuesday: him standing in this exact spot at midnight, spooning peanut butter out of the jar because there was nothing else, laughing once, out loud, alone, at how far a doctor of veterinary medicine had fallen. The laugh had no bitterness in it he could locate. That was the strange part he remembered noticing about himself.

The shirt against your back — his good scrub top, dogs and leopards printed small and cheerful all over navy cotton — is not the one he's wearing now, but the phone in his hand still carries this morning's shirt, an old olive tee, cotton gone soft as a washcloth, and pulling that thread backward gives you his hands doing the sleeve, right arm first, always right arm first, a habit from some year he couldn't have named either. Under the tee, the body: skinny in a way that isn't fashion, just genetics and a metabolism that outruns whatever he eats, shoulders a little forward from bending over exam tables all day, a cartilage piercing in his upper ear that throbs faintly whenever he sleeps on that side, which he does, out of habit, every night.

His locs are heavy where they fall against the back of his neck, and touching them — just the weight of them shifting as he tips his head — brings back the two hours in a chair in Columbus getting them retwisted, the stylist's radio playing gospel quietly, him closing his eyes and thinking of nothing, which he remembered as one of the few unbroken calm hours of that whole year.

The rest comes in pieces, the way rooms give up their smell before their shape: four years of undergrad debt still sitting on him like a coat he can't take off; the clinic on Main Street with its one stoplight and the diner across the street that closed the spring before last, boarded glass he walks past twice a day and doesn't quite look at; the golden retriever this morning with the torn ACL whose owner cried in the exam room and he'd stood with the table between them, steady, professional, good at the part of the job that is just being calm near someone else's fear; a woman two years back who left for Cleveland and a bigger salary and didn't ask him to come, and he hadn't been able to decide, lying awake after, whether that had hurt exactly or just confirmed something he already suspected about the shape of his life. He vapes on the back porch some nights so the smell doesn't get into the exam rooms. He picks at his cuticles without noticing, has since he was a boy, has a small unhealed rawness at the edge of his left thumbnail right now, which you can feel, a small dumb ache that is entirely his and entirely new to you.

There is money saved, more than you'd think from the truck he drives and the state of this kitchen — a discipline nobody in this town would guess he has, thirty-some thousand dollars sitting patient in an account he checks once a month and otherwise doesn't touch, and even that comes with a feeling attached, not pride exactly, something closer to relief, like a door he's checked is locked.

Nothing enormous. No wound with a name on it. Just a Monday, and a phone turned face-down, and a man standing in a dark kitchen deciding, again, not to want the thing he can't have.

—

You lift the hand off the counter and look at it — long fingers, the raw place at the thumb, a life's worth of small useful calluses along the palm from collars and leashes and the particular grip of holding an animal still while it is afraid — and it does not feel like your hand yet, the way none of them ever quite do in the first minute, this one especially, thin-wristed, careful, made for something patient.

You look up, into the dark kitchen, toward wherever a camera would be if there were one.

"Guess I'm not buying the watch," you say, and something in it that isn't quite Terrance's voice yet, and isn't quite not.