Terrence Jarvis

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Liam O'Sullivan has been leaning on this patrol car for eleven months and thirty-one days, and you have been him for less than a minute. The lot is gravel and dust, the sun going down orange behind a Sonic sign, and already you know you don't want the rest of the shift, the rest of the week, the rest of the marriage-shaped silence waiting at his house. It's not about him. It's never really about him. It's the itch under the new skin, the second thirty seconds inside anyone when you start totaling up what he can't give you. Liam can't give you anything. You spun for him at a gas station in Amarillo eleven months ago out of the same itch, wearing someone else you don't think about anymore, and here you are again, phone out, thumb already on the bookmark, the badge on his chest catching the last light like it's asking you to stay. You don't answer it. You open vessel.cards, and the wheel is already spinning before you've decided anything, which is the truest thing about you at this point — the deciding happens after.

The light comes from a bad taping job, a triangle of it lying hot across a stranger's closed eyes, and you're the one who turns into it. The couch is a print you'll never be able to describe right, florid and soft under a back that is not the back you had. Boots on the floor, laces still tied the way feet left them. A T-shirt damp at the collar. You open his eyes into the glare and don't blink, because blinking is Liam's rural habit and you're not him anymore, whoever you are now.

The shirt is what starts it — plain white cotton, worn thin at the ribs, and it gives you a morning: this morning, or one so like it there's no telling apart. Cold apartment air, the rasp of a chest that pulls a little tight before the second cup of coffee, the flat click of an inhaler cap he didn't need today but checked anyway, out of habit, the way another man might check his pockets. Terrence Jarvis. The name comes with the smell of the shirt, laundry soap and the ghost of gun oil, and behind it a whole life uncoils at its own pace, unhurried, because you are still standing in the same three seconds and there is nowhere else to be.

He put this shirt on at five in the afternoon for a shift that starts at eleven at night, the two of you out of step with every clock in the building, and that wrongness is its own small ritual — closing the blinds at dusk like it's dawn, taping foil over a window that lets too much California gold through the gap in the curtain. There's a woman in the memory, warm, half-asleep in the next room while he dressed, her voice saying something about milk, about the toothpick jar on the counter that's almost empty again. His wife. The ring on the hand that isn't your hand yet, but will be — plain gold, a little loose from a summer of not eating right on graveyard hours. There's an ex in there too, snagged in the weave of the shirt like a thread pulled loose — not gone from him the way exes are supposed to be gone, a name that still surfaces in traffic stops and grocery aisles, a want that never quite got tidied away, guilt sitting next to it like a passenger who won't get out of the car.

The belt by the boots remembers a decade of it: fourteen-hour doubles, a partner's laugh through a rolled-down window, the particular flavor of exhaustion that comes from being polite to people who hate you. Asthma flaring on foot pursuits, the two puffs he takes before shift and never mentions to the sergeant. A toothpick worn down to nothing between molars during a stakeout that went nowhere, hands doing it without him, the way hands do things men stop noticing about themselves. He is skinny in the arms and soft through the middle in a way the department gym never quite fixes, thirty-three and already feeling it in his knees on stairs, feeling it now, dully, in the body you're wearing on this couch with the light lying across it like a hand.

The couch fabric under your palms brings the day itself — chips eaten standing at the counter at ten in the morning like breakfast, boots kicked off two different directions because his feet were done deciding things by then, the foil taped up fast and crooked because his wife was already asleep in the next room and light was the enemy for both of them, on opposite schedules, married anyway. That love is in the shirt too, worn soft as the cotton — not a big love, not a movie love, just a woman who leaves milk out and a man who tapes up windows so she can sleep past his hours. It costs you nothing and it was his, entirely his, five minutes ago.

You sit up on the couch that isn't your couch, in the light that found him on purpose, apparently, and look down at a hand you don't recognize — a wedding band catching the same gold as the window, knuckles a stranger memorized without you. You turn it over once, like you're checking it's attached.

"Didn't sleep long enough," you say, to no one, in his voice, and it comes out easy, already fitting, and you have no idea yet whether you'll still be wearing it by the time that shift starts.