Terrence Odell Baptiste

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Marcus Delray has been standing in his own kitchen for forty seconds and it is already unbearable.

You feel it in his knees first — the good ones, the ones that don't ache — and that's the problem. Thirty-five and a dad bod and a nurse's schedule that ends at seven, and nothing on him hurts, and nothing about tonight is wrong, and that is exactly the trouble. The apartment is quiet the particular way a Friday night is quiet when you did not make plans for it. A charting app is still open on the counter from a shift that ended two hours ago. You spent less than a minute being him this last time before the itch started again, and it has not stopped since — the itch is not his, you know that, you brought it with you into him from the man before and the man before that, five hundred and twelve of them now, a museum you keep walking through faster and faster, never letting the paint dry on a single room.

You are not unhappy. That would almost be a mercy, having a name for it. It's smaller and worse than unhappy: you are simply already thinking about the next one while you are standing in this one, the way you might read a menu while still chewing. Marcus's phone is on the counter. The site is already open in a tab, the way it always is now, the wheel sitting there mid-spin from last time, waiting.

You put his thumb on it.

—

The light does not change so much as the hand holding it changes what it's doing.

You come in mid-scroll, six inches from a stranger's face that is your face now, in a bed that creaks under weight Marcus never carried. The room is dim and blue and smells like a day that has been worked hard and not showered off yet. The thumb — heavier, slower to lift, a big man's thumb — keeps moving on its own for a half-second before you catch it, steady and fast, past a highlight reel, past a woman laughing at something off-camera, past all the small ordinary things he had stopped to look at that you have no interest in. You feel the mattress under a hip, the give of it different from any bed you've had this week. You feel, distantly, a weight in the chest that isn't fear yet, just presence — a body's engine idling loud enough to notice.

You are still on your side. You have not moved. The apron is not on him now — that's tomorrow's — but your shoulder is against a cotton pillow that carries the last of a long day's grease and sweat, and that alone is enough of a key.

It hits first through his own shirt, worn thin under your — his — arm: a Dodgers tee, softened by a hundred washes, and it opens the morning he put it on, hours ago, sun already flat and hard through the courtyard's dry palms, humming along low to something on the radio, favoring the left knee getting out of bed because the right hip's been talking to him lately. Nothing serious. Just fifty-four making itself known. He'd stood in front of the mirror a second too long, thumbed at the barbell in his eyebrow to make sure it hadn't crusted overnight, and gone to work.

The kitchen comes back through his hands, because his hands are what know it best — not memory so much as muscle telling you what it's for. A knife handle worn smooth in a groove only his grip fits. The particular heat of a flat-top eighteen inches from his stomach for ten hours a day, the heavy build of him made for standing in it, made for absorbing it, not minding it the way a smaller man would. Ticket rail snapping new orders. Someone yelling behind him and him not turning around because he already knows who it is and what they want. He is good at this. Nobody has ever told him he's good at this, not out loud, not in the words he'd want, but his hands know, they've known for thirty years, and there's a kind of peace in that that you didn't expect to feel and can't quite hold onto because it isn't yours.

Under that: a woman's voice, not sharp, just tired in the specific way of someone waiting on dinner and rent both. Girlfriend. She's asleep or near it in the other room right now, this exact minute, unaware the man beside her has just become someone else. There's love in what comes back — worn-in, unglamorous, a decade of small negotiations — and under that, older and more tender, another woman entirely, one who isn't around anymore, whose name arrives with a particular ache that has nothing to do with anger. And under both of them, a kid — not a child anymore, grown now, calls sometimes, doesn't call enough, and the missing of that sits in his chest like something swallowed wrong, permanent, the way only the people who made you can make you feel small.

The cigarette pack in the nightstand drawer six inches from his hand gives you nothing you asked for and everything you didn't: the vape before it, the six-pack before that, years and years sober from the drink now, one thing at least he did do, one door he did close, even if two others stayed open. His cuticles are torn along both thumbs. He's been picking at them without noticing, the way he always does, some nervous accounting his hands do that his mind never signs off on.

His heart, underneath all of it, pushes slow and thick and a little labored, doing work it's been asked to do for fifty-four years without complaint, though the doctor has complained enough for both of them.

None of this belongs to you and all of it is, for these seconds, the only thing there is.

You look at your hands.

They are big, dark, scarred faintly along one forearm under a tattoo you didn't put there, cuticles picked raw at the edges, phone still lit and forgotten in the right one. You turn them over slow, like they might explain themselves, the way every set of hands has and none of them ever have.

You lift your eyes off them, into the dark of the room, and you say, low, mostly to nobody —

"There you go again."

The wheel is still open on the counter in Chicago, spinning down to a stop nobody's watching. It doesn't matter yet. Nothing has to be decided tonight. You have him for exactly as long as you have him.