Terry Ledbetter

The apartment is quiet except for the hum of the window unit, and Isaac Delvalle's hands — 23 years old, brown, a little chalk dust still ground into the knuckles from Friday's whiteboard — are not doing anything you want them to do anymore. You have been him twelve hours and one minute. Long enough to grade nine essays on The Crucible, drink his protein shake, feel his shoulder ache from a rec-league game he doesn't remember agreeing to play. Long enough to realize he goes to bed at nine on a Saturday, alone, phone face-down, and that the streak in his hair is the only interesting thing about him that you didn't put there. It isn't cruelty. It's just that midnight is the hour you always start thinking about the wheel, and there's a laptop open on his desk, and the tab never closed.

You spin. There is no countdown. There is only the change of address.

You are leaning over a sink with foam on half your jaw and a razor stopped at the corner of your mouth, and then the razor is moving, up against the grain, no hesitation at all, and the second half of the face goes faster than the first ever has in this life. The water is running. The light through the window is early-evening gold, low and thick, the kind that makes a bathroom feel like a held breath. Your back — his back — is already complaining low and dull the way it does by six p.m., the way it will complain until the day he dies, if he still gets one of those.

The razor's handle is warm from his palm, worn smooth at the grip in a spot where three fingers always sit, and that's the first thing that comes back: his father's hands teaching him this exact motion at eleven years old, against the grain hurts, with the grain is for children, and the small fierce pride of the first time he didn't nick himself. Then the mirror gives you nothing because he never looks at it long, and the counter gives you the rest — the cheap disposable razors bought three-for-nine-dollars because there isn't room this month for anything better, an accounting his body knows before his mind does, a hole somewhere north of sixty thousand dollars that he doesn't tell Renata about, that he barely tells himself about, that lives in his chest like a second heartbeat.

The t-shirt against your shoulders is soft from a hundred washes and it gives you this morning — pulling it on over his head in this same room, sun coming through this same window, one of the kids hammering on the door because she needed the toilet, him laughing through the wall, tired laughing, the kind that costs something. The sweatpants at your waist give you the couch last night, a beer sweating on the side table, second one going warm because Renata called and he talked to her forty minutes with his eyes closed, missing her on a Saturday like a man twice removed from his own house. Three kids somewhere in this apartment or the other one, he doesn't fully sort which nights are which lately — that's its own ache, separate from the back.

The office comes to you sideways, through the ID badge memory that lives in his fingers even when the badge itself is in the other room clipped to yesterday's belt: glass walls, door propped open on purpose because a closed door means something's wrong and he needs nobody thinking that about him, spreadsheets that don't reconcile no matter how he prays over them Sunday mornings at Mount Zion, a woman two cubicles down he manages and likes and is careful never to like out loud. He drinks a beer most nights standing at this counter. He vapes on the balcony so the kids don't smell it. His jaw aches on the left, low, an old dentist bill he never finished paying for the crown that's still not right.

The razor finishes the last pass at the jawline and your hand — his hand, blond-haired at the wrist, freckled to the knuckle — sets it down on the porcelain without being told to, muscle doing what muscle always did here, and you catch yourself in the mirror foam-streaked and half-clean and looking, for one second, like a man who has no idea what just moved through him.

You look down at the hand instead. Turn it over. Freckles across the back of it too, pale hair on the forearm catching the gold light, a faint permanent stiffness in the fingers that isn't yours, that belongs to years of typing and lifting boxes and holding a steering wheel too tight in traffic that never ends. It is a good, tired, unremarkable hand. You lift your eyes to the mirror instead of away from it, foam drying on one cheek, and you say, not loud, mostly to see whose voice comes out —

"There you are."

Outside the window the light is going from gold to gray, evening sliding toward whatever a Houston Saturday night turns into for a man like this. You don't know how long you'll want to be him. Nobody does. Not even you, not yet.