Todd Kowalik

The screen has been the whole evening. Nothing on, nothing worth finishing, the blue rectangle doing its small work against the dark the way it always does when there's nowhere else to put your attention. You found the site three days ago and didn't believe it, and then you couldn't stop believing it, and tonight is the first night you let yourself pay. It's the thing you've wanted since before you could say why — not to watch someone else's body, but to be inside the wanting itself, the actual weight of a person who isn't you. A wheel on a page. You spin it the way you'd flinch before a jump you already decided to make.

There is no travel. There is no warning. One second you are the nothing you've always been, watching a wheel spin down to a name you'll never see, and the next you are thumb-deep in a scroll that isn't yours, on a mattress that isn't yours, in a dark that smells like somebody else's detergent. The weight arrives first — more of it than you expected, settled low, warm against a phone screen that's been six inches from a face for longer than a face should hold still. The thumb keeps going. Faster now, steadier, past a video he'd stopped on, past another, because you don't know yet what stopped him and don't care. The room is close and low-ceilinged and smells like paint that never fully cured.

It comes in through what you're holding, first — the phone, warm on one side from his palm, and with it a flash: this exact phone, this exact bed, an 11 a.m. that felt like midnight because he works nights and Sunday doesn't mean anything to a schedule like his, chairs booked back to back to back until close, and after close there is only this — the mattress on the floor, the clothes he didn't hang up, a Sunday that starts in the wrong direction and ends in the dark anyway. The gray T-shirt against your back gives you the morning he put it on: sleep-warm, off a chair, no thought in it, tugged down over a belly he doesn't fight in the mirror anymore, not because he's given up on it but because there are more useful battles — the fatigue that comes and goes on its own schedule, the joints that ache before rain that isn't due for hours, a body that fights itself quietly in ways no client at the shop will ever be told about. The sweatpants at your hips remember a waistband rolled instead of tied, a habit from years of standing eight hours at a stretch.

The gum. There's a piece gone soft and flat somewhere at the back of his mouth, and his jaw works it without him, a motor that runs whether or not he's thinking, and it has run through every single day for so long it isn't even a habit anymore, it's just teeth. A nicotine pouch tucked and forgotten under his lip gives you a flash of the shop floor — hair in dark crescents around the base of a chair, a client's head tipped forward under his palm, the clipper's hum climbing his own arm from a hand that has done this ten thousand times and would keep doing it in its sleep. He is good at his job in the unbothered way people are good at things they never had to fight for. He likes the quiet parts best — the fade going in clean, no talking required, just the buzz and the floor filling up with somebody else's hair.

Somewhere under the flat gum-taste there's a woman. Not recent. A name that surfaces with an ache that isn't yours but sits in your chest like it might be — she left for reasons that were fair and he's never once pretended otherwise, and that's worse, somehow, than if she'd been cruel about it. He still checks, sometimes, without meaning to. Not tonight. Tonight there was only the scroll, the low blue light, the gum going soft, a body lying on its side because lying any other way puts weight where the joints complain loudest.

The mattress under you holds the specific give of use — no frame, no headboard, just the floor and a room he never got around to finishing the way he meant to when he moved in. Petals from the jacaranda outside must be on the sill somewhere, though the dark hides them; you know that tree without seeing it, the way you know the courtyard downstairs has a haze in it every morning he's usually too asleep to notice, because his mornings are other men's nights.

You look at the hand holding the phone. It is not a hand you have ever owned — thick through the knuckles, a burn-pink callus low on the palm from the clipper's heel, nails cut close and square the way barbers keep them. You turn it over, slow, like it might mean something different on the other side. It doesn't. It's just a hand, heavier than any hand should feel, and it is, as of a few seconds ago, entirely yours.

You lift your eyes off it into the dark of the room, toward nothing, toward everything, and you say, out loud, to no one:

"Okay. Okay — I'm really in here."

And underneath that, already, quietly, not yet a decision: how long. Whether the wanting comes back tonight or in a year. Whether tomorrow you're still the man whose gum has gone flat in his mouth, or someone else's Sunday entirely.