Todd Marchetti

Two minutes in Isaiah Muñoz's body and already the wanting is back, sharp as a hangnail. It is the middle of a Thursday in Dallas and the sun is doing something violent to the windshield of a truck that is not yours, parked outside a job site that is not yours, and your — his — forearms are burned brown to the elbow and raw pink above it, and there is a throb low in the back that has nothing to do with anything you did. Twenty-one years in this body and it already aches like forty. You stand there in his boots, in the itch of concrete dust in his collar, feeling how little of him you actually want. He had two minutes. You do not owe him a third.

You find the site again on a phone with a cracked corner, thumb — his thumb, bitten nail — already knowing the way there without you steering it, and that alone decides you: some things a body remembers whether you want them to or not, and you would rather be the one being remembered somewhere else. You spin.

The middle of the day in Dallas is the middle of the day in Pittsburgh too, near enough, except the light through a tall studio window there is already going long and amber, autumn thin, and there is no truck, no sun, no ache in two forearms — there is a machine's buzz cut off mid-note as if someone pulled the plug on the whole world for two seconds, and then it is back, and the arm under your — his — hand does not flinch anymore, because you are the one steadying it now, and you turn your head, slow, to watch a green-soaked needle draw a line into skin that belongs to you.

The tattoo artist doesn't notice anything. Why would he. Men go still on this table all the time.

His shirt is against your back first — thin gray cotton, a name pressed white against the chest in script you can't read from inside it but feel anyway like a scar you didn't get: MARTHA, and numbers under it, a date, and it comes up out of nowhere and hits you sideways — a hospital room, fluorescent and too bright, a woman with her hair stuck to her face saying his name back at him like a question, and a nurse holding out something small and furious and red, and him — Todd — laughing the specific broken laugh of a man who has been awake for thirty hours and would not trade it for sleep ever again. That's the date on his chest. That's the whole reason for the ink he's getting today, this second one, to go with it, something his tattooer friend has been bugging him to add since the con. You feel the pride of it settle into the ribs like a held breath finally let out.

The lanyard isn't around his neck right now — it's back at the hotel, TECH CON 2024 printed in that flat corporate blue, and just thinking toward it pulls up a lobby, fluorescent-clean, the smell of coffee gone stale in a silver urn, a dozen handshakes that meant nothing and one that might, a guy from a firm in Cleveland who liked the deck more than he let on. Sales rep, this one. Good at it in that unbothered, height-and-shoulders way where people believe him before he's said anything worth believing. You feel how easy that is for him — not arrogance, just calibration, twelve years of learning exactly how long to hold eye contact.

The chair under him, vinyl going cold where his jeans have ridden up — that's this morning coming back whole: standing in a bedroom with gray light through half-closed blinds, buttoning a shirt that is not this one, the good one, the interview-blue one, his wife's hand smoothing the collar down flat though it didn't need it, her saying something about picking up the kid from her mother's, him saying he'd be done with the tattoo appointment by four, plenty of time, and meaning it. The wedding band is on his left hand right now, plain, slightly loose from a winter of not eating enough between flights, and touching it — just being it — gives you the exact weight of a woman's head on this chest at one in the morning eight years ago, before any of the good stuff had names yet.

The boots under him, worn soft at the ankle, know a decade of tile floors and rental car mats and one particular gravel driveway upstate where his father-in-law's dog goes insane every single time.

His jaw, which you feel loosen under your own held stillness, remembers being clenched — the sting is real, has been real the whole time, a scraping brightness up near the wrist bone — but somewhere in the last several seconds it stopped being his to hold against.

You look down. Blond hair on the forearm, going into the green-black smear of fresh work, a date not yet finished under the needle. A mole high on the cheek you can't see but already know is there the way you know your own face used to be somewhere. You turn the hand over — his hand, wide, a callus at the base of the ring finger where the band usually sits tighter than it does today — like it's a glove you're deciding whether it fits.

You look up, past the artist, into the window's flat gray light, and you say, mostly to yourself, "Nearly done, right?" — his voice, even, unbothered, already someone else's problem how long that turns out to be true.