Travis Bledsoe

The scrub sink is cold and Marcus Delacroix-Webb's hands are under it, and they are good hands, careful hands, and you hate them a little this morning. You have had them an hour and twenty minutes. Enough time to learn the tremor isn't fear, it's caffeine, and that the man under you kept a folded photo of somebody in his coat pocket you didn't look at, because it wasn't yours to look at. Enough time to stand in his kitchen at five a.m. Las Vegas dark and think: a surgeon, finally, a life with weight to it, and to feel, underneath the satisfaction, a small flat nothing, like a note played correctly and not felt. Twenty-one men and you already know the shape of this morning. It is the morning after. It is always good for about an hour and twenty minutes.

You go to the site the way you always do, telling yourself you won't, and you spin.

The box leaves your hip and lands on bare floorboards with a sound that fills a whole empty room, and the keys are still swinging faintly in the door behind you, and your breath is his breath, shallower than the surgeon's, younger in the chest. Sun through a bare window throws a yellow rectangle across pine floor that smells of old varnish and fresh cardboard. Your knees know this floor is new to them. You set the box down slowly — an old habit from a body that has moved apartments too many times not to be careful — and you don't know that habit yet, you only feel it arrive as your hands do it.

Then your knuckles find the wall, trailing along the corner where the paint hasn't cured all the way, tacky under your fingertips, and that's the key turning.

A shotgun apartment above a laundromat in Hays, four years ago, the smell of hot lint drifting up through the floor vents at night — his first place alone, and the specific, embarrassing joy of it, walls he could paint any color and didn't, because renting. A cubicle at the call center, headset pinching the same spot behind his left ear every single day for six years, a supervisor named Deb who brings donuts on Fridays that nobody eats because of the sugar-crash on the phones, and the particular exhausted peace of clocking out at three and driving home into a sky doing something enormous and violent and free, a thunderhead stacked black over cut wheat stubble, gone the color of a bruise, and him just watching it from the truck like it was made for him alone.

The tattoo at your collar warms under your own touch when your hand brushes it without meaning to — geometric lines, done on a whim at twenty-six with a buddy who's since moved to Wichita and stopped texting back, and the sting of the needle is gone but the day isn't: laughing in a shop that smelled like antiseptic and cigarettes he'd already quit, feeling for once like his body was a decision instead of a default.

The shirt against your back gives you this morning specifically — his last morning in the old place, actually — pulling the tan tee over his head in a bedroom already half boxes, then the olive crewneck over that because the truck bed was cold before sunrise, sleeves tugged down over wrists that ached faintly, always, from a fall off a ladder two winters back that never quite healed right in the left one. Jeans he's owned three years, soft now, broken exactly to him. The shoes he bought because they were on sale and stayed because they fit. None of it chosen for anyone. He dresses like a man nobody is checking on, because nobody is, not since the divorce that wasn't even dramatic, just two people who ran out of reasons, no kids to argue about, no ex who calls. He does not miss her most days. He built a life instead that fits in boxes, that he can put down anywhere and start over, and there is something almost proud in that, small and stubborn, like the thunderheads he still stops the truck to watch.

He is thirty-three and unremarkable to himself in every way he can name, and that not-being-noticed is its own kind of rest.

You look down at your hands — his hands, blunt and sun-fair, a callus at the base of the right index finger from a headset cord he's wound around it ten thousand times — and you turn them over slowly in the yellow window-light, the way he never would, like they're borrowed.

"There you are," you say, to no one in the empty room, and you don't know yet if you mean him or yourself.