Travis Kolbeck

Nobody in the house knows you're up. The apartment is dark except for the laptop glow, and the man asleep down the hall — freckled, going soft in the middle, forty-eight and tired in ways sleep doesn't fix — is you, for four more seconds. You've been him one hundred and something spins ago, long enough that his hands feel like your hands, his sales numbers feel like your quarter. But tonight after the third scotch he didn't finish and the second cigarette he didn't have, boredom sat down next to you like a client who won't leave, and you opened the site the way you always do, telling yourself this is the last one for a while. It never is. Five hundred forty-six times you have told yourself that.

You spin. The wheel does what it does. There is no countdown, no light — just the number landing, and then you are not where you were.

You are standing over a kitchen counter in the middle of the night in a coat you don't recognize, a plastic container in one hand and a fork halfway to a mouth that is not the mouth you had a second ago. The fork stops in the air. Somewhere behind your eyes a stranger's face is doing nothing at all, and you feel how short you are now, how the muscle sits differently on this frame, compact and dense where the other one was loose. You set the fork down. You shrug the coat off your shoulders — it slides, and the collar drags against a tattoo you didn't have until just now, ink at the back of your neck that pulls faintly at skin still tender from wherever the needle went. You sit. You eat the rest of the container in even mouthfuls because some reflex under the wanting knows how to do that without you, and you look at nothing in the dark window over the sink, and behind that flat unblinking half-focus, something starts to come back.

The coat first — canvas, worn at the cuffs, and your hands (his hands) remember shrugging into it this morning before a twelve-hour shift, the walk-in fogging your breath white at four a.m., the particular cold of a knife handle before your grip warms it. Phoenix outside, gravel yard, saguaros standing black against a sky that hadn't decided to be blue yet. You feel the ache settle into the same two places it settles every day: low back, right shoulder, old friends by now. Whoever he is, he is strong in a way that isn't for show — thirty-two years of lifting sides of beef does that whether you mean it to or not.

The fork is next, and it opens wider than it should: Sunday dinners at a table with a woman who used to spoon out mashed potatoes and ask if he was still going to church, and he'd say yes even on the years it wasn't true, because it mattered more to her than it did to him by then, and lying about that felt smaller than the fight. A congregation he drifted out of the way you drift out of anything — not a door slammed, just fewer Sundays, then none, and nobody chasing him about it because nobody left to chase.

The counter under your palms gives you the kitchen itself, this exact kitchen, at this exact hour — and here the memory catches on something odd, a small itch of wrongness even inside him: he should be dead asleep the way anyone is at this hour, except the graveyard shift at the shop reset him years ago, nights into days into nights, and this — this bowl standing up, coat still on, the fork not even bothering with a plate — this is breakfast. His breakfast. The dark outside the window isn't late, it's early, and his body knows the difference in a way you're only borrowing.

Under the collar, the shirt he pulled on some hours ago comes back sleeve by sleeve, the memory of his own hands working it: the tug over the tattooed shoulder, careful even now, months in, of a stretch that still occasionally pulls; the drag of the zipper on the coat over it; the mirror he didn't really look into, because he never lingers there, because one eye doesn't sit where it should and looking too long used to bother him more when he was younger than it does now. A woman once told him it made his face honest, like it couldn't help but wander. He hadn't believed her, but he'd kept the sentence.

Nothing on him worth counting — no ring, no watch, wallet thin enough to forget in a coat pocket for days. No ex he'd bring up if you asked. No kids. A single man's kitchen: dishes for one in the rack, a calendar on the fridge with nothing written on today.

You feel where the wanting in you meets the stillness in him and finds no argument. He isn't fighting you. There's nothing left in there to fight with.

You look down. The hand holding the empty fork is thick through the knuckles, a working hand, a burn scar pale along one thumb you didn't earn and now carry. You turn it over once, like checking whether it's really yours, and it is, the only way anything here is yours.

"Okay," you say to the window, to nobody, to the reflection that has your face and somebody else's eye drifting a half-degree off true. "Okay."

Somewhere down a hall in Los Angeles a heavier man sleeps in a bed that isn't warm anymore, and you are not thinking about how long you'll leave him empty like that, or when the wanting comes back around, sharp, asking for a new number. You only know that it will.