Travis Ledoux

The gap in Ryan Hoefling's teeth is the first thing you notice tonight, because you keep running your tongue over it, two days in, and it still isn't yours no matter how many times you do that. You're standing in his kitchen with the lights off, same as every other night this week, and you're bored of him in the specific way you get bored — not of the face, the face is fine, but of the smallness of the life underneath it. Nurse in San Francisco, decent apartment, houseplants somebody waters on a schedule taped to the fridge. Gap teeth. Nothing wrong with him. That's the problem. Nothing wrong with him is not a reason to stay, and you have never needed a reason so much as an itch, and the itch is already at the laptop before you've finished deciding, Ryan's own hand on the trackpad like it belongs to you now, which it does, until it doesn't.

You pay. You spin. Twenty-four times now and the wheel still gives that half-second of nothing, a held breath that isn't breathing because for that half-second there's no throat to do it with.

Then there's a throat. It's swallowing.

You come up out of a dark room into a body already sitting on a couch, already mid-blink, TV throwing blue-white light across a face you don't have yet in any way that matters. Weight settles into you all at once — more of it than Ryan, a soft heaviness low in the belly, thighs pressing the couch cushions wider than you're used to. A remote is loose in the right hand. Bare feet, both of them, one tucked half under the opposite calf. The show on screen cuts to a commercial, bright enough to sting, and you feel the body's face do something automatic — not quite a smile, the memory of where a smile usually goes — and then hold still instead, because you are not who was going to laugh.

The couch is what gives you the first of it. Corduroy going bald in one patch under your left hip, and it comes with an evening, another evening, a hundred evenings, the particular ache of a lower back that sits too long after a twelve-hour shift, ankles up on the arm rest because the swelling starts by hour eight and doesn't ask permission. Charting under lights too bright at four in the morning, a coffee gone cold at the nurses' station, a patient in 214 who calls him "hon" no matter how many times he corrects her, and something in that lands soft, almost fond. He likes nights. Nobody above him breathing down his neck at 3 a.m. Just him and the monitors and the vending machine that eats quarters.

The remote in your hand gives you a woman's laugh, not unkind, from a kitchen two years gone — Dana, the ring already coming off in this memory, her voice saying we can still be friends about the kids and neither of them believing it, but trying, actually trying, because that's the kind of divorce it turned out to be, the kind where you still text about a fever, a permission slip, whose weekend. Two kids' faces arrive with that, quick and warm and then gone, a boy's cowlick, a girl losing a tooth on video call because he was on shift and missed it live and cried about that alone in the break room, which nobody knows.

Another hand — recent — Marisol, only four months, already over, a goodbye that didn't slam any doors, just quietly stopped returning calls the way endings do sometimes when neither person is angry enough to make it dramatic. There's an ache in that one still fresh enough to be a bruise you keep testing.

The earring gives you a Tuesday, some ordinary Tuesday, a barber's chair, a joke about looking younger that didn't quite land because the dye job came out too flat, too uniform, that hard line at the temple he keeps meaning to have fixed and never does. Vanity worn a little sheepishly. The t-shirt against your back gives you this morning — his morning, hours ago now by his clock — pulling it over his head one-armed while the other hand held a mug, humming something wordless, no coffee in the mug, hasn't had a drink of any kind in years, coffee included some days, just hot water because his doctor keeps saying blood pressure like it's the only sentence she knows. Cracking his knuckles while he waited for the microwave. A small good habit of a small good man doing a small good ordinary evening after a shift that ran long.

None of it is dramatic. That's what she said, the app on the site, the wheel that doesn't explain itself: sometimes you get a man and there is nothing in particular about him. You feel that now as the last of the memories settle — an ordinariness so complete it is almost its own kind of peace, and for a second, only a second, you understand why someone might just stay in a body like this and let the nights run themselves out.

Then it passes, the way it always does.

You lift the remote-holding hand off your knee and look at it — soft knuckles, pale line where a ring isn't anymore, blue light sliding off it as the TV changes scenes again. You turn it over once, like you're checking it's real, and your eyes come up off it into whatever is watching, dead center, and you hear his voice come out of your mouth for the first time, low, almost midnight-quiet in a Nashville living room that isn't yours yet either.

"Well," you say. "Guess we'll see."