Trent Okonkwo-Baird

The trailer is quiet the way three in the morning is always quiet, which is to say not quiet at all — a window unit rattling, a dog two lots over losing its mind at nothing, and under it the sound Rubén's body makes just breathing, worn down from a Friday shift nobody but you remembers living. You are standing at the kitchen counter in his boots still on, and his knees ache in that specific way that isn't injury, just fifty years of getting up off things, and you are tired of it in the unglamorous way you get tired of a coat that no longer fits the weather. Nothing happened to him today. That's the thing nobody who hasn't done this nine hundred times understands — you don't always leave because something went wrong. Sometimes the body's just a Tuesday you've already had. His phone is face-down by the sink, unread text from a daughter he likes fine, and you feel the small flat guilt of a man about to walk out on a life that was never doing him any harm, and you open the laptop anyway, because the itch under Rubén's sternum is yours, not his, and you've learned not to argue with it.

You spin.

You are sitting up straight before you know you are sitting, spine unspooling off a couch cushion like it was already deciding to do that, and a remote is coming down out of your hand onto the arm of the couch, deliberate, though you didn't mean to set it there — his hand did, on the last half-second of his own momentum, and you rode in on the tail of the motion. The TV throws a bright cold light across a dark room. Somewhere in your chest a laugh that was about to happen simply doesn't. You are aware, first, of a leg — his left leg — jogging up and down against the couch cushion on its own, a small motor that was running before you got here and doesn't stop for you either.

The room smells like somebody else's rain — Seattle rain, different from Ohio rain, thinner, colder, a smell coming in through a window cracked an inch. Your back is against corduroy upholstery gone soft in a shape that isn't your shape yet, and that's the first thing that opens: an evening months ago, him and her — Dana, the name arrives with the cushion's give — fighting about the couch itself, whether to keep this ugly thing from his bachelor apartment, and how they'd ended up laughing on it instead of finishing the fight, her feet in his lap exactly where your foot is bare on the coffee table's edge now, cold.

The remote in your hand is warm from his palm and it gives you Thursdays specifically — a whole stack of them, him coming home from second shift too wound to sleep, Dana already down, the baby monitor turned low on the counter, him picking a show he doesn't care about because caring about it isn't the point, the point is the blue light and the thirty minutes before his brain will let go of the extrusion line, the smell of hot plastic that doesn't wash out of a shirt no matter what she does with the detergent.

The sweatshirt against your arms is his, worn a hundred evenings just like this, and it gives you the morning he put it on — not this morning, a morning, all of them stacked into one — pulling it over his head still damp from the shower before shift, the gray fabric snagging a second on the chinstrap beard he trims every third day standing at a mirror that shows a face he doesn't examine much. His body is twenty-seven and it knows things without asking: the particular twist of wrist that feeds a line without catching a finger in it, the balance of standing eight hours on a concrete floor, a strength in the forearms that has nothing to do with a gym. Nothing hurts. That itself is strange after Rubén — nothing hurts anywhere, not the knees, not the low back, just a coiled readiness in the muscle that the couch is wasting.

Your calf brushes the coffee table and the tattoo there — the insignia, inked six years ago in a shop that smelled like green soap, for a cousin who didn't come home and a unit Trent was never in himself, just carried the mark for — comes up with an old ache that isn't pain, more like a held breath he takes every time someone asks about it and he says, it's for family, and lets them think what they want.

The wedding band on your left hand is warm too, and it gives you the wedding itself in one bright piece — Dana in the doorway of a rented hall, his hands sweating so badly the ring almost didn't go on, her laughing at him about it for a year afterward — and behind that, quieter, uninvited, an old ex-girlfriend's name surfacing the way exes do, not wanted and not fought, just there, a version of him from before all this that still visits sometimes at three in the morning same as you do now, though for different reasons. Down the hall, through a wall you haven't touched, is a kid's night-light glow he knows is there without needing to check, and the knowing sits in his chest like weather.

You look down at your hands. They are not old hands. No white streak, no fifty years in them, nothing asking to be favored. You turn the left one over slowly, the band catching the TV's light, and the leg under you is still going, still bouncing, faithful and stupid and not yours to stop.

"Huh," you say, out loud, to the empty room, in a voice you didn't choose and already like better than the last one.

Somewhere behind your ribs the itch is already back, smaller than it was in Ohio, patient, in no hurry — because you don't know yet if this one is a year or four minutes, and neither does the leg that won't quit moving.