Tyler Iverson

Patrick Solheim's hotel room smells like the mini-bar and the cigarette he shouldn't have had. You're sitting on the end of the bed, gray-haired, sales-rep soft around the middle, and your phone is open to the site because twenty-one hours in this body was enough to tell you everything it has to say. Houston is a good living and a bad life. There's nothing here you want to feel twice. So you scroll instead to a name that isn't a stranger — Colton Wexley, the dentist, New Orleans, four hours and twenty minutes you spent inside him three days ago, and what you learned in there was worth more than the teeth: who Colton takes orders from at that practice, who makes him small, who he complains about to no one because there's no one he'd trust with it. You didn't ask to be given that. You were just standing in the man's life for an afternoon, in his office, in his temper. Now the wanting comes back simple and ugly: you want to be the boss's boss, from the other side, for the fun of knowing what it costs a man to hate someone he can't say he hates. You spin knowing exactly what you're spinning for, which has never happened before, and that's its own kind of thrill.

The wheel doesn't care what you wanted. It gives you a school hallway smell of bleach through a bedroom wall, gives you Los Angeles, gives you twenty-one and skinny and nowhere near New Orleans at all.

You arrive face-down. Somebody else's arm is dead-weight off the edge of a mattress, streetlight cutting the curtain into a blade of gold, and the breath under you is ragged and then, in the space of your first thought, even. The arm draws itself up on its own, folds at your chest, and you are on your back before you've decided to be, hands laced over a thin sternum like a man laid out for a viewing. You didn't do that. The body did that, settling into you the way water finds a level.

The sheets are old cotton gone soft, a smell of fabric softener and someone else's sweat, and that's the first door: a Sunday, hot, the cheap box fan going, a woman two years back whose name you can't get to yet — not this touch, not this one. You breathe out and your ribs are narrow under your folded hands, narrower than Colton's ever were, narrower than Patrick's, a boy's ribs on a man who works nights. Freckles you can't see but feel, somehow, in the tightness across your own nose when you almost frown.

Then your foot finds the mattress seam and there it is: whole. Tyler. Floor buffer at 11 p.m., the corridor lights left half up so you can see the wax shine come off the tile like a held note. You love that part of the job and you'd never say so. You love the empty building, the way the trophy case glass throws your reflection back at you distorted and gold-lit, the way nobody's there to need anything from you for six straight hours. You clocked out at midnight, walked home under dead streetlamps past the courtyard's dry palms, let yourself into the apartment that's always five degrees too warm, and did not turn on a single light.

Your hand finds the hem of the gray t-shirt you slept in and the memory comes up through the cotton like heat off asphalt: this morning, or the one like it, pulling this exact shirt over your head, arm catching, the tattoo on your bicep dragging against the sleeve — script, a name, a date, the ink still a little tender at the edges some months of the year because you got it touched up, because nobody's allowed to ask about it and you've gotten good at the flat voice you use when they do anyway. Sarah. 04.22. You don't let the rest of it up. Not here. Not yet. It's his to keep down and yours, for now, to respect.

Your knuckles ache faintly with wanting to crack, an old tic your hands run through without you, and under the sheet your legs are a young man's legs, wiry, the kind of tired that comes from being on your feet on tile for six hours and calling it nothing. Somewhere down in the marrow of him there's church on Sundays when his mother's still speaking to him, a paycheck that never once broke five figures ahead, a big night out twice a month that ends in a cigarette he swore he quit, a mop bucket he knows better than he knows most people. None of it is dramatic. All of it is his, and it comes up gently, sleeve by sleeve, like the shirt did.

You lift your hands off your chest and look at them in the gold blade of streetlight — narrow wrists, bitten thumbnail, the tattoo turned dark and unreadable in this light on an arm that has never in its life had to answer to anyone named Colton Wexley, and won't tonight either, and that thought arrives with a laugh that isn't unkind, just yours.

"Not who I was expecting," you say to the empty room, and you don't know yet if that's disappointment or the better kind of surprise, or how long you'll let it stay unanswered before you spin again.