Wesley Nakamoto

Devin Achebe's dorm room is too bright for eleven in the morning, and that's the problem — the blinds are up, some roommate's doing, and the sun is lying flat across the desk where the laptop sits open to the wheel. Twenty years old, six-foot-two, a body that still has finals in it, still has a mother who calls on Sundays, and none of that is yours to keep thinking about. You've been him less than a minute and already the appeal of him is thinning out, the way it always does — the itch under the ribs that isn't his, the one that never once belonged to any of the hundred and seventy-five before him. You paid for this one on a whim after a party three nights ago and it was fun exactly until it wasn't. His classes are hard and boring in the specific way of a kid who hasn't figured out yet what he's for. You want to be somewhere the day has already been decided. You put your hand — his hand — on the mouse, and you spin.

The room does not go anywhere. It changes entirely. Foil light lies across a face that is not the one you left, and the first thing you know is the weight of a body an inch shy of your old one's shoulders, water-heavy with a tiredness that isn't fatigue so much as debt, something owed and not yet paid. Your eyes open into a bar of light and you hold there without blinking, the way he must have done a hundred times when the tape didn't quite hold at the corner. A ceiling fan turning too slow to cool anything. The smell of a room that's been sealed against daylight on purpose.

The shirt is still on him — thin white cotton gone soft with washing, twisted where he slept on it — and it gives you the first flash before you've even decided to want one: a hand, his hand, buttoning it slow in a bathroom mirror at eleven at night, the fluorescent light buzzing, the gap in his teeth showing in a smile that isn't for anyone, just a habit of checking. Wesley Nakamoto. Thirty-six years old and dressing for a shift that starts when other people's days are ending. He tucked the brown work shirt in that morning-that-was-night, khaki shorts already laid out on the closet door, boots by the bed where they still sit now, laces still tied from being kicked off rather than untied — that's how tired he was.

The mattress under you — no frame, just the box spring and the mattress square on the carpet — gives you a year: the divorce of it, not his own, his parents', long since done with but still furnishing the way he thinks about permanence, why there's no frame, why he's never bought one, why the lamp on the nightstand is nicer than anything else in the room because his sister gave it to him and everything else here is just what got him through the week. The scanner holstered at his belt when he's dressed is muscle memory older than three years — the beep of it, the weight of a package handed off a truck at 4 a.m., his van idling in a cul-de-sac with its back doors open onto heavy Atlanta air, sweat under his collar by six. He likes the quiet of the night routes. Nobody's dog barking. Nobody watching him misjudge a walkway.

The pillow still holds a shape of someone else's head from three weeks ago, an ex he does not let himself think about in the daylight but who arrives now anyway, sideways, through the smell of the sheets he hasn't washed since — a man's laugh in this same bed, a joke about the foil on the window, *you live like a vampire, Wes*, said fondly, before it stopped being fond. His jaw tightens with a feeling that isn't yours: a loss still soft at the edges, a decision he's proud of and lonely inside of both at once, going home to an empty apartment by choice, sober seven years, no cigarette ever, because his father drank and it took things from the house that never came back, and Wesley decided young he would not be a thing that took.

The migraine is already coming in behind his left eye, low, a tide he recognizes before it's fully in — it lives here on hot afternoons like a second occupant of the skull, and some correct, borrowed part of you wants to close the eyes again and let the day just be over. His fingers find the edge of the sheet the way they'd find anything, and you feel the nails, bitten close, worried down without him ever deciding to do it — hands that spend all night reading barcodes and can't, off the clock, leave themselves alone.

Then the light shifts, foil settling, and you're all the way in, weight and ache and gap-toothed jaw and all, and you lift your — his — hand off the mattress and hold it in the bar of light, turning it like it might tell you something about the last three years it spent doing this exact motion, small and calloused and someone else's entirely.

You say, "Not yet," to the empty room, not sure yourself if it's an answer to the migraine or the boots on the floor or the wheel already gone quiet behind your eyes, and you lie there in his heat with no plan for how long you intend to stay being him.