Wyatt Delacroix

It is the middle of the night where you are, and nothing is on. You have scrolled until the feed stopped being anything. You have always been drawn to this: the films where a man wakes in another man's body, the threads at two in the morning, the long private habit of wondering what it would be like to be handed someone. You never believed the page would work. It has a wheel on it. You pay. You spin.

Then you are sitting down, and the kitchen is dark, and there is a phone in your hands, lit with watches. The chair is hard under his weight. Your thumb is lifted off the glass, and the number under it is more than his rent. His breath goes out of you slowly. You turn the phone face-down on the counter. The hand that does it is his, and it does not pick the phone back up.

The jeans are stiff over your knees, and the denim gives you the first piece. It is the morning, in the bedroom with the shutters half-open. He pulled these on one leg at a time, hopping, the paint on the thighs gone hard as bark. He is tired in that memory, but only the ordinary way. The sweatshirt follows, its cuffs worn soft. His arms went through the sleeves like a habit, and the collar caught his ears, the little studs in the lobes. He tugged it down over his belly and thought about nothing. It was the nothing that felt good.

Your thumb finds the pale band of skin at the base of your ring finger. It is a thin, cool stripe, and it opens up. A porch. Her laugh. Sun on the wet street, steam lifting off it. He slid the ring off in a car, and he set it in a dish and has not looked in the dish since. Grief comes up in his feeling, not yours, quiet, with no edges.

You press your forearm and the tattoo there is rough under your fingertip. It is small and badly done, and the regret arrives whole: a friend's garage, a dare, and the long years of keeping that arm covered at weddings. You almost laugh.

The chair's wooden slats press into your back and the memory is a warehouse. Canvases leaning against brick, taller than you are, though you are tall. He is six-three, and his shoulders know how to lean into a stroke. Your fingers curl by themselves around a brush that is not there. They know the angle. He loves the first hour with a blank canvas more than anything he has ever finished.

Under your shoes the tile is cracked and gritty. You taste the room, old coffee and a vape's sweetness, and he reaches for it in the dark, and your hand is already moving toward his pocket. You stop it. His beard is rough against your wrist when you rub your face. Your knees ache from the floor, and your stomach is empty. His life is not yours, and it is warm anyway, and it is loud in every place you touch.

You lift your hands into the light from the hallway. You turn them over. The knuckles are scarred with old paint and the nails are rimmed with color. They are strangers' hands, and they are yours.

"Okay," you say, in his low voice, and it fills the kitchen. "Okay. Hi."

Somewhere under that is the wheel, patient and glowing, and the question of when you will want it again. You do not know how long you get him.