Wrong Man - part 2 (Patreon)

The dog knows before she does. A brindle pit mix, gray around the muzzle, and it comes off the couch when I open the door with the key that the phone told me would be under the third pot on the landing, and it gets two feet from me and stops. Doesn't bark. Just stands there with its weight back and its nose going, working the air, because I smell like Aaron and I move like nobody it's ever met, and a low sound starts up in its chest, not a growl exactly, a question.

"Hey," I tell it. My voice. The voice still drops into the floor of this chest every time and surprises me. "Hey. It's me."

It's not me. The dog knows it. I hold a hand out, knuckles down, the way you're supposed to, and it leans in and takes a long read off the back of my hand and then pulls its head away and looks up at my face like the two halves don't add up, the hand says Aaron and the rest of me says stranger. It sits, finally, uneasy, and lets me past, and follows three steps behind the whole way in like it's keeping an eye. There's a name on the tag and the firmware hands it to me a beat late, Bruno, and I don't say it out loud because I don't trust myself to say it like he would.

Charlie's apartment is small and clean in the way of someone who works nights and does the cleaning at two in the morning because there's nothing else to do. There's a lamp going in the corner, warm, yellow, fighting a smell underneath it that's cigarettes and dog. A blanket folded wrong over the arm of the couch. On the side table by the doorway, charging, a black tablet in a rugged case, and I clock it the second I'm in the room and then I make myself not look at it, because she's coming out of the back in a t-shirt and sleep shorts with her hair up, and she stops when she sees me, and her whole face does something complicated.

"You've got some nerve," Charlie says.

"I know."

"No. No, you don't get to 'I know' me." She's got a glass of something in her hand, half gone. "Two weeks. Two weeks, Aaron, and a guy comes to my door, you know that? Last Thursday. Real polite. Asked did I know where you were." She drinks. "I said no. I'm a great liar, turns out. Didn't even know I had it in me."

"What'd he look like?"

"What?" That stops her. "You don't - usually you'd already be telling me it's handled. You'd be doing the hands." She does a little flat motion with her free hand, his motion, a thing he must do, it's fine, it's handled, and watching her do my body's gesture from the outside puts a cold finger on the back of my neck. "Now you want a description."

"Humor me."

"Big. Gym big. Gray truck out front, he didn't try to hide it." She sets the glass down harder than she means to. "Bruno wouldn't stop. Whole time the guy's at the door, Bruno's losing it. The dog's got better sense than both of us." The dog, hearing itself, thumps its tail once against the floor and doesn't get up.

The voice in my head, the one that came with the implant, the one that's been feeding me his life all afternoon in little cold doses, surfaces something. Friday. The thing she does on Fridays. She likes when you remember. I don't say it. I can't run lines off a script at her, not with her looking at me like that, like she's furious and she's relieved and she hates that she's relieved.

"I'm sorry," I say, and the strange thing is I mean it, just not for the thing she thinks.

She puts the glass down. "You look different."

My stomach drops the way it did at the charger. "I'm tired."

"No." She comes closer. She tips her head, reading my face the way you read a face you've spent years on, and the dog watches from the doorway. "You're standing different. You're, I don't know. You're looking at me like -" She stops. Whatever the end of that sentence was, she decides against it. "Forget it. You shaved weird. You missed a spot." She reaches up and touches the spot under the jaw, and her finger comes away and she looks at it and then at me, and for one long second the whole thing hangs there, the wrongness of me, close enough to touch and not adding up, and I watch her decide not to chase it. People do that. They'd rather have you back than be right. "You're here," she says, like she's settling something with herself. "You hungry? There's chili. It's two days old, it's better now."

"I'm okay."

I have to get the tablet and I have to go and I know exactly how this is supposed to work, walk in, be him, get the thing, get out, and instead she's two feet away and the lamp's throwing that warm yellow over both of us and the body I'm in has its own ideas, the heart's doing the slow heavy slam again, and under that, lower, something else, a heat with a different address than any heat I've known, nearer the surface, blunter, already speaking up. She smells like some lotion, almond maybe, and like sleep and like the cigarette she had on the balcony before I came in, and under all of it a little like the chili. She reaches up without asking and puts her thumb at the corner of my mouth like she's wiping something off, and there's nothing there, it's just a thing she does, and the body leans into her hand on instinct.

"There he is," she says, quiet, and something in her loosens, and I've stopped being able to tell where the job ends and the wanting starts because they're in the same body now and the body isn't sorting them for me.

I kiss her. Her mouth is sure. She kisses like there's no version of this where she has to ask, and she takes a fistful of the shirt and pulls. The dog gets up and leaves the room.

It's not like mine. I keep waiting for it to map onto something I know and it won't. The want in this body comes up faster and dumber and louder, it doesn't thread up through the chest the way I knew it, it just arrives and it announces itself and there's no hiding it, it's pressed between us before I've decided anything and she feels it and laughs against my teeth, pleased, and the laugh undoes me more than a kiss would have. Her hands know him. They go to the buttons without looking, two fingers and a turn, bored almost, the boredom of a long thing.

We move it back toward the couch and I clip my shoulder on the doorframe, hard, the way I've been clipping doorframes all day because the body's wider than I keep believing, and she laughs at that too, you're drunk, and I'm not, I'm just new. She gets the shirt off me and her hands go flat to this chest and the chest is broad and hard under them and the contact lands somewhere, a heat that drops straight down and pools, blunt and undeniable, and I have to stop for a second with my forehead against her hair and just breathe through how much the body wants, how it doesn't ask me, how it's already past asking.

She works the belt loose without looking, like her hands have done it a thousand times and don't need her attention for it, and the second she gets a hand inside I make a sound I don't recognize, low, dragged out of somewhere I've never had access to before today. The size of it is the first thing. How full it already is, how it's been building since the kiss without asking my permission, a thick stacked heat that has nothing in common with anything I knew as myself, no warmth that spread and softened, just a single blunt insistence that wants one thing and isn't interested in being managed. She runs her thumb along it once, testing, and my knees nearly go.

She strips the rest of the way down and pulls me after her onto the cushions, and for a second I just look, the unfamiliar geography of her laid out from an angle I've never seen a woman from, and then there's no more looking because she's guiding me with a hand at the base and the body knows exactly where that is even though I've never stood on this side of it.

Going in empties my head out completely. There isn't a word for the grip of it, just a clench and give that runs up through me like something struck, every part of this body reporting at once, low and total, refusing to let me think about anything else. I go too fast right away, the body wanting speed before I've found a single rhythm of my own, and she catches my hip and presses down, slows me, here, like this, and I match it, and slower turns out to be worse, or better, I've lost the ability to tell those two things apart. There's a pressure building underneath that doesn't bloom out the way mine used to. It gathers instead. Climbs. Narrows down to one demanding point low in the body, and the nearer it gets the less any of this feels like a choice I'm still making.

I get a hand into her hair, the same hand that found the scar a minute ago, and her hair comes loose the rest of the way around my fingers, and the small white scar on her shoulder is right there against my mouth again, the one the voice in my head has nothing to say about, just a hole where his memory of it should be. I put my lips to it because it's the one true thing in the room. She makes a sound for that, sharper than the others, and pulls me down harder, and the body answers her a beat before I would, glad to, built for exactly this.

What it does after that it does almost entirely without me. There's a clumsiness I can't smooth out, I lead with the wrong hand, I lose the rhythm twice and find it again worse than before, and none of it seems to matter because her breath's gone ragged at the top and her hand's at the back of my neck now, pulling me down into her shoulder, and the point low in the body has stopped climbing and started closing, fast, and there's no warning I recognize before it goes. It locks through me in three or four long pulls, the whole body seizing around it and then letting go in stages, and I make a sound I've never made and don't recognize as coming from me. She says his name. Into the side of this neck, twice. Aaron. And it lands in a chest that isn't mine. I take his name like it's mine because right now, in the lamplight and that almond smell, with her weight and the heat of her and this body emptied out and humming, it nearly is.

After, she's a line of warmth down my side and this chest is hers to lie on now and she's tracing something on it with one finger, the scarred shoulder against my arm, and the dog's come back and dropped down by the couch with a sigh like it's put up with a lot.

"Stay tonight," Charlie says into my shoulder. "Don't do the thing where you leave at four. Just stay."

"Okay."

I mean it when I say it. I lie there and do the math I keep doing and can't stop. There's a body across town, careful hand under the belly, on a man's clock and on mine, and getting it back means the tablet on the side table and the money behind it and walking out of this into a face two carloads of men are hunting and a fourth-floor walk-up and a job that's always bad and a kid I was scared of before any of this, scared in the dark with the calculator app open, scared in a way you don't get to say out loud. And here there's a lamp still burning and a dog and a woman who pulls me where she wants me like I'm hers to keep.

She falls asleep fast. One arm's thrown across this chest and it's heavier than it looks and I don't move it for a while. The lamp's still on across the room, throwing that same warm yellow over the carpet, nobody having gotten up to turn it off. Bruno's breathing in the doorway. Somewhere out there a gray Tahoe is doing slow loops past addresses, and across town there's a body on a couch or a curb or wherever he's holed up, careful hand under the belly, waiting on me to be the kind of person who does this clean.

The tablet's on the side table, charging, eleven feet away. I get Charlie's arm off me an inch at a time. The dog watches me get up. I stand there in the dark in a body that takes the stairs two at a time and doesn't ache in the back, naked in a stranger's apartment, and I cross the cold floor, and I pick the tablet up off the cable, and the screen lights to a lock I don't have, and then a six-digit string floats up the way it does now and my thumb's already moving, and it opens. And there it all is. A column of numbers, a wallet inside the wallet, sitting behind a face that's mine until it isn't, behind a thumb that opens everything, in an apartment with a lamp still burning and a dog and a woman who told me to stay.

I could move it right now. I know that the second I see it. The thumb's right here. The body the money's keyed to is the body I'm standing in. I could send all of it somewhere only I know and put the tablet back on the cable and let Charlie sleep and walk out the door a man with no one's name on him and no ache in his back and forty in a wallet and a thumb that opens locks, and the only thing pulling the other way is a heartbeat that isn't in this chest, a flutter somebody else felt this morning and decided not to know.

Charlie turns over and says something that isn't words and reaches for the warm spot I left and doesn't find it. Bruno lifts his head. The cable's still plugged in, swinging a little where I lifted the tablet off it, ticking against the cabinet. I stand there holding the thing in the dark, naked, a stranger in a stranger's life, and I think about the chili getting better in the fridge two days at a time and the second hook by the door that's hers and the photo strip in his wallet where it took her three frames to get him to smile, and none of it's mine, and I'm standing in the middle of it like it could be.