The Body Share

The suit didn't look like much laid flat. Flesh-toned, semi-translucent, faintly iridescent under the fluorescents like an oil slick on shallow water. Almost weightless. The face was collapsed, features slack and undefined—eye holes dark, mouth a soft slit, the whole thing formless and waiting. Down the back, skull to tailbone, a line of black stitching ran tight and precise. Like lacing on a basketball.

I'd paid for it with everything I had. Savings. Rerouted student loans. Seven months corresponding with someone in Kuala Lumpur who only used Signal and never used verbs. It arrived vacuum-sealed inside a crate of textbooks, pressed flat like a preserved specimen.

The instructions were three lines:

Subdue host. Apply to host within four minutes of unconsciousness. Stitching faces outward.

Cale hummed. Country song, loose and tuneless. His shoulders moved with it—rolling, easy, unconscious rhythm. He bunched a shirt, brought it to his face, sniffed, tossed it in the darks. The gesture was so casual. So animal. He inhabited himself the way water inhabits a glass—without effort, without gratitude, without any awareness that the container was extraordinary.

He'd never had to inventory himself. Never stood in front of a mirror and calculated deltoid to deltoid, the exact width of his back, the ratio of shoulder to waist, the square footage of golden skin he simply had. Like it cost him nothing. Like the universe hadn't spent its entire budget on his chassis and left the rest of us with the change.

I slid off the table. Three steps. Two.

The taser clicked—dry, small, a sound like cracking a knuckle.

Cale heard it. Started to turn, and I caught the edge of his confusion, that half-second of processing where his mouth opened and his brow creased and the world briefly stopped making sense for a boy to whom it had always made perfect sense—

"Wha—"

I pressed it to his neck. Just below the jaw, in the soft triangle between tendon and pulse point.

Every muscle seized at once. Full-body clench—shoulders climbing to his ears, spine arching, veins surfacing in his forearms like roads on a map. A choked sound, "nngh—", and then gravity. Knees first, then sideways, catching the edge of the washer on the way down. The mesh bag spilled. Socks, boxers, a Sigma Chi intramural jersey. His phone skittered under the dryer, screen still lit, a country song still twanging tinny from the speaker.

He lay on the concrete. Breathing. Slow. Eyes closed. Face slack and younger without the tension—without the casual authority, the chin-up confidence. Just features. Just skin and bone and the faint wet gleam of drool catching fluorescent light at the corner of his mouth.

Four minutes.

I set the taser down. Set the suit beside him, spread flat, waiting.

Then I knelt.

My hands found his jaw first. Both hands. Cradling his face like something fragile, tilting it toward me. The stubble rasped against my palms—coarse, dense, Friday stubble, exactly the texture I'd predicted. I dragged my thumb along his jawline, slow, root to tip, feeling every individual hair push back against my skin. His jaw was wide. Solid. The mandible of a man who'd never clenched it in anxiety, only in exertion, in effort that was always rewarded.

"Soon," I whispered.

I traced the mole under his left eye. The small scar bisecting his right eyebrow—a childhood thing, probably, a bike accident or a brother's elbow, some golden-boy origin story. I pressed my thumb into the divot of his chin. His lips parted slightly under the pressure, and I could feel the warmth of his breath against my wrist.

My own breathing was ragged. I could hear it bouncing off the concrete walls, too fast, too loud. I didn't care.

I pulled his cutoff over his head—gently, so gently it made my chest ache—lifting his arms one at a time, threading them free. His torso was bare now. Chest broad and defined, pecs thick with a dusting of dark hair between them, nipples flat and brown. His stomach was ridged—not the carved six-pack of someone who starved for it, but the easy, functional musculature of someone who ate whatever he wanted and burned it off by existing.

I put my hand flat on his sternum. Felt his heart beat. Slow, steady, utterly unbothered, pumping blood through a machine that had never broken down.

I worked his shorts down. Hips first—thumbs hooking the waistband and the boxer briefs beneath, sliding both together. His hip bones rose like architecture. The trail of dark hair thickened below his navel and spread, and then he was exposed—soft, heavy, resting against his thigh. I pulled the shorts past his knees, his calves, off over his bare feet. Kicked the slides aside.

He lay naked on the concrete floor.

I stood over him. Looked. Let myself look the way I'd never been allowed to—not the stolen glances across lecture halls, not the peripheral worship at parties where his body moved through crowds like a current. I looked at him the way you look at a painting when the museum is closed and you're the only one left.

Golden skin. Everywhere. Shoulders, chest, stomach, the thick columns of his thighs, the taper of his calves. Dark hair on his legs, his forearms, the trail from navel to groin. His hands rested palm-up on the concrete, fingers loosely curled, calluses on the right palm from the barbell.

I started pulling off my own clothes.

Shirt first—yanking it over my head, glasses catching, almost falling. I didn't care. Jeans next, fumbling the button, kicking them off. Boxers. Socks. Everything. Piled in a heap beside the dryers.

I stood naked above him. My body—narrow-chested, pale, the ribs visible when I breathed, wrists bony, legs thin, the body of someone the gene pool had shrugged at. The contrast was so sharp it felt surgical. His body and mine in the same frame like two different species sharing a habitat by accident.

I knelt beside him. Then lowered myself.

The first contact was electric. My chest against his chest—his skin radiating gym-heat, still damp, and mine cool, goosefleshed. I pressed down. Felt his pecs flatten under my sternum, the hard ridge of his ribs against my ribs, and the size difference was obscene—his torso was so much wider than mine that my arms barely reached the concrete on either side of him. I was draped on him like a coat on a chair.

I slid lower. Pressed my thigh between his thighs.

"Hh—oh—"

The sound that came out of me wasn't voluntary. His thigh was dense. Warm. The muscle firm even unconscious, even slack, and the hair on his leg pressed into my skin—fine, dark, countless tiny points of friction, a texture I'd never felt against my own bare leg because I'd never been close enough to a body like this. I could feel each hair individually, a field of them, bristling against my inner thigh where the skin was thinnest and most honest.

I rocked against him. Slow. Deliberate. My hips grinding down into the junction of his thigh and groin, and the friction was devastating—his skin against mine, the heat of him, the size of him underneath me. My cock slid against the crease of his hip and I pressed my face into his neck and breathed him in. Irish Spring. Protein shake. Sweat. The warm, yeasty, lived-in smell of a body that functioned like a temple and was maintained with the casualness of a rental car.

"Soon," I said into his neck. My lips moved against his pulse point. I could feel the beat. "Soon, soon. I'll feel it from the inside."

I rutted harder. His thigh hair dragging against mine, the friction building, his limp cock warm against my hip, his heartbeat slow and oblivious under my chest. I was shaking—not from exertion but from proximity, from the impossible reality that his body was under mine, that I could feel the specific topography of Cale Bakal's quadricep against my bare skin, that his stubble was scratching my forehead where I'd pressed my face into his jaw.

I reached up and touched his face again. Dragged my fingers across the grain of his stubble—against it, feeling the catch and rasp, then with it, smooth. His jaw was slack. His lips parted. His breath came warm and slow against my fingers and I pressed two of them against his lower lip, feeling how soft it was, how full, the specific give of tissue that had kissed girls at parties and smiled for photos and said "you good, bro?" to someone he'd never see.

"You're not going to feel any of this," I said. "You're not going to know."

I pulled back. Forced myself. My body screamed against the separation—every nerve ending howling at the loss of his heat, his solidity, the sheer gravitational fact of him.

But the clock was running. I could feel it in my teeth.

I grabbed the suit. Spread it open.

Started with his feet.

It was harder than I expected. Dead weight is one thing; unconscious weight is another, and Cale's unconscious weight was substantial. His ankle was thick, solid, and the suit's opening was narrow—I had to push, force his toes through the membrane, then his heel, pulling the material up over his calf. The suit was cold against his skin. I watched it make contact and cling, vacuum-tight, like plastic wrap pulled taut over warm meat. His calf hair pressed flat under the membrane, dark lines visible through the translucence.

Other leg. Same process. Push, pull, adjust, the material stretching and snapping back. His thighs were harder—the muscle dense, the circumference massive. I had to lift each leg to work the suit over his quads, and his weight in my hands was extraordinary. This single thigh weighed more than both of mine combined. I thought about how it had felt pressed between my legs. My cock twitched and I ignored it.

I lifted his hips to get the suit over his ass and groin. Heavy. The material stretched to accommodate and then contracted, sealing tight to every contour. His cock pressed flat against his pelvis under the membrane, visible through the translucence like a shape under ice.

Up over his waist. His stomach. The suit snapped tight against every ridge of his abdominals. I threaded his arms through the sleeves one at a time—lifting from the concrete, bending at the elbow, guiding fingers into fingers. His right hand was bigger than both of mine. The callus on his palm scraped against the material as it slid over.

Shoulders. Chest. Neck.

Then the head.

I cradled the back of his skull—hair still damp, warm scalp, the tender give of it—and lifted. His head lolled against my forearm. I bent down and pressed my lips to his forehead. Quick. Instinctive. The stubble at his hairline scratched my chin.

"Thank you," I said. I didn't know what I meant.

I worked the suit up over his jaw, his mouth, his nose. The membrane stretched thin over his features, and for a second I could see everything underneath—his lips compressed, his closed eyelids distorted and flattened like a face pressed against glass from the inside. A face in a window. A face going away.

I pulled the suit over his forehead, over the crown of his skull, and smoothed it down.

He was sealed inside.

For a moment nothing. Just Cale's body wrapped in translucent flesh-toned film, features vague and blurred underneath like a mannequin in shrink wrap. The dryer hummed. The fluorescents buzzed. The country song had ended.

Then the suit began to move.

Not him. It.

The material tightened in pulses—rhythmic, peristaltic, like something breathing or swallowing. It contracted against his skin, vacuum-sealed, and every detail sharpened through the membrane. I watched his face come into focus—the slope of his nose, the shape of his jaw, the stubble pressing through like seeds under cellophane, each individual hair finding its way to the surface.

The suit drank him.

Translucence thickened. Skin tone bloomed across the surface—golden tan, exactly matched, the warmth spreading outward from his chest like a blush in reverse. The membrane over his face shifted, rippled, and then it wasn't a membrane anymore. It was skin. His skin. The suit's skin. Eyes still closed but the lids were perfect, lashes dark and distinct. Lips full and parted. The stubble wasn't underneath anymore—it was on the surface, grown into the suit like hair through scalp, textured and real. The mole under his left eye darkened into place. The scar through his eyebrow etched itself like a signature.

I could see his chest rising and falling beneath. Two systems breathing—his lungs and the suit's stolen surface, one inside the other, like a Russian doll made of someone's entire life.

The stitching at the back of the neck pulsed once. Warm, then hot, then still.

Ready.

I reached for the seam. Found the base of the skull and pulled.

Peeling it off was worse than putting it on. The material clung, reluctant, possessive—like tape leaving skin, like something that had tasted what it wanted and didn't want to give it back. I peeled it down over his forehead, his nose, his mouth—watching Cale's real face reappear underneath, slack, unchanged, none the wiser. Down his neck. His chest. I rolled him onto his side to work it off his back, and his body was heavier now, colder. Sweat and something else—something faintly chemical, faintly sweet—had pooled between his shoulder blades.

I pulled the suit off his arms, his hips, his legs. The material made a soft wet sound as it separated from skin—schlk, schlk, schlk—tacky, intimate, obscene.

I held it up.

It wasn't blank anymore.

Cale's face stared back at me from the collapsed hood. Slack-jawed, eyes closed, but his. Fully formed. Dimensional. Textured. The stubble was there—Friday stubble, the exact grain I'd felt under my thumb thirty seconds ago. The mole. The scar. Every detail stolen, cataloged, preserved in a medium that fit in a garment bag.

I looked down at the real Cale. Naked on the concrete. Breathing slow. Skin pale where the suit had been, flushed pink where it hadn't. Goosebumps rising along his arms in the basement chill.

He had no idea he'd just been hollowed out.

I reached for the seam at the back of his neck—the stitching, the neat black line I'd pulled closed over his skull minutes ago. My fingers found it easily. But the texture was wrong. Not thread against membrane. Not synthetic. The stitching had sunk into him. I could feel it under his skin—a ridge running from the base of his skull down the channel of his spine, vertebra by vertebra, all the way to the tailbone. Like a surgical scar that had healed in minutes. Like something installed.

I pressed my thumb into the ridge at the top. The skin dimpled. Warm. Living. His pulse fluttered beneath it.

I pressed harder.

The seam opened.

Not the suit peeling away from a body. The body itself—splitting along the line the stitching had drawn, skin parting like a mouth along his spine. Clean. Bloodless. The edges curling back to reveal not muscle, not bone, but space. A hollow. Pink-warm and glistening, faintly luminous, shaped exactly like the interior architecture of Cale Bakal's body—ribcage, pelvic bowl, the long channels where limbs connected to trunk. A cavity that had been carved out of living tissue and left waiting.

The smell hit me. Warm copper. Saline. Something faintly electric, like ozone after lightning. And underneath it, still, absurdly—Irish Spring.

His body lay open on the concrete. Cale Bakal, split down the back, breathing slow and even, face-down now, arms at his sides. From the outside, his skin was still golden, still perfect. From behind, he was a doorway.

I was already naked. I'd stripped minutes ago—my clothes in a pile by the dryers, my body pale and narrow and shaking in the basement chill. The contrast between what I was and what lay open in front of me was so vast it felt like vertigo. Like standing at the edge of something that would either kill you or replace you entirely.

My cock was hard. Had been since I'd pressed my thighs against his. I didn't care. It wasn't sexual—or it was, but it was also something past sexual, something the word didn't have the architecture to hold. Want so dense it had its own gravity.

I sat on the concrete behind him. Extended my right leg.

Slid my foot into his foot.

"Ahh—hahh—"

Warm. God, warm. Not membrane-cold, not synthetic-slick. Body heat. The inside of Cale Bakal's foot was the temperature of living tissue because it was living tissue—sole and arch and the five tunnels where his toes were, and my toes slid into them like fingers into glove fingers, each one finding its channel and settling, and the skin closed around them. Snug. Wet-warm. I could feel the bones of his foot around mine, metatarsals nesting outside my metatarsals, his arch cupping my arch. His foot was bigger. My foot compressed to fit—painless, impossible, the bones condensing or the space expanding, I couldn't tell which. I flexed. His toes flexed. Mine flexed inside his, a beat behind, and then the delay vanished and there was just one flex. One foot.

Left foot. Same. Sliding in—the heat, the give, the accommodation. His heel settling around mine like a cupped palm. My ankles disappearing into his ankles. I looked down and saw his feet at the end of my legs: large, tanned, a dusting of dark hair across the tops of the toes. My legs emerging pale and thin from his calves like something half-born.

I pushed deeper.

His calves swallowed mine. The muscle wrapped around my shins—dense, heavy, the soleus and gastrocnemius encasing my own like a second skeleton of meat. I could feel the fibers. The density. The sheer volume of muscle that Cale Bakal carried on his lower legs without thinking about it, tissue I'd never grown, would never grow, now pressed against my skin on all sides. His leg hair prickled against me from the inside—thousands of follicle roots, each one a pinpoint of texture along the interior wall of his calves.

His thighs were next, and I had to lie back on the concrete to push into them. Hips lifting, feeding my legs deeper into his legs, and the thighs were enormous from the inside. Quads wrapping my quads. Hamstrings cradling my hamstrings. The interior was slick and hot and gripped me with a peristaltic squeeze—the same rhythm the suit had pulsed with earlier, that swallowing motion, pulling me in. My thighs compressed. His thighs thickened around them. I felt the specific mass of each muscle group as it enveloped mine—the rectus femoris, the vastus lateralis, names I'd memorized from anatomy charts while studying his Instagram photos with a devotion that bordered on liturgical.

I reached his hips and the fit changed. The pelvic bowl was wider, the hollow deeper. My narrow hips slotted into his broad hips and the bones shifted—not breaking, just rearranging, finding a configuration where my skeleton and his skeleton could coexist. His glutes settled around mine, heavy and firm. My cock pressed against the interior wall of his groin and I gasped—"nnh, fuck"—because I could feel his, from the inside, the root and weight of it on the other side of a membrane of living tissue no thicker than a breath.

I sat up inside him. Threaded my torso into his torso.

His abdominals wrapped my stomach. His ribs enclosed my ribs—each one finding its larger counterpart and nesting inside it, my narrow chest expanding to fill his broad one. I felt his lungs on either side of mine. The capacity. The sheer square footage of alveoli, the volume of air this body could hold. I inhaled and his chest rose with me, and the breath was huge—filling spaces I'd never had, pressing outward against a ribcage built for an athlete, a body that had never known the shallow, anxious breathing of someone who took up as little space as possible.

Arms. I fed my arms into his arms, and the sensation was exquisite—biceps around biceps, triceps around triceps, his forearms thick as my calves wrapping my thin forearms in a sheath of corded muscle. My hands pushed into his hands. Each finger finding its tunnel, sliding in past the first knuckle, the second, the third—his fingers were so much longer, my fingertips sitting mid-palm for an instant before the interior contracted and pulled me the rest of the way, stretching me, mapping me, until I could feel his calluses from the inside. The rough thickened skin of his right palm pressed against my own palm like they were holding hands through a wall.

His shoulders settled over mine. The deltoids—massive, rounded, heavy as epaulets—capped my narrow shoulders and the width of me doubled. I rolled them. Felt the ball-and-socket joints move in perfect, lubricated arcs, the rotator cuffs healthy and silent, no clicking, no grinding, none of the small complaints my own body had accumulated from years of hunching over laptops in bad lighting.

I was inside him to the neck. My body encased in his from toe to collarbone, every surface touching, his flesh around mine like water around a stone.

The head was last.

I reached back. Found the opening of the seam where it crested at his skull. Lifted his head—heavy, lolling, the neck muscles thick and warm around my own neck now—and pulled it over mine like a hood.

His face slid over my face.

I felt his jaw settle around my jaw. Wider. Heavier. The mandible was a different architecture entirely—broad, squared, the masseter muscles dense against my own hollow cheeks. His lips closed over my lips. His nose over my nose. Eyelids over eyelids—and for a second I was in darkness, warm, wet darkness, breathing his breath from inside his mouth, feeling his stubble from underneath, each hair a root pressing into the surface above me.

I found the seam at the base of the skull. Pulled it closed.

The seal was different this time. Not a zip. An integration. The edges of the opening melted together—skin fusing to skin, the ridge flattening, the stitching dissolving into his flesh until there was no seam at all. Just the unbroken line of Cale Bakal's spine, the knobs of his vertebrae, the smooth golden skin of his back, with neat black cross stitching, sealing me in permanently.

Full-body pulse.

Every nerve ending fired at once—not pain, not pleasure, something that annihilated the distinction. My body and his body pressed together at every conceivable point of contact, skin against interior skin, muscle against muscle, bone nested in bone. I felt my own dimensions surrender. My narrowness expanding into his breadth. My thinness filling into his density. My face reshaping behind his face, jaw widening, cheekbones broadening, brow thickening, until the interior pressure equalized and I couldn't feel the boundary anymore.

I opened my eyes.

His eyes. Brown, gold-flecked in the fluorescent light. I blinked. Felt the lashes—his lashes, thick and dark—brush against cheeks that were now also mine.

I sat up. The movement was fluid, powerful—abdominals contracting, and I felt them from both sides now, the exterior ridge and the interior effort, the doubled sensation of muscle working around muscle. I stood. The legs unfolded beneath me and the height—God, the height. Six-two. The world was rearranged from up here. The washers were lower. The mirror was at eye level instead of above it. I occupied the room differently. The air moved around more of me.

I walked to the mirror.

Cale Bakal looked back. Not a copy. Not a replica wearing a dead-eyed approximation. Him. The real and only Cale Bakal, alive, breathing, pulse visible at the throat, stubble casting shadow on the jaw in the flat fluorescent light. The mole under the left eye. The scar through the right eyebrow. Brown eyes, slightly narrowed—the default expression of a man who'd never had to look closely at anything because everything worth seeing came to him.

I raised my hand. His hand. Touched my jaw. Felt the stubble rasp against fingertips I could feel from the inside—my original thin fingers pressed against the interior of his thick ones, both sets of nerves firing, the scratch registering twice. Once on the surface. Once beneath.

"Hey," I said.

His voice. Deep, easy, resonant in a chest that held twice the air mine ever had. A voice that expected the world to be listening because the world always was.

I smiled. His smile. The slow one, left corner first.

Somewhere behind me on the concrete, there was nothing. No body. No pale, unconscious boy left sleeping on the floor. The suit had taken everything—converted the body into a vessel, used it up, sealed shut. There was only Cale Bakal standing in a basement laundry room, alone, breath steady, heart beating, fully inhabited.

I found his phone under the dryer. Face unlock engaged, the little padlock clicking open without hesitation. I scrolled his messages. Absorbed names, cadences, the rhythm of a social life that had never required effort. Group chat: "DAWGS 🐕," forty-seven unread—memes, bar debate, Marcus saying whitford you better not flake. Sofia, lowercase, 🫠: hey you, what're you wearing tonight.Tyler: you coming to the party tonight or being a hermit again lol

I typed back to Tyler: yeah I'll be there

To Sofia: something good. you'll see 😏

I turned to the clean pile. Found a grey and white henley—fitted, soft, the kind of shirt that cost forty dollars and looked effortless. I pulled it on. It fit perfectly across the chest, snug at the biceps, the fabric settling against muscle that filled it without trying.

But that wasn't enough.

I grabbed the hem with both hands and pulled.

The fabric tore. Just—ripped clean across, the sound of cotton giving way loud in the concrete space, and I felt it in my hands, the ease of it, the strength required so minimal it was almost funny. These hands could just do that. Tear a shirt like tissue paper. I ripped upward, shredding the bottom third of the henley until the edge sat ragged just above my navel.

I looked down.

Holy fuck.

Abs. Not my abs—his abs, ridged and defined, the lines between each segment casting shadow under the fluorescents. Golden skin. The dark trail of hair running from my navel down into the waistband of his jeans, a perfect vertical line that disappeared into denim slung low enough to show the cut of the Adonis belt on either side.

I flexed.

The abs contracted. All of them, simultaneously, the entire grid of muscle pulling taut, and I felt it from both sides—the effort of contraction and the visual result, watching my stomach transform from flat and defined to carved, each ridge popping into sharper relief, the treasure trail narrowing as the skin tightened around it.

I did it again. Slower. Watching. Feeling the specific sensation of each muscle firing—rectus abdominis, top to bottom, the obliques pulling in at the sides. My hands found my waist, fingers tracing the lines, and the contact was doubled: my touch on this skin, this skin feeling my touch, the circuit closing.

"Fuck," I said out loud. His voice. My voice. Whoever's.

I rolled the sleeves up. Bunched the fabric to mid-bicep, exposing his forearms—thick, corded, veins running elbow to wrist. The callus on the right palm from the barbell. I flexed my arm. Watched the bicep swell, the peak rising, the horseshoe of the tricep visible when I rotated. Arms that could rip shirts. Arms that had never been mine.

I turned to the mirror above the slop sink.

Cale Bakal looked back—but wrong. Better. The henley torn and ragged, midriff exposed, sleeves rolled to show off arms that had been hidden under casual, unsexy cotton. Jeans slung low. The treasure trail on full display, leading the eye down, deliberate as a road sign.

Cale would never dress like this. Cale dressed like someone who didn't have to try. Loose shirts. Unmodified. The confidence of a body that got looked at no matter what it wore.

But I wasn't Cale.

I was what Cale could be if he knew what the fuck he had.

Something flinched deep inside—a flicker of resistance, the body's muscle memory registering wrong, too much, not how we do this. Instinct fighting against intention.

I pressed my palm flat against my stomach. Felt the abs under my hand, warm and solid and minenow.

"Yeah," I said to the mirror. "We do it like this now."

Now that I was inside, I wanted people looking.

Something flinched inside. Deep. Not the suit's resistance this time—there was no suit anymore, just integrated flesh—but something older. A muscle memory. A preference buried in tissue that remembered dressing differently, dressing casually, dressing without intent. Cale didn't perform. Cale just showed up and the performance happened around him.

I overrode it. Pressed the instinct flat. Tugged the henley up another inch.

I wasn't Cale. I was what Cale could have been if he'd ever understood what he had.

I took the stairs two at a time. The legs carried me—quads firing, calves pushing, the entire machine surging upward without negotiation, without the internal bargaining I'd lived with every day of my life. Can I, should I, will it hurt, will I be out of breath. None of it. The body just went.

At the top, Tyler clapped my shoulder. The impact landed on the deltoid and the body absorbed it—just took it in, the way sand takes a wave.

"There he is. Thought you died down there."

I grinned. The slow one. Left corner first.

"Just doing laundry, man."

He didn't blink. Didn't look twice. Chin-nodded and walked away, already on his phone, already done with me the way people are done with things they trust completely.

I leaned against a doorframe. The party filled in—bodies, music, cheap beer and vanilla body spray. A pledge carried a case of Natty Light past me: "'Scuse me, Cale." Someone pressed a red solo cup into my hand without asking. Things just arrived for this body. Drinks, space, the benefit of every conceivable doubt.

A girl brushed past. Her fingers trailed my forearm—light, automatic, the way you'd touch a banister. She didn't look back. I don't think she knew she'd done it.

I drank. The beer was terrible. It didn't matter. We were slowly replacing all the brothers. The beer would change.

You don't go to them. You stand here. Lean. Exist in the coordinates of a body the world organized itself around. And they come—unthinking, pulled by a gravity they wouldn't name if you asked.