I woke to birds. Not traffic. Not the soft electronic hum of the apartment refrigerator. Not someoneâs footsteps in the hall outside my door or a car alarm giving up after three miserable chirps.
For a moment I lay still with my eyes closed, afraid in an animal way, the way you are afraid before thought arrives. The mattress was softer beneath me. The air smelled different: clean cotton, cedar, some expensive candle burned down to its last inch, and the faint green dampness of a yard after sprinklers.
Samâs arm was across my stomach. That, at least, was familiar now. Terrifyingly familiar. His weight, the heat of him, the rough brush of his leg against mine under the sheets. My body had spent yesterday accepting him before my mind could even decide what he was.
I opened my eyes. The bedroom was enormous. Sunlight came through wide shutters, striping a wall I had never painted. There was a fireplace opposite the bed. A real fireplace, with a framed photograph on the mantel: Sam and me in suits, laughing under an arch of flowers. My breath stopped before I understood why.
I lifted my left hand. A gold ring circled my finger.
Not new. Not shiny. It had tiny scratches, soft wear around the edges, a dullness made by years of soap and doorknobs and holding on.
Sam stirred beside me. âMm?â
I sat up, pulling the sheet with me. My chest moved differently. Heavier. Softer. There was more of me around the middle, not dramatically, not grotesquely, but enough that my body folded when I bent forward. Hair ran thick across my chest and down my stomach, threaded here and there with gray. My shoulders were still broad, my arms still strong enough, but they belonged to a man who sat in meetings, drove home tired, promised himself heâd get back to the gym next month.
âDavid?â Samâs voice was rough with sleep.
I turned. He was older again.
Forty-five, maybe. Still Sam, still broad and handsome, but there were silver threads in his beard now, real ones, not just a few at the chin. His face had settled into itself. The lines beside his eyes were deeper, and there was a softness at his jaw that made him look less like the man I had met at the bar and more like the man who had stayed when no others ever had.
He looked at me with concern that had history behind it.
âWhatâs wrong?â he said.
I couldnât answer. I looked past him at the room, at the heavy curtains, the framed art, the built-in shelves, the photograph of us on a beach, another of us with a dog I did not remember owning - but was nowhere to be found in the room. A big suburban house. Not an apartment. Not a temporary life. A life with storage space. A life with landscaping. A life that I had expected to arrive at gradually - if at all!
My hand found the ring again. Sam followed my gaze.
âYou okay?â he asked more carefully.
I said the same stupid thing I had said the day before because apparently panic had limited vocabulary.
He frowned, but then some old habit passed across his face. The kind partners develop when they know which worries to press and which to let breathe.
âCome downstairs when youâre ready,â he said. âIâll start coffee.â
When he left, I went to the mirror. The bathroom was larger than my first apartmentâs kitchen. Stone counters. Two sinks. A glass shower. Little amber bottles arranged with expensive indifference. On the counter, beside my toothbrush, sat a comb, a jar of mustache wax, and a polished wooden cigar box. I stared at it before I stared at myself. Then I looked up.
The man in the mirror was recognizably me, but the argument was getting harder for me to make in my head. My hair was salt-and-pepper now, darker at the back and on top, silvering hard at the temples. My hairline had begun to retreat, especially above the corners, exposing more forehead than I expected. My face had thickened. Not ruined. Not old, exactly. But undeniably middle-aged. My eyes were still mine, light and startled, but the skin around them was creased. My cheeks had more weight. My jaw was less sharp. My mustache had changed completely: broader, shaped, curling outward into a handlebar, clean cheeks beneath it. The style looked absurd to me for half a second, and then horribly correct.
I touched one waxed end. My fingers knew what to do. They pinched and smoothed the curl with practiced precision. I yanked my hand away like Iâd touched a stove.
The cigar box waited on the counter. I opened it. The smell rose up at once â cedar, earth, pepper, sweetness, something dark and intimate. My stomach turned, not from disgust, but from recognition.
Memories hit me in fragments: a patio at night, Sam laughing through smoke, my own hand holding a cigar between two fingers, bourbon sweating in a heavy glass, the feeling of having earned silence after a long week.
âNo,â I whispered again, but softer this time.
Downstairs, the house continued to reveal me to myself. There were framed wedding photos in the hallway. David and Sam, approximately ten years younger than this morning but older than yesterday, holding each other in dark suits. There were holiday cards on a console table, a bowl for keys. In the kitchen, Sam moved easily through a room designed around our habits. He poured my coffee before his. Black. No sugar. I took it. It was exactly how I wanted it. And that scared me more than the ring.
We spent the day in the house because I said I had a headache. Sam did not argue. He made breakfast. He talked about errands, about the cute new gardener we hired to manage the lawn, about dinner with neighbors I apparently found boring but useful. I watched his mouth move and tried to assemble our marriage from clues.
At noon, I found our wedding album. By two, I had cried silently in the guest bathroom. By four, I was standing in the garage staring at shelves of things I owned: paint cans, holiday bins, hiking boots, an old leather jacket, a toolbox organized by a man with opinions about organization. In a cabinet near the back, behind a box of extension cords, was a small humidor.
I did not remember walking to it. I opened it and inhaled. The wanting arrived slowly, then all at once. It wasnât just craving. It was ritual calling the body home. Porch. Evening. Bourbon. Smoke. Sam beside me, older and warmer and real. The missing decade did not come back, but its grooves were carved into me.
After dinner, I found myself on the patio. The calm suburban evening spread out blue and gold over the yard. Somewhere a sprinkler clicked. Somewhere a neighbor laughed. Sam sat beside me, reading something on his phone, his bare ankle crossed over his knee.
I held the cigar unlit for a long time. âYou going to smoke that or interrogate it?â he asked.
I looked at him. âWhen did I start?â
Sam glanced up. âStart what?â
I raised the cigar. He smiled faintly. âFortieth birthday. You said it made you look âlike a divorced magician,â then smoked two" he laughed.
I gave a slight smile. I almost laughed. I almost sobbed.
Instead, I cut the end with a tool I apparently knew how to use and lit it with hands that barely shook. The first draw filled my mouth with bitterness and heat and memory. I coughed once, not enough. My lungs knew restraint. My fingers knew the angle. My body, traitorous and loyal, relaxed into the chair.
Sam watched me through the smoke. âYou sure youâre okay today?â
I looked at my ring. At the yard. At the man I had apparently married. At the house that had swallowed ten years and arranged them beautifully around me.
âNo,â I said. It was the first honest thing I had told him all day. Sam put his phone down.
I wanted to explain, but the words felt impossible. How do you tell your husband you met him two nights ago? How do you tell him you love him and donât remember earning the right to?
So I smoked in silence until the sky went dark, and by the end of it, the worst part was not that I wanted the cigar. The worst part was that it helped.
I woke before the alarm. That was new. At twenty-five, alarms had been violence. At thirty-five, they had been obligations. At forty-five, they had been negotiations. But this morning, my eyes opened into the dawn with no sound at all, as if some older mechanism inside me had already begun the day without permission. For a few seconds, I did not move.
I knew before I looked. The body has its own weather, and mine had changed overnight. My back ached in a slow, deep way, not sharp enough to explain, too present to ignore. My mouth was dry. One knee felt stiff under the sheet. My hands, resting on the blanket, looked broader than I remembered, the veins raised, the knuckles slightly swollen, the skin faintly creased like paper that had been folded and unfolded too many times.
Beside me, Sam breathed heavily in sleep. I turned my head toward him and saw, in the blue-gray pre-dawn light, that he had changed too. He was almost totally bald now, his beard heavier with gray, his face fuller and more tired, though still unmistakably Sam. Still the man from the bar, if the bar had been a thousand years ago. Still the man who had poured my coffee black yesterday morning like it was the simplest fact in the world.
I sat up carefully. Carefully. That was the word that frightened me. Not quickly. Not dramatically. Carefully, because my body expected consequences if I moved too quickly.
The bedroom had not changed much from the day before. Same shutters. Same fireplace. Same built-ins and framed evidence of a life I had not lived. But the room felt more deeply owned now, more settled into middle age. A folded throw on the chair. A pair of reading glasses on my nightstand. A small plastic pill organizer beside a glass of water.
In the bathroom, I turned on the light and gripped the sink before looking up. The man in the mirror was in his fifty-five.
I knew because yesterday had taught me the math, but knowing did nothing to soften the blow. My hairline had retreated farther, the salt-and-pepper giving way to gray and white, brushed back from a higher forehead. My face had grown heavier, especially around the cheeks and under the jaw. The eyes were still mine, but they were surrounded now: crowâs feet, deeper lines beneath them, creases in my forehead that stayed even when I stopped frowning.
And the mustache had expanded into something larger. A beard. Full, gray-white, dense along my jaw and chin, covering the lower half of my face as if the handlebar had surrendered to age and became weather. I touched it, expecting costume hair. It was warm. Coarse. Mine. My fingers sank into it with the familiarity of maintenance.
On the counter sat more amber bottles, a blood-pressure cuff, ibuprofen, a prescription bottle with no readable label turned toward me, and a small case filled with little blue pills tucked half behind my shaving cream. I stared at it longer than I should have.
Behind me, the closet door stood open. Inside, hanging beside tailored work shirts and dark jeans, was a black leather jacket. Not fashionable exactly. Not costume. Well-made. Heavy. Broken in at the elbows. Below it, on a shelf, a pair of black leather boots, polished but creased. A life had accumulated textures I did not remember choosing.
I put my hand on the jacket. A fragment came: me in assless leather chaps smoking a cigar. Sam smoldering in a dim room with a swing, my hand closing around his cock in a leather jockstrap - the two of us older and more confident, less apologetic about wanting what we wanted and liking what we liked. Not shocking. Not shameful. Domestic, somehow. Just another private dialect of a marriage that lasted decades now, apparently.
I let go of the jacket and dressed for work. That was the decision that felt most insane, so of course I made it. A man who wakes up fifty-five in a house he doesnât remember owning should stay home. He should sit on the floor. He should call someone. He should scream. But I put on dark slacks, a crisp shirt, a jacket that fit a thicker body, and shoes that looked expensive and felt already broken in. Sam found me in the kitchen struggling with my tie.
âYouâre going in?â he asked. He wore a robe, his beard still sleep-flattened on one side.
The way he said my name told me this was not the first time he had worried about me going to work feeling unwell.
âIâm fine,â I said.
His face tightened. The phrase had history. I could feel it land badly.
He came closer, took the tie from my hands, and fixed it with the ease of someone who had done this before. His fingers brushed my beard. His eyes moved over my face.
âYou look exhaustedâ he said.
âI didnât sleep well.â
âYou never do before board review.â
Board review. The phrase opened a door in my head and for one sick second I saw a conference table, twelve faces, a slide deck, a dispute over budget and staffing, my own older voice saying, âNo, weâre not cutting the field team to make the numbers look clean.â Then it vanished.
I swallowed. âRight,â I said.
At work, no one was surprised to see me. That was the first cruelty.
The office had become a building with glass doors and polished floors and my name on a small plaque outside a private office. Not a cubicle. Not even close. People said good morning with deference. Younger people straightened when I passed. A woman in her thirties walked beside me listing things I had apparently already approved.
âThe revised Fujiwara package is in your inbox. Finance wants your comments by noon. Carlos moved the contractor call to three. Also, Mark is still pushing back on the staffing memo.â I nodded at each sentence like I knew where to put it.
Inside my office, there were framed certificates, books, two monitors, a worn leather chair, and a photograph of Sam and me maybe in our middle forties on a hiking trail, both in sunglasses, both laughing. I looked happy in it. Older than yesterday. Younger than today.
My assistant â assistant, God â handed me coffee.
âBlack,â she said. âNo sugar.â I almost dropped it.
The morning became a performance of competence. People came in and asked questions. My mouth answered some of them without my permission. Fragments bled through when needed: contract language, personnel tensions, names attached to faces, irritation at Mark, affection for Carlos, the specific exhaustion of being the person who knew too much and was asked to decide too often.
At 11:40, during a meeting, my back spasmed. Not dramatically. Just enough. A hot little clamp low in my spine that made my hand tighten around my pen. No one noticed except a young analyst across the table, who paused mid-sentence.
âYou okay, Mr. Faracci?â
Everyone looked at me. Their concern was respectful. Professional. Old.
âIâm fine,â I said again.
By one oâclock, I was sweating through my shirt. My stomach burned from the coffee. The words on my screen blurred until I found the reading glasses beside my keyboard and put them on with humiliating relief. My phone buzzed.
Sam: You took your morning meds, right? I stared at the message until the room seemed to tilt.
A second bubble appeared. Sam: Not nagging. Just checking.
I typed: Coming home. Donât feel well.
His reply came almost instantly. Good. Come home.
Come home. The phrase should have comforted me. Instead, I nearly cried in the elevator.
At the house, Sam met me at the door before I had my key out. He had changed into soft black lounge pants and a gray T-shirt, his skin still damp like he had just showered, his beard trimmed into the face of a man who knew this day had gone badly before I said a word.
He didnât ask too much. That was his mercy. He took my jacket. He touched the side of my face. He looked into my eyes, not at the mostly white beard, not at the age, not at the shaking I was failing to hide.
âUpstairs,â he said. âShower first. Then bed.â
âIâm not a childâ I retorted.
âNo,â he said gently. âYouâre my husband.â The word hit differently today. Heavy. I let him guide me up the stairs.
The shower helped until it didnât. Warm water loosened my back and made the beard sag dark against my jaw. My body looked older under the bathroom lights than it had in the morning: soft at the middle, thick at the chest, skin textured in ways I could not unsee. I dried off slowly. My shoulder protested when I reached behind me.
In the bedroom, Sam had closed the curtains halfway. The room was dim and gold. On the dresser, I noticed the leather jacket again, hung over a chair as if he had set it there. Not staged. Familiar. A private life waiting patiently. He came up behind me and wrapped his arms around my waist. For once, my body did not panic first, instead it leaned back. That frightened me too. His beard brushed my temple. âYou scared me today.â
âI scared myselfâ I said.
I turned in his arms. He looked older than yesterday, older than the man in the bar, older than the man who had slept on my thigh in the apartment. But he was still there. Somehow, through every stolen decade, he remained the constant the universe kept handing back to me. I kissed him because I didnât know how else to ask for proof.
The tenderness of it undid me. Not hunger first, not even desire. Recognition. His hands on my back. My hand in his gray beard. The two of us moving with a patience my twenty-five-year-old self sitting in the uber with Sam after our first data would not have understood. The room seemed to narrow to breath with warmth and history.
I kissed him not to prove I was young. Not to pretend I was unchanged. I kissed him because I had lost decades and still somehow arrived in a room where this man knew how to hold me. The tenderness of it undid me.
We made love slowly, carefully, without hurry or performance. It was not our first night together - although in my head that was just a few days ago. It was not the bar or the hallway or my cheap apartment with its laundry basket and bad decisions. It was something else â something built from trust, from a memory my mind did not have but my body seemed to understand. His hand knew my back. My mouth knew his shoulder. We moved like two people who had forgiven each other many small things over a sea of time.
I grieved while I wanted him. I wanted him while I grieved. And somewhere in the middle of it, the terror loosened. Not vanished. Not solved. But softened by the impossible fact that age had not made love smaller. It had made it deeper, stranger, heavier with use.
Later, we lay tangled under the sheet naked - Samâs hand rested on my chest. My beard was still damp. His breathing warmed my shoulder.
âI feel like I missed it,â I whispered.
He stirred. âMissed what?â
âEverything in my life,â I said.
He was quiet for a long time. Then he said, âYouâre here now.â
I closed my eyes. The sentence was too simple. Too generous. But I held it anyway. For the first time since this began, I did not pray to wake up young. I prayed to wake up with Sam.
Day Five Two â Saturday Morning
I woke late to the sound of traffic. A bus exhaled somewhere below my window. A car horn complained and vanished. The refrigerator hummed in the next room with its old uneven rattle. My eyes opened.
The ceiling was cheap white paint. The old dome light was back. For several seconds, I did not breathe. Then I sat up so fast the sheet slid to my waist.
No ache in my back. No stiffness in my knee. No beard heavy on my jaw. My hands were young again â smooth, narrow, unlined, no ring. I touched my face and found only my thick dark mustache and stubble. My hair fell over my forehead in dark, stupid waves.
I was back. My room was my room. The laundry basket. Books stacked to imply a better version of me. Shirt on the floor. Samâs shirt. Sam! I turned. He was asleep beside me, young and broad and beautiful, one arm under the pillow, dark beard catching the pale morning light. The man from the bar. The man from last night. The man from the house, the office, the patio, the bed â all of him somehow folded into this sleeping "stranger."
I stared at him until my eyes burned. A dream, I thought. It had to be.
But when I stood, I reached automatically for slippers that were not there. In the kitchen, I made coffee. My own apartment seemed smaller than memory, messier, louder, temporary in a way that made my chest ache. I opened a cabinet, found two mismatched mugs, and poured his first. Black. No sugar. The same as I took it. I froze.
Behind me, Samâs voice came rough with sleep. âMorning.â
He stood in the doorway wearing only last nightâs smile and his jeans, hair mussed, face soft and uncertain in that vulnerable first-morning way. He looked nothing like the older man in my dream and exactly like him.
âYou okay?â he asked.
The question moved through me with thirty years of weight. I almost laughed. I almost cried. Instead, I handed him the mug. He took a sip, blinked, and looked at me.
I looked at his young hand around the cup. No age spots. No tremor. No history yet. Just possibility.
He smiled. Outside, Los Angeles kept going. Morning light moved across the wall. Somewhere, someone started a leaf blower. My phone lay on the counter, full of ordinary messages from an ordinary Friday that apparently had not finished with me despite going home.
Sam stepped closer. âSo,â he said. âBreakfast?â
I looked at him â really looked. At the dark beard, the strong brows, the body that time would change if we were lucky enough to keep it. I thought of gray hair and wedding rings, coffee poured before asking, hands on ties, hands on shoulders, a leather harness and swing, a house full of proof. I thought of all the ordinary mornings I had been shown and all the ones I might still get to earn.
âYeah,â I said. âBreakfast.â
He smiled like it was nothing. Like it was only the beginning. And this time, I meant to be awake for it.
