Inventory of Us

Counting the moments before goodbye

The last customer left at ten till nine. I watched him from the register, a guy in a faded Northwestern hoodie who’d spent forty minutes flipping through the same clearance rack of graphic novels, picking one up, putting it back, picking up another. He bought nothing. Just nodded at me on his way out, and the bell above the door chimed once, and then it was just the hum of the fluorescents and the smell of old paper and the end of something I didn’t want to name.

I leaned against the counter and let my head fall back. My neck cracked. My feet ached in a way that had become familiar over the last three months, a dull throb that started around hour six and settled into something permanent by closing. The store felt hollowed out. Half the shelves were bare, stripped of textbooks for the fall rush that hadn’t happened yet. End-of-season clearance signs hung crooked from the ceiling, their red letters faded. SUMMER SALE. EVERYTHING MUST GO. Even the air felt tired, thick with dust and the ghost of air conditioning that had been struggling all August.

I checked my phone. 8:52. Eight minutes till we could lock up.

From somewhere in the back, I heard a box thud against concrete. Then a string of muttered curses, low and familiar.

I smiled before I could stop myself.

Marcus was back there doing inventory, had been back there for the last two hours, counting boxes of engineering textbooks and art supplies and whatever else had been gathering dust in the stockroom since May. He’d volunteered for it. Said he wanted to finish the job before he left. Said it would drive him crazy if he didn’t close out the summer properly.

He didn’t say *leave* like it meant something. He said it like it was just a word, a fact, a thing that was happening. He was leaving. He was going to Seattle for a fall internship at some architecture firm. He was going to be gone before the leaves turned, and I was going to be here, still ringing up freshmen who didn’t know where the biology section was, still clocking in at noon and clocking out at nine, still breathing the same dusty air.

I pushed off the counter and walked toward the back.

The stockroom was a rectangle of fluorescent misery. Gray concrete floor, gray metal shelves, a single bulb overhead that buzzed like a trapped fly. Boxes were stacked everywhere, some open, some sealed, some half-collapsed from weight. Marcus stood at the far end, his back to me, a clipboard in one hand and a box cutter in the other. He was wearing a faded gray t-shirt that had a hole near the collar, and his jeans were dusted with something white, probably cardboard particles. His hair was shorter than it’d been in June. He’d gotten it cut two weeks ago, and I’d noticed immediately, and I’d said nothing.

“You talking to yourself back here?” I said.

He turned. His face was half in shadow, half in that ugly fluorescent light, and he looked tired in a way that made something twist in my chest. Not bad tired. Just tired. The kind of tired that comes from a summer of doing the same thing every day, of waking up and going through the motions, of pretending you’re fine when you’re not sure what you are.

“Just counting boxes,” he said. “Talking to them helps them feel seen.”

“You’re a good man.”

“I try.”

He smiled, and it was the same smile he’d been giving me all summer. Easy. Warm. A little too long. A smile that said *I see you* without saying anything at all.

I leaned against the doorframe and crossed my arms. “Anyone else clock out?”

“Yeah. Sarah left at eight. Said she had a thing.”

“She always has a thing.”

“She does. I think the thing is she hates it here.”

“Can’t blame her.”

Marcus looked at me for a second, then looked back at his clipboard. He made a mark. “You hate it here?”

I thought about it. The answer should have been yes. The job was boring. The pay was shit. The air conditioning barely worked, and the manager, a guy named Doug who smelled like old coffee and regret, spent most of his shifts in the office watching sports highlights on his phone. There was no reason to like this place. No reason to stay.

But I’d stayed.

I’d stayed all summer, even when I could have quit. Even when a better offer came along, a temp gig at a law firm that paid twice as much. I’d said no. I’d said I was busy. I’d said I had plans.

The plans were standing six feet away from me, cutting open a box of mechanical pencils.

“It’s fine,” I said.

Marcus raised an eyebrow. “Fine?”

“Fine.”

“That’s the most enthusiastic endorsement I’ve heard all summer.”

I shrugged. “What can I say. I’m a man of passion.”

He laughed. It was a low sound, warm, the kind of laugh that made you want to hear it again. He turned back to the box and slit the tape down the middle, then pulled the flaps open. “You think Doug’s gonna come back tonight?”

“Doubt it. He said to lock up behind us.”

“So it’s just us?”

“Just us.”

The words hung in the air. I felt them settle, felt the weight of them, the shape. Just us. Alone in a stockroom at the end of summer, with nothing but cardboard dust and fluorescent light and the quiet hum of a building that had already given up on the season.

Marcus didn’t say anything. He just kept working, pulling pencils out of the box, counting them, marking them down. His hands moved with the kind of efficiency that came from repetition. He’d done this a hundred times. A thousand. He knew the weight of a box of pencils, the way they shifted when you lifted them, the sound they made when you set them down.

I watched him. I didn’t mean to. But I did.

I watched the way his shoulders moved under his shirt. The way his jaw tightened when he concentrated. The way his fingers curled around the box cutter, confident and sure. I’d been watching him all summer. Not in a creepy way. Not in a way that felt like stalking. Just in a way that felt like noticing. Like paying attention. Like I couldn’t help it.

He was tall. Not towering, but tall enough that I had to look up when we stood close. His skin was dark brown, the color of coffee with a splash of cream, and his eyes were the kind of brown that looked almost black in low light. He had a scar above his left eyebrow, a thin white line from some childhood accident he’d never explained. I’d wanted to ask about it a dozen times. I never did.

“You’re staring,” he said, without looking up.

I felt my face go hot. “I’m not.”

“You are.”

“I’m observing.”

“Observing.”

“Professionally.”

He looked up then, and his eyes met mine, and there it was. That beat. That pause. That moment where the air between us got thick and heavy and neither of us knew what to do with it.

He smiled. “You’re a terrible observer.”

“I’m great at it.”

“You’ve been standing in the same spot for three minutes.”

“I’m taking a break.”

“Your break is watching me count pencils.”

“It’s a good show.”

He shook his head, but he was still smiling. He turned back to the box, and I let myself breathe.

This was the thing about working with Marcus. This was the thing that had made the summer bearable, and also the thing that had made it unbearable. We did this dance every day. We traded jokes. We brushed hands when we passed each other in the aisles. We held eye contact a beat too long and then acted like it didn’t mean anything. We pretended we were just coworkers, just two guys who happened to work the same shift, just friends.

But friends didn’t look at each other the way Marcus looked at me.

And friends didn’t feel the way I felt when he looked back.

I pushed off the doorframe and walked into the stockroom. The air was warmer here, stale, thick with the smell of cardboard and packing tape and something else, something faint and clean that I’d come to associate with Marcus. Laundry detergent, maybe. Or soap. Something that made me want to lean in closer.

I stopped a few feet away from him. “How much more do you have?”

He glanced at his clipboard. “About half the room. Maybe an hour.”

“Doug said we could leave whenever.”

“I know.”

“You don’t have to finish tonight.”

He looked at me. His expression was hard to read, caught somewhere between tired and something else. Something softer. “I want to.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Because I started it. And I don’t like leaving things unfinished.”

The words landed hard. I felt them in my chest, a dull ache that I tried to ignore. Leaving things unfinished. That was what this summer was. That was what we were. An unfinished sentence. A half-written story. Something that had started but never quite found its way to the end.

I didn’t say anything. I just stood there, watching him, and he watched me back, and the silence stretched out between us like a rubber band, thin and tight and ready to snap.

“You could help,” he said.

“Help?”

“With inventory. If you’re just gonna stand there.”

“I’m not just standing there. I’m supervising.”

“Supervising.”

“It’s a management skill.”

He laughed again, and the sound of it broke the tension, just a little. He tossed me a pair of gloves from a nearby shelf. They hit my chest and fell to the floor.

“Put those on,” he said. “And grab a clipboard.”

I bent down and picked up the gloves. They were the cheap kind, thin blue plastic that would rip after ten minutes. I pulled them on and found a clipboard hanging from a hook near the door. “What am I counting?”

“Overstock. The shelves against the wall. Art supplies, mostly. Markers, paints, sketchbooks. Should be labeled.”

“And if they’re not?”

“Then use your judgment.”

“My judgment is bad.”

“I know. That’s why I’m supervising you.”

I snorted. “You’re supervising me?”

“Someone has to.”

I walked to the far wall, where the shelves were stacked with boxes marked in black Sharpie. WATERCOLOR SETS. CHARCOAL PENCILS. SKETCHBOOKS, 9X12. I pulled down a box of watercolor sets and set it on the floor. The tape was old, peeling at the edges. I cut it open with a box cutter I found on the shelf, and inside were rows of small plastic palettes, each one filled with dried cakes of color.

I started counting. Twenty-four sets. I wrote it down.

The work was mindless. That was the point. It gave me something to do with my hands while my brain ran in circles. I counted boxes. I marked numbers. I listened to the sound of Marcus moving around the room, the scrape of his shoes on concrete, the rustle of cardboard, the occasional muttered curse when a box wouldn’t open.

We worked in silence for a while. It wasn’t uncomfortable. It was the kind of silence that came from knowing someone, from being comfortable enough to not need words. We’d had a lot of silences like that this summer. Silences in the break room, drinking bad coffee. Silences in the aisles, restocking shelves. Silences at the register, waiting for customers who never came.

But this silence felt different. Heavier. Like it was holding something back.

I finished the watercolor sets and moved on to the charcoal pencils. There were twelve boxes, each one containing thirty-six pencils. I wrote it down. Then I moved to the sketchbooks. Nine by twelve. Wire-bound. Sixty pages each. Eighteen boxes, twelve per box.

I was halfway through the sketchbooks when Marcus spoke.

“What are you doing after this?”

I looked up. He was standing a few feet away, his clipboard tucked under his arm. His face was hard to read in the dim light.

“After this?” I said. “Going home. Sleeping. Waking up tomorrow and doing it all over again.”

“No plans?”

“No plans.”

He nodded. He didn’t say anything else. He just stood there, looking at me, and I felt that familiar pull, that gravitational tug that had been there all summer. The thing that made me want to close the distance between us. The thing that made me want to reach out and touch him, just to see what would happen.

I didn’t.

I looked back down at the sketchbooks and kept counting.

“What about you?” I said.

“What about me?”

“After this. After inventory. After the summer ends.”

The words came out sharper than I meant them to. I didn’t look up. I kept my eyes on the boxes, on the numbers, on anything that wasn’t his face.

He was quiet for a moment. Then: “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“I mean, I know the logistics. I know I’m flying out Sunday. I know I have a place lined up. I know the internship starts Monday. But after that? I don’t know.”

“That’s a lot of not knowing.”

“Yeah.” He let out a breath. “It is.”

I finished the sketchbooks and wrote down the final number. Eighteen boxes. Two hundred sixteen sketchbooks. All of them blank. All of them waiting for someone to fill them.

I closed the box and stood up. My knees cracked. My back ached. I’d been hunched over for too long.

Marcus was still standing there. He hadn’t moved.

“You okay?” I said.

“Yeah. Just thinking.”

“About what?”

He looked at me. His eyes were dark, unreadable. “About how weird it is. Being here. Knowing it’s the last time.”

“The last time?”

“Last shift. Last night. Last time I’ll stand in this room and count boxes of shit nobody’s gonna buy.”

“You don’t know that. Someone might buy those charcoal pencils.”

“No one’s buying the charcoal pencils.”

“You’re probably right.”

He laughed, but it was a sad laugh. The kind that didn’t have any joy in it. He looked around the stockroom, at the boxes, at the shelves, at the bare concrete walls. “I’ve been here four years. Four summers. I’ve counted more boxes than I can remember. And now it’s just. Over.”

“That’s how summers work.”

“I know.” He looked at me. “Doesn’t make it easier.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. So I said nothing. I just stood there, holding my clipboard, feeling the weight of the moment settle around us.

The fluorescent light buzzed. The air conditioner hummed. Somewhere outside, a car drove past, its headlights flashing through the small window near the ceiling.

Marcus took a step closer.

Then another.

He stopped about a foot away from me. Close enough that I could see the faint stubble on his jaw, the way his shirt collar was slightly frayed, the tiny mole just below his left ear. Close enough that I could smell him. That clean scent I’d noticed before. Soap. Laundry detergent. Something warm underneath.

“Can I tell you something?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“I’ve been thinking about this all summer.”

“About what?”

“About being alone with you. At the end of the night. When everyone else is gone.”

My heart was beating too fast. I could feel it in my throat, in my chest, in the tips of my fingers. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” He looked down at the floor, then back up at me. “I don’t know what it means. I don’t know what I’m trying to say. But I’ve been thinking about it. A lot.”

I swallowed. My mouth was dry. “I’ve been thinking about it too.”

“You have?”

“Yeah.”

He looked at me for a long moment. His eyes searched mine, like he was looking for something. A sign. A signal. A reason to move forward or a reason to stop.

I gave him the only thing I could.

I didn’t move away.

He stepped closer. His hand came up, slow, hesitant, and his fingers brushed against my arm. Light. Barely there. A question more than a touch.

I didn’t pull back.

His hand settled on my shoulder. Warm. Solid. Real. He looked at me, and I looked at him, and the air between us was thick with everything we hadn’t said.

“This is crazy,” he said.

“I know.”

“I’m leaving in five days.”

“I know.”

“I don’t know what happens after.”

“I know.”

He leaned in. His forehead touched mine. His breath was warm on my lips. “Tell me to stop.”

I didn’t.

I couldn’t.

I reached up and put my hand on his chest. I felt his heartbeat under my palm, fast and steady. I felt the warmth of his skin through his shirt. I felt the weight of the moment, the gravity of it, the way it pulled us together like we were falling.

“I don’t want you to stop,” I said.

He kissed me.

It was soft at first. Tentative. Like he was testing, like he was making sure. His lips were warm and dry, and they moved against mine with a slowness that felt deliberate. Like he wanted to remember this. Like he wanted to make it last.

I kissed him back. My hand slid up his chest to his neck, and I pulled him closer, and the kiss deepened. It wasn’t careful anymore. It was hungry. It was the end of summer and the start of something else, and it tasted like dust and sweat and the last few minutes of a season that was already over.

He pushed me back against the shelf. The metal rattled. A box fell somewhere, but neither of us cared. His hands were on my waist, pulling me toward him, and my hands were in his hair, and his mouth was on my neck, and I was lost.

“I’ve wanted to do that,” he said, his voice low, his breath hot against my skin. “All summer. I’ve wanted to do that since June.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I was scared.”

“Of what?”

He pulled back. Just enough to look at me. His eyes were dark, his lips were red, and he looked like he was standing on the edge of something.

“Of this,” he said. “Of what it means. Of what happens when I leave.”

I put my hand on his face. I felt the warmth of his skin, the roughness of his jaw. “Then don’t think about it.”

“How do I not think about it?”

“Just for tonight. Just for now. Don’t think about it.”

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he nodded.

He kissed me again. Harder this time. More certain. His hands found the hem of my shirt, and his fingers brushed against my skin, and I shivered.

The stockroom was cold. The light was ugly. The air smelled like cardboard and dust and the end of something.

But his hands were warm. His mouth was warm. And for the first time all summer, I didn’t feel like I was waiting for something to end.

I felt like I was starting something.

He pulled my shirt up, and I lifted my arms, and it came off. The air hit my skin, cold and sharp. I shivered again. He ran his hands down my chest, slow, deliberate, like he was memorizing the shape of me.

“You’re beautiful,” he said.

I laughed. It came out shaky. “I’m covered in cardboard dust.”

“I don’t care.”

He kissed my collarbone. My chest. My stomach. Each kiss was a question, and I answered by pulling him closer.

We sank to the floor. The concrete was cold and hard beneath me, but I didn’t care. He was on top of me, his weight pressing me down, and his mouth was on mine, and his hands were everywhere, and I was drowning.

I wanted to remember this. Every second. Every touch. The way his breath caught when I bit his lip. The way his hips pressed against mine. The way he said my name, low and desperate, like it was the only word that mattered.

His hands were rough on my hips, pulling me against the hard ridge of his cock straining against his jeans. The concrete floor was cold against my bare skin, but all I could feel was the heat radiating from him. Marcus. He towered over me, his dark skin a stark, beautiful contrast to the pale fluorescent lighting. His eyes, almost black in the dimness, bored into mine.

“Please,” I breathed, not even sure what I was begging for. Everything. All of him.

A low chuckle rumbled in his chest. “Eager, aren’t you?” He leaned down, his voice a whisper against my ear. “Get on your knees.”

My body obeyed before my mind caught up. I sank to the hard floor, the impact jolting through my bones. My hands went to his belt, my fingers fumbling with the buckle. His gaze was heavy on me, intense and unwavering. I finally got his pants open, and the thick, heavy weight of his cock sprang free, slapping against his stomach. He wasn’t even fully hard yet, and he was already immense. A perfect, dark curve of flesh, heavy in my hand, his balls drawn up tight beneath.