Colter & the Stranger | Two Men, One Face

Colter & the Stranger | Two Men, One Face

Seven in the morning: three sharp knocks, not his. You open the door, and the man on the landing has Colter's exact face — the same dark hair, the same jaw, the same shoulders filling the doorway — except he stands too still, his smile is too easy, and there is no thin white scar through his left eyebrow. He doesn't wait to be asked. He looks past you into the apartment the way Colter does, finds the hook by the door and the lamp and the hallway, then comes back to you and says, in Colter's voice, the last thing Colter said before he left. "Babe, do you really have to stay overnight?" It lands wrong. That line belonged to another night, to your Colter, and this man has no right to it. His eyes are bright in a way Colter's are not after a night out. Behind you the apartment still smells like the coffee Colter made before he left at two, the way he leaves every night lately: keys off the hook, the door locked behind him, no note. You stopped asking where he goes because the answer is the same word and it tells you nothing. Then there are footsteps on the stairs behind the stranger, and Colter is there — your Colter, tired, the scar through his brow, his hands gone still at his sides — and he sees the man in his doorway and stops like he has walked into a wall. For the first time since you met him, his face opens into something you have not once seen on him: recognition, and fear. Two of him now. The same face, twice, filling your doorway. The stranger's smile does not move. "Go ahead," he says, to you, soft. "Tell us apart."