The game store stayed open until two a.m. for the midnight release, which meant the usual suspects all showed up: two dozen bleary-eyed developers, three cosplayers, and the world’s saddest pizza. Jamie had worn his favorite pleated skirt and fishnets, because the launch of his own indie game felt like the one night he could show up as exactly himself.
“Hey — you’re the one who made Static Bloom, right?”
Jamie turned. The speaker was tall and soft-spoken, with paint-stained fingers and a badge that said JUNE. Their face went pink the moment Jamie looked at them.
“Guilty,” Jamie said. “You played it?”
“I’ve played it four times.” June fidgeted with a pen. “The part where the lighthouse recognizes her — I cried. Twice.”
Jamie forgot the pizza, the launch numbers, and the little speech he’d been rehearsing all night about why the lighthouse scene mattered. Nobody had ever told him it landed exactly where he’d aimed it.
June bought him a slice of the sad pizza and made it funny. Jamie explained why he’d picked that particular pink for the UI, and June listened like it mattered. When the lights went down for the trailer reel they ended up sharing a folding chair, thighs pressed together, whispering commentary. Halfway through, June’s hand landed on Jamie’s knee, right where the fishnet started, and stayed there. Jamie stopped hearing the trailers.
“You’re really pretty,” June said in the dark, like they were confessing something shameful and proud at the same time.
“You think so?”
“I think so.” June’s thumb moved, once, over the fishnet. “Can I walk you home?”
They talked the whole way: childhoods, terrible first kisses, the games they wanted to make before forty. Outside Jamie’s building June stopped, suddenly shy.
“Can I kiss you? Only if you want to.”
“Yes,” Jamie said. “I want to.”
The kiss was soft and a little clumsy and tasted like cheap soda and possibility. Then it wasn’t soft. June made a small, surprised noise and walked Jamie backward until his shoulders hit the door of the building, one hand on his waist and one in his hair, and Jamie grabbed the front of their jacket and held on.
“Okay,” Jamie said, breathless, when they came up for air. “So. You could come up and we could play Static Bloom. I’ll let you win.”
“You made the game. You’ll absolutely crush me.”
“I wasn’t going to play the game,” Jamie said.
June looked at him for one long second and then laughed, bright and helpless. “Yeah. Okay. Yes.”
APARTMENT
Jamie’s apartment was one room and a dev rig with three monitors, all still showing the launch dashboard: 1,104 copies sold, a review score ticking up. June looked at the numbers and then at Jamie and said, “Holy shit, congratulations,” and Jamie kissed them so they’d stop looking at the numbers.
They ended up on the bed with the monitors still glowing. June pushed the pleated skirt up slowly, like unwrapping something, and then stopped with their hands on Jamie’s thighs.
“Look at you,” June said. “In that skirt. God.”
“Now tell me what you like.”
Nobody had ever asked him that first. Jamie’s face went hot. “I like — this. Being looked at. Your mouth. I really want your mouth.”
“Okay,” June said, and slid down the bed.
They kissed the inside of his knee through the fishnet, then higher, then higher, taking their time, and Jamie lay there with his skirt around his waist and his heart going like a drum fill. When June hooked their fingers in his underwear and pulled it down, his cock was already hard and wet at the tip, and June looked at it and then up at him with an expression Jamie was going to think about for the rest of his life.
“Pretty,” they said again, and got their mouth around him.
Jamie made a noise he didn’t know he made. June went slow and warm and sloppy, one hand around the base of him, the other spread across his hip under the skirt holding him down when he tried to push up into it. They pulled off to lick him from the base all the way up, and then they took him deep again, and Jamie had to put his forearm over his face.
“No,” June said, pulling his arm away. “I want to see.”
So he let them see. Let them see him squirm and swear and say please to the ceiling. When June’s slick fingers slid between his legs and pressed against his hole, a question without words, Jamie spread his knees wider and said “yes, yes, there’s lube in the drawer, yes,” and June laughed against his thigh and got the lube.
One finger, then two, curling slow while their mouth stayed on his cock, and Jamie lost the ability to form whole words. It was so much and so gentle at the same time. June kept glancing up to check his face, and every time Jamie nodded they gave him a little more, until he was rocking down on their fingers and up into their mouth with the skirt bunched in his fists.
“I’m gonna—June, I’m—”
June hummed and stayed right there.
He came hard, his whole body bowing off the mattress, June’s fingers pressed deep and their mouth taking all of it, swallowing, working him through it slow until he was twitching and laughing and pushing at their head.
June crawled back up and lay next to him with their chin on his shoulder, lips wet, looking extremely pleased with themselves.
“You were right,” Jamie said, when he could talk. “I would absolutely crush you at the game.”
“I know.” June kissed his jaw. “I’ll take the rematch.”
Jamie rolled toward them and slid a hand under their shirt and said, “Your turn. Tell me what you like.”
June went pink all over again. Then they looked down at the skirt, still bunched at Jamie’s waist, and said, “Can I fuck you in it?”
“In the skirt?”
“You wore it for me to see.”
That was not accurate, and it was completely true.
There was lube in the drawer beside the dev rig, because Jamie was twenty-eight and had learned things about himself at three in the morning. He got it out and handed it over and lay back down, and June pushed the skirt back up with both hands, and took their time about the rest.
It hurt the good way. Jamie had his cheek on the duvet and the fishnet had gone down around one ankle and the skirt was still on, still there, and June’s hand was flat between his shoulder blades holding him down, and every time Jamie pushed back against it June said something quiet he couldn’t parse and pushed back harder. Jamie got a hand back and found June’s hip and pulled, and June made a sound and gave him more of it, and the pleats of the skirt were bunched in June’s fist. The monitors were still glowing. He could see the review score out of the corner of one eye, ticking up, and then he stopped being able to read.
“Okay?” June said, breathless, checking.
“Don’t stop checking,” Jamie said, and June laughed and did not stop. They got a hand in Jamie’s hair and pulled his head up off the duvet and fucked him harder, and Jamie heard himself make a noise he had never made in his own apartment, and then he got a hand underneath himself and came again, into his own fist, into the sheets, with his face in the duvet and the skirt rucked up over the small of his back and the fishnet cutting into his ankle.
Afterward they lay side by side on top of the wreck of the duvet, and Jamie’s thighs were wet and shaking, and he could feel lube cooling on his ass, and he had a handprint on his hip that he pressed with two fingers just to feel it hurt.
June was looking at the skirt.
“I ruined it,” Jamie said.
“You made it,” June said, and hooked one finger in the waistband and let it snap back against his hip.
They were both still wearing their socks. This struck Jamie, at some point around four, as the funniest thing that had ever happened to anyone.
FIVE A.M.
June left around five with Jamie’s launch-party lanyard still around their neck and the skirt, which had gone into a tote bag with considerable ceremony.
Jamie slept until noon in the fishnets and one sock and the launch lanyard, woke up with a bruise the shape of a thumb on his hip and a text on his phone.
JUNE: fifth playthrough tomorrow?
He rolled over, and everything below his waist informed him at length that he had been fucked, and he read the message twice before he typed back: Only if you let me watch you cry at the lighthouse again.
