The remote wasn’t lost. I want that on the record before anything else: I knew exactly where it was, because I’m the one who put it there — under the couch, in the dust and the pennies and one lonely guitar pick — at 9:40 in the evening, on purpose.
Here’s what nobody tells you about wanting someone. Eventually you stop waiting for the moment to arrive and start building little altars to it instead.
He was coming home at eleven-something, the way he does on Thursdays. Two jobs, a man who says sorry to the rice cooker when he unplugs it mid-cycle. I’d been in his apartment since six, because we have an arrangement older than this couch: I come over, I cook, he comes home, nobody keeps score. That part is politics for me — nobody’s labor should be free, except mine, for him, on a Thursday. Red lentil dal, the good kind with the charred shallots on top, and I’d eaten mine standing at the counter at eight so his plate would still be warm whenever he walked in.
Then I had three hours to kill with my whole nervous system pointed at the door like a compass needle, and I did the remote thing.
You know the shorts. Black soccer ones, tiny, white stripes down the side, a little heart embroidered on the hem that I sewed there myself because irony is a love language. They had ridden up somewhere in the last hour and I had decided not to fix them. I was on my knees on his living room carpet with my arm jammed under the couch — “looking” for the remote — with my hair falling in my face and my hipbone out over the waistband and the shelf of my flat chest pressed to the floor through the old band tee I’d stolen from his clean pile. I’m a femboy, and I had arranged myself on that floor like an offering I didn’t have the nerve to name.
The apartment key turned at 11:47. I heard the bag hit the hook. I heard him eat standing up, the way he does when he’s beat, and I heard the pause — the plate, the note under it, my handwriting saying wash the pot later, I already did it twice — and I felt the whole shape of the evening tilt toward the doorway of the living room.
He stopped in it. I heard him stop.
“Whatcha doing down there?”
“Your remote,” I said, into the carpet. “It’s gone. It’s been gone. I’ve been looking for—” I pushed up on my knees, hair everywhere, face hot. “Forty minutes.”
“Forty minutes.” He came in. Bare feet on the carpet, work shirt untucked, and the smell of a whole day out in the world arriving before he did. He walked past me. He actually walked past me — down the hall, the bathroom door, the tap running — and I stayed right there on the floor, cheeks going red, telling myself the yes was still standing even while my chest did the thing where it folds in on itself like a paper crane. Because it was standing. Third week of knowing each other, on this exact carpet, he’d said I want you, whenever you want — and I’d been waiting for him to mean it ever since.
The tap shut off. And then — this is the part I think about when I can’t sleep — footsteps, but not past me. Back. Toward me. I kept my eyes down at the carpet, at the pennies, at his toes arriving in my field of view, because I’m very brave in theory.
He crouched. I heard him reach under the couch, one easy sweep of the arm, way past where I had let my own hand wander — and then he sat back on his heels next to me and held up the remote between two fingers.
It made a small, incriminating clatter.
“You didn’t look,” he said.
“I didn’t want to find it.”
My heart was doing something embarrassing, and I could feel the warmth of him down my whole side. His hand was still holding the remote, knuckles loose. His ears had gone pink. Grown man and his ears were pink because I was on his knees in soccer shorts, and he’d been thinking about this the same way I had.
He put the remote down on the couch cushion above us. Untouched.
“Stay down there,” he said.
I stayed. I put my cheek against his knee for maybe ten seconds, which is the longest I have ever been patient about anything, and then I turned my face and put my mouth on the inside of his thigh through his work pants.
His hand came down and sank into my hair like he’d been waiting.
“Yeah,” he said, rough. “Like that.”
He laughed, this broken little huff, and said “yeah. yes. please,” and the please is the part that got me, honestly. He sat back against the front of the couch, right there on the floor with me, and I crawled between his knees and undid his belt with my hands kind of shaking which was humiliating because I’d been planning this since 9:40.
He was already hard. He’d been hard, I figured, since the doorway. I got his pants and his boxers down to his thighs and he lifted his hips to help and his cock came out heavy and flushed and I just looked at it for a second, which made him put his forearm over his eyes.
“stop looking at it”
“no. I waited three hours.”
I licked him from the base up, slow, flat tongue, and he said fuck into his own arm. He tasted like salt and work and the soap from the bathroom where he’d washed his hands and not anything else, which is so him. I took the head in my mouth and sucked, just that, just the head, until his thighs started to shake on either side of me, and then I took more.
He got his hand back in my hair. That’s the thing I’d built the whole altar for, if I’m honest. Not the blowjob, the hand. He held me there, not pushing, just holding on like I was the thing keeping him on the floor, and every time I went down further his fingers curled tighter and he made this sound in his chest.
“You’re so good,” he kept saying. “baby you’re so — you’re so good at that, Luna, fuck—”
I went down till I gagged. Came up, spit everywhere, chin wet, and went back down because he’d made a noise when I gagged that I wanted to hear again. The remote was on the cushion right next to his head. The dal was going cold. My knees were on the carpet in the exact spot I’d been “looking” for forty minutes and there was a penny stuck to one of them, I found it later.
“I’m close,” he said, and tugged my hair, polite, so him. “Luna. I’m gonna—”
I didn’t move. I just looked up at him with my mouth full and he looked down at me and that was it, he came with his head thrown back against the couch cushion and his hand fisted in my hair, and I swallowed and kept him in my mouth soft and slow till he flinched.
I sat back on my heels. Wiped my mouth with the hem of his band tee. My shorts were — look, the soccer shorts do not hide anything, and I’d been hard in them since the key turned, and there was a wet spot on the front that I was not going to address.
He addressed it.
He opened his eyes, saw it, and reached for me. Pulled me up off my knees into his lap so I was straddling him on the floor with my back against the coffee table and he slid his hand right up the leg of those tiny shorts like he’d been wanting to do it for three Thursdays.
“oh my god,” I said. “you don’t have to—”
“Shut up,” he said, really soft, and wrapped his hand around me.
I’m not proud of how fast it went. He jerked me slow at first, watching my face, thumb rubbing the head every upstroke, and I grabbed his shoulders and put my forehead on his and just shook. He kissed me. He could taste himself on me and he didn’t care, he kissed me deeper, and his hand got faster, and he said into my mouth “you hid the remote,” like it was the dirtiest thing anyone had ever said, and I came all over his fist and the inside of my own shorts with a sound I’m glad his neighbors were asleep for.
We sat there. Me in his lap, sticky, his shirt half off, his belt open, both of us breathing like we’d run up the stairs.
“Dal’s cold,” I said into his neck.
“I’ll microwave it.”
“you will NOT microwave the dal”
He laughed so hard I bounced.
The TV never came on that night. It didn’t come on the next Thursday either.
The remote still lives under the couch. He knows that. I know he knows. Some things you just leave where you put them, on purpose.
