The invite was on the fridge for nine days before I asked about it.
It wasn’t really an invite. It was a sheet of printer paper somebody in his office had made in Canva, with a clip-art beer and the words Q3 IS DONE (FINALLY) 🍻 Thursday 6pm @ Hoptown Brewing — bring your +1!! He’d brought it home folded in his laptop bag and stuck it to the fridge under the magnet shaped like a taco, and he’d never mentioned it, and I’d looked at it every morning while I made his coffee.
Bring your +1!!
Two exclamation points. Somebody named Brianna in HR had typed those. I’d seen her in the background of his Zoom calls. She has a ring light and a lot of opinions about the Chiefs.
On the ninth day, Wednesday, I was sitting on the counter while he ate cereal standing up at 6:40 in the morning, which he does, like a raccoon, and I said:
“Can I come to the work thing?”
He stopped chewing.
I watched him do the math. I’ve been watching him do the math since the night we met: the careful man running the numbers, what it costs, who sees, what they’ll say, what it means that he wants it. He’s never once been confused about wanting me. He’s just been careful, with his whole body, about where.
“You want to come,” he said.
“I want to be your plus-one,” I said. “It’s on the fridge. It says bring your plus-one with two exclamation points. I’m a plus-one. I’m your only plus-one. I’m available Thursday.”
“Luna.”
“I want to be your plus-one,” I said again, meeting his eyes. “I’m asking out loud. But you get to pick.”
He put his bowl in the sink. He rinsed it, which he doesn’t usually do. He stood with his back to me and his hands on the edge of the sink for a while.
“What would you wear,” he said.
That was a yes. I slid off the counter and went to the bedroom and didn’t say anything, because you don’t make a careful man watch you celebrate.
Thursday
I spent Thursday on it.
Not on looking like a girl. That’s the thing people get wrong. I’m not trying to pass at his office. I’m trying to look like exactly what I am, which is his, and good at it.
Black jeans that fit like I’d been poured. A cream sweater that falls off one shoulder, not all the way, just enough that you’d notice the collarbone. My little gold hoops. Liner, thin. Lip oil, not lipstick. I did my nails the night before in a pink so pale it’s almost just clean. I wore his watch. It’s too big and it slides down to the bone of my wrist, and I pushed it up about thirty times on the drive and he watched me do it every time.
He picked me up from the apartment even though we live in the apartment, because he’d gone in to the office and I’d stayed home, and when he pulled into the lot and saw me come down the stairs, he didn’t get out. He just sat in the truck with both hands on the wheel.
I got in. He didn’t start the engine.
“Hi,” I said.
He looked at me. My face, the hoops, the shoulder, the watch. He looked for a long time.
“You’re going to kill me,” he said.
“That’s not a no.”
“It’s not a no.”
Hoptown Brewing · 6:12 pm
Hoptown Brewing is in an old tire warehouse off the highway with roll-up garage doors and picnic tables and a food truck that does Korean tacos. I’d looked it up. I’d looked at every picture on Google Maps, including one of the men’s bathroom, which has a chalkboard wall, which I’d prepared an opinion about.
He parked at the far end of the gravel lot, under a light that wasn’t working. It was 6:12. Through the windshield I could see the garage doors rolled up and the string lights on and people from his office standing around picnic tables with plastic cups, lit up gold, the way people look at a party when you’re outside of it.
He turned the truck off.
“I don’t know how to do this,” he said.
“Walk in. Get a beer. Say this is Luna. Eat a taco.”
“I mean—” He rubbed his face with both hands. “Darren’s going to be there. Darren’s the one who does the fantasy league. He’s—he’s fine. He’s a nice guy. He just says stuff.”
“Okay.”
“And Brianna’s going to ask how we met.”
“We met at a party,” I said. “We did. It’s true.”
“She’s going to want the whole—”
“Then you’ll tell her the whole.” I reached over and put my hand on his thigh. I felt him go still under it. “Or you’ll tell her some. Or you’ll say at a party and eat your taco. You get to pick. You always get to pick.”
He looked at my hand.
The pale pink nails on his dark work pants. His watch sliding down over my knuckles.
“Say when,” I said softly, “if you want me to take my hand back.”
He put his hand over mine and moved it. Up. Slow. Into his lap where he was already hard, straining against the zipper, and he let out a breath through his nose like he’d been holding it since Wednesday morning.
“We’re in the parking lot,” he said.
“The light’s out,” I said. “I checked.”
“You checked.”
“I checked on Google Maps. There’s a Street View from April. The light’s been out since April.”
He laughed, helplessly, with his head back against the seat, and his hand stayed on top of mine, pressing, and I felt him get harder under both our hands at the exact same time as the laugh.
The laugh and the want came together, like the careful part of him and the other part had finally started riding in the same car.
I undid his belt with one hand. He lifted his hips off the seat to help me, which he has never once done in his life without being asked, and I got his work pants and his boxers down far enough and his cock came free, hard enough to lift off his stomach. It was thick through the shaft and heavy in my hand, the head flushed darker than the rest and already glossy at the slit, a vein standing along the underside. He smelled like clean cotton, warm skin, and the last hour of a workday, all of it trapped in the cab with us sixty yards from Brianna from HR.
“Luna,” he said. Warning, or begging. Both.
I leaned across the console. His watch slid down my wrist and knocked against the steering column. I closed my lips around the head of his cock.
He grabbed the wheel so hard it creaked.
I’d planned to be slow about it. I’d planned a lot of things. But he tasted like him, like salt and warm skin at the end of a long day, and he was breathing like he’d been underwater, and the sound he made when I took his cock all the way down was the best sound I’d heard since the dryer, so I stopped planning. I sucked him the way I know he likes, deep and wet and unhurried at the base, tight at the head, my tongue working the spot underneath that makes his thighs jump. His free hand came into my hair. Not pushing. Holding. His thumb moved behind my ear.
After a minute I pulled off and kept one hand wrapped around his wet cock, stroking him slow while I looked up at him.
“Look at me,” I said.
He did. His fingers tightened in my hair.
“Good girl,” he said, so quietly I almost thought I’d imagined it. Then, rougher: “Keep going.”
I did.
“They’re right there,” he said, hoarse. “Luna, they’re—there’s people—”
I pulled off long enough to look up at him. My lip oil was everywhere. “You can see them,” I said. “They can’t see you. Keep watching.”
He watched. I felt him watching, his eyes going back and forth, from me in his lap to the golden garage door and the cornhole game and back. His hand tightened in my hair each time he looked at the party, like my mouth was the thing keeping him in the truck.
Headlights came across the gravel. Someone parking three rows over. The light swept through the cab, over his face and over the back of my head bent down in his lap, and he said my name again, sharp, and his whole body went rigid.
I didn’t stop. I went deeper. My jaw burned and my eyes watered; when the head pushed too far I gagged and it echoed in the truck and he made a sound like I’d hurt him, but he pulled me back down by the hair. He didn’t let me come up for air until he needed to move, and when I did my eyes were streaming and his cock was shining with my spit.
He didn’t say anything. He just came, suddenly, with his head knocked back against the headrest and his hand fisted in my hair and his other hand white on the wheel, his cock pulsing hot and heavy on my tongue, and I swallowed all of it and kept him in my mouth, gentle, until he was shaking and pushing at my shoulder, laughing without any breath behind it.
After, I pulled the visor down and fixed my lip oil in the little mirror. My hair was a mess on one side where his hand had been. I left it.
He sat with his head back against the seat, looking at the ceiling of the truck, breathing.
“You okay?” I said.
“No,” he said. Then: “Yes. Yeah. Give me a minute.”
I gave him a minute. I watched the party through the windshield. Someone had started a game of cornhole. A woman in a Chiefs jersey, who could only be Brianna, was laughing at something with her whole body.
He zipped up. He looked at me.
“Your hair,” he said.
“I know.”
“Everyone’s going to—”
“I know,” I said. “Are you going to tell me to fix it?”
He reached over and pushed it back off my face with two fingers, the way you’d move a curtain. He didn’t fix it. He just looked at it.
“No,” he said.
Hoptown Brewing
We walked across the gravel. He didn’t hold my hand. I didn’t ask him to. That’s not what tonight was, and I wasn’t going to be greedy about the one thing he’d already said yes to. I walked next to him with my shoulder almost touching his arm and my heart going like the dryer does on the last cycle.
The girl at the door checked IDs. She stamped the back of my hand with a red UNDER 21 in a little box, and I held it up and showed him like a prize, and he laughed, and some of the stiffness went out of his back.
The garage door was rolled up and the string lights were warm and there were maybe thirty people, and at least ten of them turned and looked at us when we walked into the light. I felt him feel it. His back went straight.
Darren got there first. Big guy, goatee, holding two beers, one of which he immediately put in my boyfriend’s hand.
“There he is! Q3, baby!” Darren looked at me. His face did a very fast, very honest thing: surprise, recalculation, and then a sort of shrug, like he’d decided this was above his pay grade. “And who’s this?”
I waited. I wanted him to choose to claim me out loud.
“This is Luna,” he said. “She lives with me.”
That’s all it took. He said it to Darren in a normal voice, the voice he uses to order at Chipotle, and then he drank his beer.
“Luna! Hey!” said Darren, and shook my hand. His hand was wet from the cup. “You want a beer? They got a sour that tastes like a Warhead.”
I held up the back of my hand. UNDER 21, in red.
“Oh, shit, okay,” Darren said, delighted. “They do a house root beer. It’s actually insane. I’ll get you one.”
Darren went to get it.
My boyfriend stood next to me with his cup and didn’t look at me, and I didn’t look at him, and his ears had gone pink all the way to the tips, the way they did in the truck, and I stood there in the string lights, fifteen minutes after having him in my mouth in a gravel parking lot, and felt more naked than I did in the truck.
Brianna did ask how we met. He told her a party. Then he told her some of the rest. Not the part where he found me on the floor of his kitchen at 3 a.m. looking for a strawberry, but the part where I’d noticed he always ran the dishwasher half-empty and started fixing it. She said oh my God, that’s so cute, and he said yeah, and he let her think it was cute, and it was.
We stayed two hours. I ate two Korean tacos and lost at cornhole to a man from accounting named Phil. Nobody said anything weird. Well, one person did, a guy by the keg said something to his friend and they both laughed and looked over. And my boyfriend saw it, and I watched him decide, and he walked over to them and said something I couldn’t hear, and walked back, and didn’t tell me what it was, and they didn’t look over again.
Then he grabbed my wrist, not gentle, and steered me past the picnic tables toward the single-occupancy bathroom in the back hallway. He pulled me inside, kicked the heavy door shut, and turned the deadbolt until it clicked.
The chalkboard wall was right there, covered in chalk doodles and phone numbers. He didn’t say a word. He spun me around and bent me over the cold porcelain sink, my hands gripping the edge of the basin.
“Someone could knock,” I whispered, my heart hammering against my ribs.
“Let them,” he rasped in my ear.
He yanked my black jeans down to my knees, taking my lace panties with them. He was already unzipped, his cock thick, rock-hard, and dripping with pre-cum. He spat into his palm, slicking his shaft and the rim of my tight hole, his fingers spreading my cheeks apart. When he pushed the swollen head in, I gasped into the mirror, my knuckles going white on the porcelain. He didn’t pause; he drove his cock deep into my ass with one long, heavy thrust, burying himself balls-deep inside me.
The shock of fullness took my breath away. He gripped my hips with bruised fingers and began fucking me with hard, rhythmic strokes, his dick sliding all the way in and out of my tight channel. The sink rattled against the wall. Every time his hips slammed against my ass, his breath hit my neck in short, ragged gasps. Outside the door, music and laughter from the party buzzed through the wood, but in here there was only the wet slap of our skin and the friction of his cock driving into my hole.
He reached around with one calloused hand, finding my own hard cock trapped against the ceramic, stroking me in time with his thrusts. I couldn’t hold it. I arched my back, crying out into the bathroom as I came in violent spurts all over the porcelain bowl, and right behind me he groaned, driving balls-deep one final time as he pumped his hot load of cum deep inside my ass.
He stayed buried in me for a long minute, his chest heaving against my back, forehead pressed into my shoulder. When he finally pulled out, cum dripped down the inside of my thigh. I cleaned us both with wet paper towels, pulled my jeans up, and washed my hands while he stood by the door, tucking his shirt back into his pants, looking at me in the mirror with that quiet, settled heat in his eyes.
the truck
In the truck on the way home he didn’t turn on the radio.
At the light at the highway exit he said, looking straight ahead, “That was the first time I said it out loud.”
“Said what.”
“That you live with me. To anyone. Out loud. I’ve never said it.”
“How’d it feel?”
He thought about it for the whole red light. When it turned green he drove through it and said:
“Like when you finally get the fridge door to close all the way.”
I laughed so hard I had to put my forehead on the window.
When we got home, the flyer was still on the fridge under the taco magnet. I took it down to throw it away and he said, “Don’t,” from the bedroom, not even looking.
It’s still there. Bring your +1!! Two exclamation points. I pass it every morning when I make his coffee, and every morning I think about Brianna’s ring light and the house root beer and the dead light in the parking lot, and every morning I leave it up.
