I’ve wanted to suck Marcus off in his car every weekday morning for six months, and the whole thing happens inside twenty minutes of dead time before work.
We carpool. He works in shipping, I work in the mailroom two buildings over, in an office park where everybody parks on numbered lines and smiles at you in the elevator and never learns your name. I ride with him because the second parking pass at my building is ninety dollars a month and I’m not paying ninety dollars to be on time for a job I don’t like. He drives because his radio works.
So I get in, he backs out, we complain about work for exactly the length of his driveway. Then one of us lights the joint he rolled before I got there, and that’s the next twenty minutes.
At 7:42 he pulls into the unused back row behind the second building. No shade, no cameras, parking lines painted in all the wrong places. The office doesn’t open till eight. He kills the engine, tips his seat back, passes me the joint.
This is the part of the day I think about when I’m falling asleep the night before.
Marcus isn’t doing anything. That’s almost the problem. He sits with his knees spread because that’s how he sits when nobody’s asking him to perform being a person. One hand holds the joint. The other lies on his thigh, fingers loose, right next to the seam of his jeans. For months I’ve watched that hand do nothing. I’ve watched the inside of his wrist when he passes the joint. The line of his jeans when he settles deeper into the seat. His shoulders drop after the second hit and my body answers before I do.
I know the exact sound he makes when he relaxes. A little breath through his nose. Every morning I hear it and every morning I get half hard in my skirt.
Yes, skirt. I wear one most days, under a long coat I take off once I’m at my desk. Nobody in the mailroom cares. Marcus has never said a word about it, except once he said, “that one’s nice,” about the black pleated one, and I thought about it for a week.
“You good?” he asks.
“Yeah. Just tired.”
“Sleeping weird again?”
“Something like that.”
He takes the joint back. His eyes go half-lidded. We talk about the guy in shipping who steals lunches, about my coworker who microwaves fish, about snow like two Midwestern people who escaped it and still feel personally betrayed. Then we stop talking.
The quiet is the whole thing. It’s the kind you only get with someone who doesn’t need you to be interesting. And I want him most in that quiet. Not at a bar. Not dressed up. Here, work badges clipped to our bags, the roach shrinking between his fingers while the whole day waits outside the windshield.
Some mornings I want him so badly I have to put my hands somewhere deliberate so he won’t see them shake.
Today he notices.
“You cold?”
“A little.”
I’m not cold. He reaches behind my seat and hands me the gray hoodie that’s lived back there since November. I put it in my lap instead of on.
He looks at the hoodie. Then at me. “You can keep it.”
“I know.”
“Then why are you holding it like evidence?”
I laugh because the breath needs somewhere to go. He drops the roach into the little console drawer. Click. That’s the sound that means the morning’s almost over.
“Marcus.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you ever think about”
I stop. There’s the edge. If I finish it he can say no, and if he says no I lose the radio, the smoke, the stupid shipping stories. The twenty minutes where neither of us has to be useful.
“Never mind. Weed brain.”
He doesn’t laugh. He sits up a little and turns toward me.
“You’ve been trying to ask me something for a month.”
“No I haven’t.”
“Jules.”
He’s calm. Not blank. He reaches over and cups the side of my face, warm palm, thumb under my cheekbone. “You can ask me. I’m not gonna guess.”
My eyes sting immediately, which is humiliating.
“I want to suck your dick,” I say.
He doesn’t move his hand.
I keep going because now that it’s out I want it all out. “In the car. In the morning. While we sit here. I don’t want a date, I don’t want a relationship talk. I want it to be part of the twenty minutes.”
His thumb moves once. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Yeah. Now, if you want.”
I’m already unbuckling. I lean across the console and he gives me room, spreads his knees wider, and when I put both hands on his thighs he looks down at me and I look back and I can’t believe my life.
His hand settles at the back of my head, light. The zipper is absurdly loud in the car. I get his jeans open, and underneath he’s already hard, straining against gray cotton, the head of him dark and wet where it’s pushed above the waistband. I thumb the fabric down and his cock springs out thick and warm and smelling like soap and skin, and I put my mouth on it before I can talk myself out of anything.
I’ve imagined this so many times that for the first few seconds it’s almost too simple. Warm skin. His breathing changing. The leather seat creaking when he shifts.
I go slow. A hand wrapped at the base, my tongue flat against the underside, a long wet drag from base to tip that makes his hips twitch up. He gets quiet in a different way. I take the head into my mouth and suck, and his fingers curl in my hair.
“Fuck,” he says, like it got knocked out of him.
I take him deeper. The seat belt buckle digs into my hip, the center console edge is a bar across my ribs, my skirt rides up and the cold air hits my bare thighs, and I don’t care. I get him to the back of my throat and swallow around the head and he makes the sound. The one from the long quiet. Louder.
“Jules.”
My own cock throbs in my panties, soaked at the front. I grind down into the seat leather, not touching, just feeling the pull, and keep working him. Up and down, hand twisting where my mouth can’t reach, spit everywhere, the wet noises filling the little car. His head tips back against the headrest. His other hand grips the door handle so hard his knuckles go white.
Six months I’ve wanted to know what Marcus is like when he stops holding himself still. He’s quieter than I thought. His thighs flex under my palms. His breath hitches. His fingers tighten in my hair once, twice, and I look up and his eyes are open, locked on mine, pupils blown wide, like he can’t believe it either.
“I’m close.”
I take him as deep as I can and moan around him on purpose.
“Oh, fuck, Jules”
He comes down my throat in hot hard pulses, groaning, hips lifting off the seat. I swallow all of it, every drop, hold him in my mouth through the aftershocks until he goes soft and overwhelmed and taps my shoulder. I sit up, wipe my chin with the back of my hand, and grin at him. My lips are swollen. I’m humming.
He stares at me. Then he pulls me across the console by the front of my coat and kisses me, deep, his own taste on my tongue, and his hand slides up my thigh under the skirt and finds the soaked front of my panties.
“You’re a mess.”
“Marcus”
“Seven fifty-four,” he says, looking at the dash clock. “We got six minutes.”
He gets his hand in. I’m so wound up it takes maybe thirty seconds. He strokes me through the lace and then under it, rough thumb over the head, and I bury my face in his neck and shake and come all over his fingers with a noise I’ll be embarrassed about forever. He holds me through it. Then we sit there, breathing, windows fogged, the radio still playing the same awful song.
He fixes his jeans. Starts the car.
I wait for the weirdness. It doesn’t come.
“See you at five,” he says.
I laugh once, because of course that’s what he says. “See you at five.”
He drops me at my building. I wave crossing the lot. He waves back. At my desk there’s already an urgent email from my boss, and I open it smiling like an idiot. Not because I have a boyfriend. I don’t. Not because I figured anything out. I’m smiling because I said the sentence out loud and the world didn’t collapse.
The next morning I get in the car at 7:38. The joint’s already in the cupholder. Marcus hands it to me without looking.
We complain about work. We drive. We park in the wrong line at 7:42. The seat goes back. The roach gets smaller, the console drawer clicks shut.
I unbuckle my seatbelt. He spreads his knees.
Twenty minutes. That’s the whole arrangement. Then we go to work.
Sunday night he texted me for the first time in six months of carpooling that wasn’t outside or running 5 late.
Marcus: rolled two for tomorrow
Me: two??
Marcus: long week
Marcus: wear the black one
Me: the pleated one?
Marcus: that one’s nice
I wore the black one.
