The clock on Jake’s triple-monitor setup read 1:47 AM.
He was on round fourteen of a promotion series in Valorant, his Discord headset clamped over his ears, his mechanical keyboard clicking with that aggressive, rhythmic fury that meant he was one bad round away from punching a hole in his drywall. His team was throwing. His voice in the mic was tight, clipped, swearing under his breath every time an enemy pushed his site.
I was lying on my twin XL bed across the room, pretending to scroll TikTok, but I hadn’t looked at my screen in forty minutes. I was watching the tendon in his neck flex. I was watching the way his gray sweatpants sat low on his hips as he leaned forward in his secretlab gaming chair.
Every guy I’d ever known carried stress like armor. They felt like they had to perform for everyone—their professors, their parents, the girls they texted who took four hours to reply with one-word answers. Jake thought he had to be the rock in our dorm room.
He didn’t know that my favorite fantasy was taking every ounce of that pressure and swallowing it whole.
I slid off my bed without a sound. Bare feet on the carpet, black crop top hugging my ribs. I walked over, slipped past the edge of his L-shaped desk, and dropped quietly to my knees right beside his chair.
His left hand froze instantly on the WASD keys.
The RGB glow from his tower cast cool purple and cyan light across his thighs. He glanced down, his eyes widening in total disbelief as he saw me kneeling between his legs, looking up at him through my dark messy bangs with my hands resting flat against the thick fleece of his sweatpants.
“Luna… what are you doing?” he whispered, his finger tapping his headset’s mute button with a hurried click. “I’m in a ranked match. We’re down two rounds.”
“I know,” I murmured, my palms smoothing upward over his quads, feeling the rigid tension locked in his muscles. “You’re stressed. Your jaw is clenched. You’ve been sighing every two minutes for an hour.”
“I’m fine,” he lied, his voice cracking slightly as my thumbs brushed the inside of his thighs. “You don’t need to…”
“I don’t need to,” I agreed softly. “I want to. I’ve wanted to since you sat down at eight o’clock.”
He stared down at me, his chest rising and falling, caught between the match on his screen and the impossible reality of a pretty, willing boy kneeling at his feet, asking for nothing in return.
I rested my chin directly on the padded armrest of his chair, flashing him that effortless, teasing smirk that always made his ears turn pink.
“Unmute your mic, Jake,” I whispered, reaching for the white drawstrings of his sweatpants. “Tell your team you’re holding site. And keep your hands on the mouse.”
He hesitated for half a second—that final, dying gasp of straight-boy hesitation—before slamming his hand down on the unmute key. “Yeah, I’m here. Mid is clear,” he choked out into Discord, his voice unnaturally deep.
My hands slipped beneath the waistband. When my warm fingers closed around him, thick and throbbing against my palm, a shudder went through his entire six-foot frame. He gripped the mouse so hard the plastic creaked.
I slipped down between his knees, disappearing into the warm shadows beneath the desk. This was my sanctuary. No expectations, no performance, no fear. Just the heavy rhythm of his breathing and the knowledge that for the next ten minutes, his entire universe began and ended with me.
Ten minutes later, the match was completely irrelevant.
The big red ‘DEFEAT’ banner was pulsing across his center monitor, but Jake couldn’t have cared less if his rank dropped to iron. His headset was crooked, knocked halfway off his right ear. His head was thrown all the way back against the headrest, his throat exposed in the dim light, chest heaving in deep, ragged gulps of air.
His fingers were tangled loosely in my hair, holding me close against his thigh, his hips trembling with the lingering shockwaves of a release so intense he hadn’t made a single sound out loud.
He looked down at me as I rested my cheek on his knee. The look on his face wasn’t shame or panic. It was the dazed, reverent look of a man who had just discovered water in the middle of a desert.
“Fuck, Luna…” he whispered, his voice completely wrecked. “You’re… you’re unreal.”
“Did you de-stress?” I asked, looking up with a lazy smile.
“I think my soul left my body,” he breathed.
I stood up smoothly, stretching my arms over my head until the hem of my crop top rode up, exposing my ribs. I reached onto the mini-fridge, grabbed his hydro flask, and passed it to him before wiping the corner of my lips with the back of my thumb.
Jake took the bottle with trembling hands, took three massive gulps, and just stared at me as I adjusted the waistband of my striped shorts.
“Same time tomorrow?” he asked, the words tumbling out before he could filter them.
I paused at the edge of my bed, turned my head, and gave him a slow, wicked wink.
“The desk duty is a standing shift, Jake. You never have to ask.”
He slumped back into his chair, a massive, foolish grin spreading across his face as he closed his eyes in pure contentment. The room was quiet again. But neither of us was ever going to sleep alone in that dorm room again.