the gym closes at ten and the night guy locks the front at ten-fifteen, which means the locker room is ours for about four minutes after the last rep. i’ve been counting those four minutes for three weeks.
it started with a conversation i was not supposed to hear. jalen was by the squat racks with his friend dom, both of them in the tank tops they wear like a uniform, and i was two lockers down with my head stuck in my gym bag, doing the thing where you look like you’re hunting for a sock. dom said something about the girl who does the six a.m. classes, the one with the pink water bottle, and jalen laughed and said, “nah, i only fuck feminine girls. don’t care what’s under there. she can have whatever she wants under there, long as she’s soft about it.”
he said it loud enough. he said it looking at the lockers. i know the difference between a man talking and a man talking to someone, and that was a man talking to someone.
i started wearing the pink set to the gym. under the leggings, under the tank, every session, like a superstition, like a girl writing a note and folding it into her pocket on the walk to school. i told myself it was laundry. i was doing laundry every single day that month, which for me is basically a diary entry. and i started staying late — stretching by the mirror in the back of the free-weight area, leaning on the rack near his bench, picking a fight with the cable machine that didn’t need picking. he didn’t say anything for two weeks. he just watched me in the mirror and wiped down equipment that was already clean.
the third week he came over, took the towel out of my hands, and said, “you’re going to tell me you’re just tired, or you’re going to tell me the truth.”
“i heard you.”
“yeah,” he said. “i meant you to.”
and that was it, that was the whole negotiation. men like jalen don’t schedule things. they lock the building and walk across it.
three weeks later it’s ten-oh-six and the front is locked and he’s leaning in the doorway of the men’s room, and then he’s not leaning, he’s walking, and the concrete is cold through my leggings when he puts one hand flat between my shoulder blades and presses down until i’m on my knees.
“you heard him,” he says. not a question.
“i heard him.”
“what’d i say.”
“you said you only fuck feminine girls.” my voice came out steady. i’d had three weeks to rehearse it and i’m not going to pretend i didn’t use them.
“say the rest.”
“you don’t care what’s under there.” a beat. the whole locker room tile holding its breath. “long as she’s soft about it.”
“look at that.” he crouches, and his hand comes into my hair, not yanking, just settling, fingers spread against my scalp like he’s measuring for something. “look at her, soft about it.” his hand is dark against my hair, dark against the pale of my shoulders where the tank strap slid off, and he looks at that contrast the way a man looks at a result he already predicted. “look at how good you look on your knees.”
i got his belt open with shaking hands, which he noticed, and which pleased him — there’s a sound men make, one short hum, when the confidence they built is confirmed by the tremble they built it out of. he was already half-hard from the walk over, which i’m choosing to take personally. i took him in my hand first, heavy and warm, heavier than the shape of him promised, and ran my palm down the full length once before i put my mouth on the head.
“good girl,” he said, looking down at me on the concrete, and I have never been more correctly labeled in my life.
he let me have my slow minute, and he spent it watching. he caught the band of the pink set at my waist when my tank rode up, one finger, and pulled it down an inch so he could see, and something moved across his face that i recognized from the day he set his new deadlift record.
“you wore these for me,” he said.
“every session.”
“for how long.”
“three weeks.”
“yeah.” he tucked the band back where he found it, unbothered, like confirming a delivery. “i saw the strap line through your leggings in week one. i’ve been thinking about it during cardio, which you should know is a big sacrifice for me.”
and then his hand settled back into my hair and he pressed me down, and the joke was over, and i was very glad the joke was over.
i kept it slow. tongue flat under the head, circling the ridge, then a few inches down, pull back, a few more, getting my jaw used to the stretch of him before i tried for anything deeper. his hand tightened in my hair, not pushing yet, just holding the place.
“soft little girl,” he murmured. “that’s it. take your time for me.”
so i took it, and then i took it faster, because he’d said take your time the way men say it when they want to watch you run out of it. i went down the way he likes: all the way, until my nose was in the hair at the base of him and my throat was full and my eyes were already streaming. held it there a beat longer than was comfortable, then pulled off fast, gagged once, spit running down my chin and onto the tank top, and went back down before i’d recovered. by the third or fourth time through, my jaw was aching the way it does when tomorrow is going to remind me all day, and i’ve never minded the reminder. it’s like a ring i get to keep. i walked home touching the hinge of my jaw for two days. i still do, some thursdays, in the mirror, just to check the memory’s still where i left it.
his hips started moving under me, small thrusts he wasn’t fully in control of anymore. the sound of it filled the room, wet and loud, and the tile gave it back to us doubled. he heard it and his hips pushed up again right on cue.
“listen to that,” he said. “nobody out here but us, and you’re making that noise for me. so pretty with your mouth stretched around me, pale little thing.”
“say who you come in here for,” he said after a minute, and it came out between breaths, more tired than commanding, which made it worse for me, which made it better.
“you.”
“who.”
“jalen.”
“mhm.” he wasn’t gloating. he was filing. “and what are you?”
the answer fell out of me the second i understood the question was real. “soft about it.”
“there it is.”
the lockers rang when his hand shoved me deeper than we had agreed on and kept me there. i held on to his thighs for balance and swallowed around him, throat working against the head of him, eyes watering, and he groaned something that wasn’t a word.
he didn’t warn me. he came down my throat in three hard pulses, hand fisted in my hair, holding me there through every one of them, and i stayed and took it, because pulling off right then would have felt like dropping something i’d been carrying for three weeks.
when he finally let go, he thumbed my bottom lip, looked at the wet mess on my chin like he’d been waiting to see it, and said, “same time thursday.” not a question. he was already zipping up.
i sat back on my heels on the concrete, knees screaming, and cleaned my mouth with the back of my wrist. the room smelled like chlorine and somebody’s abandoned protein shake, which is the most romantic thing i’ve ever been offered. he dried his hands on his shorts, didn’t look back, and clicked the light switch on his way out, so i was sitting in the dark with the locker doors ticking as they cooled.
i got up eventually and fixed the tank top, which was see-through and sticky at the front, and stood there for a minute in the half-dark grinning at nothing like an idiot. through the doorway the emergency light made a long stripe down the lane of lockers and i just stood in it, wrecked, in the pink set, in the gym nobody else could get into, and got to be exactly the kind of secret that gets kept in a building.
thursday is in two days. i don’t cancel anything on thursdays. i also don’t shower at home that night. i keep it on me as long as i can. i already know what time i’ll be there.
