Kevin booked Room 211 for exactly two hours.
9:00 to 11:00.
He arrived at 8:56.
I know because when I got there at 9:11 he looked at the wall clock, looked at me, and said, “Fifteen minutes.”
“Hi to you too.”
“I said hi in the text.”
He had not.
The text said:
room 211. second floor. bring chapter seven.
Kevin considers location information a form of affection.
Room 211 was the farthest group-study room from the circulation desk. I sat down across from him and my throat was dry, and I blamed the stairs. Four pens sat beside his laptop in a perfect row. Yellow highlighter on top of blue. Water bottle on a folded napkin because the tables leave rings. Almonds seven inches from the keyboard.
I measured later.
Seven.
“Why are the almonds over there?”
“Particulate contamination.”
“Crumbs.”
“That’s a less precise way to say the same thing.”
This is why I like studying with him.
Also why I occasionally want to throw things at him.
Kevin is excellent at numbers and terrible at explanations. Give him a page of data and he can find the bad assumption before I finish reading the question. Ask him what a 95 percent confidence interval means and he’ll start answering like he’s being deposed.
I’m the opposite. I can make a written response sound like a normal person wrote it. I can also transpose two digits in a formula while looking directly at them.
So he checks my arithmetic.
I translate Kevin into English.
Usually this works.
At 9:58 he checked the clock.
At 10:01 he checked it again.
At 10:03 he put his pen down.
Not capped.
That was the first weird thing.
Kevin always caps his pens.
He stood up, walked to the door, and turned the thumb lock.
Then he pulled the handle once.
Of course he did.
I looked at the open pen.
Then at him.
He came back to the table and moved the chair beside mine instead of sitting across from me.
“We have fifty-seven minutes,” he said.
“For Chapter Seven?”
“No.”
Okay.
Now I was listening.
Kevin took his glasses off. Cleaned both lenses on the inside hem of his sweater. Put them back on.
It wasn’t a nervous gesture. He had a fingerprint on the left lens.
Maintenance first. Emotional crisis second.
“I didn’t book this room because I needed help with statistics.”
“You absolutely need help with the written-response section.”
“Separate issue.”
“Devastating. Continue.”
His ears went pink.
His eyes did not move.
“I’ve been watching you all semester.”
“I know.”
“I know you know.”
“Great. Mutual surveillance established.”
The corner of his mouth moved.
Then stopped.
“I wanted somewhere private enough to ask you something without doing it in a hallway.”
“So ask.”
He looked at me for another second.
Kevin can calculate around uncertainty all day. He hates manufacturing it on purpose.
“I want you.”
He looked at me like the room had tilted.
“Say it in words,” I said.
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Tried again, and this time he made himself be exact, which is the only thing he has ever been able to do.
“I want to fuck you,” Kevin said. “Tonight. In this room. Before eleven.”
His ears went pink.
His shoulders dropped.
Just a little.
I saw it.
He saw me see it.
He leaned in. His mouth found mine before I could answer the question he hadn’t asked yet.
The first kiss was careful enough that I almost laughed. Kevin’s hand touched my waist and stopped there, warm through my shirt, like he was waiting for reality to update.
I put my hand behind his neck and kissed him again.
Harder.
His chair rolled backward half an inch.
He planted one foot and stopped it.
Of course he did.
When we broke apart his breathing was ragged and his eyes were dark. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked at the door, then at me, and then he grabbed my belt loops and pulled me in.
I stood between his knees.
His eyes went down my body and came back up. There was nothing smooth about it. He was looking because he’d finally been told he could.
I touched the open pen on the table.
“This is bothering me.”
Kevin glanced over.
His face changed.
“Don’t.”
I clicked the cap on.
“You’re welcome.”
“You’re a terrible person.”
“You locked me in here.”
“For privacy.”
“Sure.”
He pulled me closer by the waist and kissed me again.
That shut me up for a while.
When I went down between his knees, the carpet was thin enough that I could feel the seam in the tile underneath it.
Kevin watched me.
He did not look at the clock.
I unbuttoned his jeans and eased the zipper down. He lifted his hips to help, which was the most cooperative thing he had done all semester. His cock was already hard against his briefs, a wet spot at the waistband. I pulled him out and got my hand around it and he made a sound before I had even done anything, which I decided not to mention yet. I took the head in my mouth and ran my tongue over the slit and his hand found the back of my head.
He made a sound.
Too loud for Kevin.
His hand came to the back of my head and stopped there.
Light.
I kept going.
The room had its own little mechanical soundtrack: ventilation fan in the ceiling, laptop fan spooling down, the faint electric buzz from the outlet under the table.
Kevin tried to be quiet.
He was very bad at it once I found the pace he liked.
I worked him slow. Slower than I needed to. The point wasn’t to race him to the end of anything. I wanted the small reactions first.
His fingers moving in my hair.
His knee shifting against my shoulder.
The breath he tried to swallow when I changed pressure.
I pulled back for air.
Kevin looked down at me.
“That,” he said.
“Very technical.”
His fingers tightened slightly.
“Do that again.”
Better.
I did, and he said, “Keep going,” and it was not a request.
So I kept going.
He stopped trying to make his face neutral.
That was worth watching.
When I drew back to breathe, his hand came off my head immediately, like he’d been caught at something.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
I went back down. Slower, my mouth wet all the way to the base of his cock, one hand working what I couldn’t fit. He kept his palm on the back of my neck and did not push, and the effort of not pushing showed in his forearm. Every time I took him deep he made a small cracked sound, quiet, like he was filing it under something else.
At 10:16 the digital wall clock changed minute.
I saw it over his shoulder.
Kevin did not.
10:17.
Still nothing.
I almost stopped just to point this out.
Almost.
His hand had stopped being precise in my hair.
That seemed more important.
His fingers clamped in my hair. Not pulling, exactly. Filing a complaint.
I took him deeper than I had been taking him and stayed there with my nose against his stomach and his cock down my throat, and the noise he made went through the plastic chair into the floor.
Then his hips came up off the seat and his hand went flat on the table and he said my name once, not the way he says it in the hallway. I pulled off to breathe and got my fist around his cock, slick to the base, and pumped it while I licked the head, and he came across my tongue and the roof of my mouth, hard enough that it caught me by surprise. I stayed on him through it and swallowed, and he made a sound with no words in it at all, and I did it again because I wanted to and because I knew it would ruin him.
He was still shaking when I sat back on my heels.
I wiped my mouth with the back of my wrist. “Chapter Seven,” I said.
He sat perfectly still for several seconds afterward with his head tipped back and his hand loose in my hair.
Then he opened his eyes.
The first thing he looked at was me.
The second thing was the wall clock.
10:24.
His eyes widened.
“What?” I said.
“I lost time.”
I started laughing before I could stop myself.
“That’s your takeaway?”
“I don’t lose time.”
“Apparently you do now.”
“Six minutes.”
“You are counting the missing minutes after I just—”
“Seven, actually.”
I stared at him.
He looked at the clock again.
“I didn’t check at 10:17.”
That made me laugh harder.
My jaw had that stretched ache that comes from doing something it isn’t usually asked to do, and my knees were imprinting the tile seam, and there was spit cooling on my chin that I wiped on my sleeve.
“That thing you did,” he said. “At the end. With your hand and your mouth at the same time.”
“Yes?”
“I want to be able to describe it.”
“For the record?”
“For next time,” he said, and his ears went pink again, and I had to look at the ceiling.
“Ask me properly and I’ll describe it.”
He considered the terms of the offer the way he considers a badly framed question. Then he put his elbows on his knees and looked at me straight.
“Describe it.”
So I did. I told him about the weight of his cock on my tongue, and the way the spit went down his shaft when I took him deep, and how his balls went tight in my hand just before. I told him I had to pull off because I wanted to watch his face when he came, and that I got my fist around him so I could see it happen, and that he said my name like it was a number he’d been trying to solve all semester.
Kevin did not move for a while.
Then he looked down at his own lap, at the front of his jeans, and back up at me, and the expression on his face was the expression of a man watching a proof collapse.
“That’s a problem,” he said.
“We have thirty-four minutes.”
“The library closes at eleven.”
“Then we had better be efficient.”
He reached for me. I caught his wrist and put his hand back on the table.
“Water first,” I said. “You sound like a man who’s been shouting.”
Kevin handed me the water bottle. He handed it to me first. I drank. Then he did. No speech about it: he just knew my mouth was dry because he had eyes.
Then he looked at the clock, and at me, and at the clock again.
“Thirty-one minutes,” he said.
“Kevin.”
“I’m aware.”
He reached for me. His hand was already on my knee when he saw the almonds eleven inches from the keyboard instead of seven, and stopped.
He fixed them.
I watched his own hands cost him the rest of the evening and said nothing, because some lessons have to be felt.
By the time he had the row straight and his glasses cleaned and his laptop open, there were twenty-eight minutes, and we both knew what twenty-eight minutes of Kevin meant.
“Chapter Seven,” he said.
“Absolutely not.”
“Twenty-eight minutes.”
“Kevin, I just—”
“Interaction terms,” he said, and he was trying so hard not to smile that I had to laugh.
We studied. Actually studied.
Actually studied.
At 10:38 he caught an error in my formula.
At 10:44 I rewrote his practice answer because the first version sounded like a threat from the Census Bureau.
At 10:53 he packed the almonds.
At 10:55 he erased the whiteboard.
Then he wrote his phone number in the bottom corner.
I watched him do it.
“Kevin.”
He capped the marker.
“What?”
“I already have your number.”
He looked at the number.
Then at me.
For the first time all night he looked genuinely embarrassed.
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“That was for a different question.”
I waited.
He erased the number.
Then, still holding the eraser:
“Dinner Friday?”
“Are you asking me out?”
“Yes.”
“Use a complete sentence.”
His eyes narrowed.
“Would you like to have dinner with me Friday?”
I let him wait two seconds.
Exactly two.
“Yes.”
Same shoulder drop.
Different problem.
At 10:58 we walked out of Room 211.
The librarian looked at the clock and told us the second floor closed at eleven.
Nothing else.
No wink. No knowing adult stranger. No joke at our expense.
Kevin said, “We know,” and held the door for me.
Outside, the November air hit hard enough that he shoved both hands into his sweater sleeves. My jaw was sore and I could feel it when I laughed. There was still the taste of him at the back of my throat, and I decided not to mention it, and then decided that I absolutely would.
“Friday,” he said.
“Friday.”
“And Thursday?”
“We study Thursday.”
He looked at me.
I made him ask.
“Room 211?”
“Ask me Thursday.”
The next week he booked Room 212.
Not because it was more private.
Room 211 had a broken outlet.
Kevin filed a facilities ticket.
Of course he did.
