Mateo had been watching my Instagram Stories for four months before he spoke to me outside class.
I had been watching him in person for exactly as long.
This was apparently how romance worked now.
We were both twenty-one and in the same sociology lecture. Mateo sat two rows ahead, one seat left. Curly hair, beat-up canvas backpack, guitar-callused fingers, usually a coffee he forgot to finish.
On Instagram he mostly posted three things:
- guitar clips;
- pictures of whatever he cooked in his tiny off-campus kitchen;
- the 11:47 campus shuttle with captions like last one again.
I watched all of them.
He watched mine too.
Not immediately enough to look desperate.
Usually between three and eight minutes.
Which was much more suspicious.
The first actual interaction happened when I posted a mirror picture before class in a cropped soccer jersey and black shorts.
Mateo viewed it.
Then, twelve minutes later, liked a completely unrelated photo of my coffee.
Coward.
I liked his guitar Reel from three weeks earlier.
He liked a picture of my cat that was six months old.
This continued for eleven days.
Nobody said anything.
Civilization survived somehow.
Wednesday night I stayed in the library until 11:35 even though I lived on campus.
That part was deliberate.
At 11:38 Mateo posted a Story from the shuttle stop.
Black screen, white text:
if i miss the 11:47 im sleeping in the library
I was ninety seconds away.
I replied:
save me a seat
He read it immediately.
Typing bubble.
Gone.
Then:
you dont take this bus
I typed:
apparently i do tonight
When I reached the stop, Mateo was pretending to study the transit display.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey.”
“You saved me a seat?”
He looked at me.
“You’re actually coming?”
“I said I was.”
“You live in Patterson.”
“I know where I live.”
“This bus goes the opposite direction.”
“Also know that.”
The bus arrived before he could interrogate me further.
We got on.
There were four people total, including the driver. Mateo chose a pair of seats near the back. I sat beside him instead of across the aisle.
The bus pulled away from campus.
My phone buzzed.
Mateo.
From six inches away.
why are you on this bus
I looked at him.
“Seriously?”
“Answer.”
I typed:
you
His screen lit his face.
He read it once.
Then again.
The bus turned onto Main.
Mateo put his phone face-down on his thigh.
“Me.”
“You.”
“You missed your stop for me.”
“I don’t have a stop on this route. That’s sort of the point.”
He laughed quietly.
Then looked out the window because apparently eye contact had become technologically impossible.
“I’ve been trying to figure out if you were flirting with me,” he said.
“How’s the research going?”
“Bad.”
“You liked a six-month-old cat picture.”
His head snapped back toward me.
“You noticed that?”
“Mateo.”
“Okay, that was bad.”
“Extremely.”
He rubbed his face.
“I didn’t know what else to like.”
“You could have replied to the picture you actually liked.”
“The shorts one?”
“See? You remember.”
Now he was blushing.
Good.
The bus rolled over a speed bump and our knees bumped.
Neither of us moved away.
Mateo looked down at the contact.
Then at me.
“Can I hold your hand?”
That was better than any DM he could have sent.
“Yes.”
His hand found mine between the seats.
Warm, slightly rough fingertips.
Guitar hands.
For the rest of the ride we mostly watched the dark windows and pretended our joined hands were not the loudest thing on the bus.
At The Oaks, Mateo got off.
So did I.
He stopped on the sidewalk.
“You know you can still bail.”
“On what?”
“Whatever this is.”
“I took a bus twenty minutes in the wrong direction.”
“That’s not legally binding.”
“Good. Because I want coffee.”
“At midnight.”
“You post those coffee pictures. I know you own a machine.”
He laughed.
“Stalker.”
“Researcher.”
His apartment was on the third floor.
I knew that only because he’d once posted a package-delivery complaint with the apartment number visible and then deleted it five minutes later.
I did not tell him this.
Some research stays unpublished.
Inside, the guitar from his Stories stood by the window. The same chipped blue mug was in the drying rack. The Alamo poster I had seen behind half his Reels was over the couch.
His online life suddenly had depth.
“This is weird,” Mateo said.
“Bad weird?”
“No. More like—you’ve been in my phone for months and now you’re in my kitchen.”
“You’ve been in mine too.”
He leaned against the counter.
“Can I ask you something without Instagram helping?”
“Try it.”
“Can I kiss you?”
“Yes.”
He crossed the kitchen.
The first kiss was soft enough that I could feel him deciding whether it was real.
I put a hand at the back of his neck and kissed him again.
That answered the question.
His hands settled at my waist.
Mine slid under the edge of his hoodie, just warm skin and the quiet shock of finally touching somebody I had been reducing to pixels and lecture-hall angles for a semester.
“Still okay?” he asked.
“Very.”
We kissed until the coffee machine beeped angrily because neither of us had put a mug under it.
Mateo pulled back and stared at the espresso running directly into the drip tray.
“Great.”
I started laughing.
“This is your seduction technique?”
“I was distracted.”
“By what?”
He looked at me.
“You know.”
Much better than a like.
Mateo put a mug under the machine, finally, and pushed the button again. Then he turned around and leaned back against the counter and pulled me in by the belt loops, and the second round of kissing was not soft at all.
He kissed like he played guitar in his Reels, head down, focused, a little rough at the edges. His hands went from my waist to my ass and squeezed, like he’d been wanting to do that since the shorts picture and had finally gotten permission. I made a noise into his mouth. He did it again.
“Still okay?”
“Mateo, if you ask me that one more time I’m getting back on the bus.”
He laughed against my jaw. “There’s no bus. You said it yourself.”
“Then you’re stuck with me.”
The coffee finished. Neither of us drank it.
His bedroom was smaller than his Stories made it look. Mattress on a low frame, a lamp with a scarf thrown over it, the guitar case leaning on the closet. He sat on the edge of the bed and pulled me between his knees and pushed my shirt up with both hands and just looked, his thumbs moving over my stomach.
“I’ve seen that jersey picture probably forty times,” he said. “Don’t tell anyone.”
“Who would I tell? Your forty views are right there in my insights.”
He bit my hip for that. I yanked his hoodie over his head.
We got each other undressed in the clumsy way people do when they’ve imagined it a lot and are now discovering zippers exist. He was all lean and dark hair on his chest and a tan line from his watch. His cock was hard and curved up toward his stomach, and when I wrapped my hand around it he let out a breath like he’d been holding it since September.
I pushed him down onto the mattress and climbed over him and took him in my mouth.
“Oh, fuck,” Mateo said, to the ceiling, very sincerely.
I took my time. I wanted to. Four months of watching him from two rows back, and now he was under me with both hands fisted in his own sheets, hips jerking every time I took him deeper. Guitar-callused fingers in my hair, careful at first, then less careful. I hummed around him and he swore in Spanish, which I had not known he did and which I am going to be thinking about for years.
“Come here,” he said, pulling at my shoulders. “Come here, I want—I want you up here.”
I came up. He rolled us over and got a hand around me and stroked me slow, watching my face like it was the most interesting thing that had ever happened in this room, and then he slid down and returned the favor. Less practiced than me. Extremely committed. Every time I made a sound he did the thing again, like he was learning a song by ear.
“Do you have—” I started.
“Nightstand.” He was already reaching. Lube, a strip of condoms still sealed. He held them up a little sheepishly. “I bought these after the cat picture.”
“After the cat picture?”
“I was optimistic.”
He opened me up with his fingers slow enough that I was the one begging, his mouth on my thigh, two fingers curling until I grabbed his wrist. When he finally pushed into me I was on my back with my knees around his ribs and the scarf-lamp making everything orange, and he went so slow, his forehead against mine, both of us breathing like we’d run for the bus.
“Okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah. Move.”
He moved. Long, deep, steady, and then less steady. The mattress frame knocked against the wall. Somebody in 305 knocked back once, and we both froze and started laughing, and he was still inside me laughing, which was a new and excellent feeling. Then he hitched my leg up higher over his arm and found the angle and I stopped laughing completely.
I came with his hand around me and his name in my mouth. He followed a few strokes later, pressed all the way into me, his face in my neck, shaking.
We lay there tangled while the sweat cooled.
“Worth the wrong bus?” he mumbled into my shoulder.
“Ask me in the morning,” I said.
It was 1:30 a.m. The last bus was long gone. Mateo gave me a T-shirt and the side of the bed nearest the outlet because my phone was at twelve percent.
In the morning he made coffee successfully.
I sat on the counter in his shirt.
My phone showed seventeen notifications and one message from Mateo even though he was standing five feet away.
He had sent me a screenshot.
My Close Friends Story from the night before: the bus stop, captioned research trip.
Under it:
Mateo: so was the research successful
I looked at him.
Then typed:
Me: results promising. further study required
His phone buzzed.
He smiled.
“11:47 tonight?”
“Ask me tonight.”
“Fine.”
At 11:39 that evening, he sent:
save you a seat?
I replied:
yes
This time neither of us pretended it was about the bus.
