Jake catches Luna stealing his headset and says, “Put that back,” without looking away from the match.
Luna puts it on.
One earcup swallows her ear completely. The other catches her bleached fringe, and she has to fish out three strands with black-painted nails before settling onto the edge of Jake’s desk.
“Can you hear me?”
“Unfortunately.”
Jake’s voice comes through the headset a fraction of a second after his mouth moves.
Luna grins.
That is interesting.
“Your microphone makes you sound hot.”
Jake finally looks away from the monitor.
“Give me that.”
Luna leans backward.
Jake catches the padded headband instead of her. Luna keeps hold of both earcups.
For a second they’re playing the world’s dumbest tug-of-war.
Then gunfire erupts from the speakers.
“Jake!” somebody yells through voice chat. “Behind you!”
“Oh, shit.”
Jake releases the headset, grabs his mouse and spins.
Luna watches his hands.
Long fingers. Short nails. A pale line across one knuckle where he’d burned himself fixing the toaster because apparently buying another twelve-dollar toaster would have violated some masculine principle.
Click.
Click-click.
Three shots.
“Sit down,” Jake mutters.
Luna glances at the second chair.
It has Jake’s backpack on it.
She looks at Jake.
Jake doesn’t.
Luna slips off the desk.
She has deliberately selected the strawberry sweater tonight. Big enough to reach halfway down her dolphin shorts, sleeves long enough that only her fingertips show.
Cute.
That had been the intention.
Cute had seemed substantially safer in the bathroom mirror.
Now Jake is leaning forward with his forearms braced around the keyboard, jaw tight while blue monitor-light cuts across the bridge of his nose, and Luna discovers she’d rather be considerably less safe.
She steps between his knees.
Jake misses a shot.
Luna stops.
His knees are touching the outside of her thighs.
Neither moves.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking for somewhere to sit.”
“There’s literally a chair.”
“There’s literally a backpack.”
“Luna.”
She turns around.
Jake’s inhale is tiny.
She hears it anyway.
Good.
Also terrible.
Luna backs up until the backs of her knees touch the chair.
Not Jake.
The chair.
He could still tell her no.
Her stomach feels ridiculous about this distinction.
“Move the backpack,” Jake says.
Luna turns her head.
His eyes immediately jump back to the monitor.
There it is.
The escape hatch.
She should take it.
Instead she lowers herself another inch.
Jake’s thighs tense beneath hers before her full weight even reaches him.
She stops again.
The headset crackles.
“Bro,” says a stranger directly into Luna’s ear, “are you playing or having a medical emergency?”
Jake reaches around her for the push-to-talk key.
His chest touches her back.
Only for a moment.
Warm cotton. Laundry detergent. The hard edge of his sternum through his T-shirt.
Luna forgets what joke she’d planned.
Jake presses the key.
“Shut up.”
His voice vibrates against her shoulder before reaching her through the headset.
Lower in person.
Much lower.
Luna shifts the last inch backward and sits.
Completely.
Jake goes rigid.
His mouse stops moving.
Onscreen, somebody immediately shoots him in the head.
DEFEATED.
“Oh my God,” Jake says.
Luna bites the inside of her cheek.
“You suck.”
“You sat on me.”
“There was a backpack.”
“You could move it.”
“So could you.”
Jake opens his mouth.
Nothing happens.
Luna can feel his breathing now. That’s the problem with this position. Every inhale lifts her slightly. Every exhale lets her settle again.
Jake notices too.
His hands leave the controls.
For one awful second Luna thinks they’re about to close around her waist.
They don’t.
One goes to the desk.
The other drops beside his thigh.
Luna stares at the respawn timer.
Eight.
Seven.
Six.
She suddenly feels overdressed despite having most of her legs out.
This had been funny ten seconds ago.
It is still funny.
It has unfortunately become something else too.
“Jake.”
“What?”
“If you want me off, say so.”
Three.
Two.
Jake’s hand lifts.
Luna’s stomach tightens.
His palm settles against her waist.
Not moving her.
Just there.
Warm enough that she feels it through the sweater.
One.
RESPAWN.
Jake reaches around her with his other arm and takes the mouse again.
“Stay.”
Luna’s smile arrives before she can stop it.
“You’re going to lose.”
“Already losing.”
“Because I’m distracting you?”
Jake’s thumb presses once into her side.
“Don’t push it.”
Luna shuts up.
For almost twelve seconds.
Then Jake gets shot again because Luna has discovered that resting her chin against his shoulder puts her mouth approximately two inches from his ear.
“Jesus Christ.”
“What?”
“You know what.”
She does.
That’s considerably better than hearing him say it.
PLAYER TWO HAS JOINED flashes across the second monitor as Luna’s controller finally wakes.
She curls both hands around it.
Jake’s hand remains at her waist.
They last one more round like that.
Luna is genuinely bad at this game. She has never pretended otherwise. She runs her character into a wall, then off a ledge, then into a teammate, and every time she dies she laughs and wiggles in Jake’s lap to get comfortable again, and every time she wiggles his hand at her waist goes tighter.
By the third death she can feel exactly what the wiggling is doing.
He’s hard. Under her, through his sweatpants and her dolphin shorts, unmistakable, pressing right up along the seam of her ass. Jake has gone very still, the specific stillness of a man who hopes if he doesn’t move it might not count.
Luna sets the controller down on the desk.
“Jake.”
“Don’t.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were going to.” His voice comes through the headset a split second after it hits her neck. “I’m—sorry. That’s just. That happens. It doesn’t mean—”
She rolls her hips. Slow. Once.
Jake’s breath goes out of him in a rush and his forehead drops onto her shoulder.
“It means something,” Luna says.
In the headset, somebody yells that they’re pushing B and asks if Jake is coming. Jake reaches past her without lifting his head, finds the mute key by feel, and presses it. The little red icon lights up in the corner of the monitor.
Then both his hands are on her. Not just her waist. Sliding up under the strawberry sweater, flat over her stomach, up her ribs, like he’s been mapping it in his head for months and is now checking his work. Luna leans back against his chest and lets him. His thumbs brush her nipples and she gasps loud enough that he laughs into her shoulder, shaky.
“That’s—okay. Good to know.”
“Do it again.”
He does. She pushes back into his lap and grinds on him, and he groans against her neck and pulls her down harder.
“Can I—” He stops. Tries again. “Luna. Can I touch you?”
“You are touching me.”
“You know what I mean.”
She takes his hand off her ribs and guides it down. Over her stomach, under the waistband of the dolphin shorts. She’s not wearing anything under them. She hears him realize it, the tiny strangled noise, and then his fingers close around her cock, warm and a little unsure, and she has to grip the edge of the desk.
“Like this?”
“Yeah. Slower. Yeah—there.”
He learns fast. Jake learns everything fast, it’s annoying, he learned this game in a week. In a minute he’s stroking her steady and tight, his other hand spread across her chest holding her back against him, his mouth hot on the side of her neck, and she’s rocking between his fist and the hard line of him under her and losing her mind about it.
On screen, his character stands in the spawn room doing nothing. In the corner of the second monitor, the squad text chat is scrolling. jake?? mic muted? bro left jake afk on the objective again. Luna laughs and it turns into a moan halfway through.
“Off,” she says. “I want—stand up. Let me.”
Jake lets her up. She turns around and pushes him back into the chair by his shoulders, and pulls his sweatpants down his hips while he stares at her, and drops to her knees between his legs, the same spot she stood ten minutes ago looking for somewhere to sit.
His cock is flushed and thick and already wet at the tip. She wraps her hand around it and looks up at him.
“Still want me to move the backpack?”
“Oh my God,” Jake says, and covers his face, and then uncovers it immediately because he wants to watch.
She takes him in her mouth. Slow at first, licking, getting him wet, enjoying the way his thighs jump under her palms. Then deeper. His hand comes down into her bleached hair, careful, the same way it came down on her waist, just there, not moving her. She hums around him and the hand tightens.
“Luna. Fuck. Luna.”
She sucks him until he’s shaking and swearing, until his heel is drumming on the floor and the chair is rolling back a few inches with every push of his hips and she has to follow it on her knees. He tries to warn her, a hoarse “I’m close, I’m—,” tugging gently at her hair. She stays down. He comes with his head thrown back against the chair and his hand fisted in her hair, saying her name into the empty room, and she swallows and keeps him in her mouth until he twitches and laughs and pushes at her shoulder.
Then he hauls her up into his lap by the sweater and gets his hand back down her shorts and finishes her in about forty seconds, her face buried in his neck, coming all over his fist and the hem of the strawberry sweater.
They sit there, sticky and wrecked, breathing.
The mic is still muted. The match is over. His teammates have lost the match without him.
“I’m never going to win a game again,” Jake says.
“You were never winning games.”
He pulls the headset off her and puts it on himself, unmutes, and says, in a voice that is completely destroyed, “Sorry, guys. Had a—technical thing.”
The voice chat explodes. Luna laughs into his shoulder.
He mutes again, drops the headset on the desk, and pulls her closer.
The backpack is still on the second chair.
He never moves it.
