The rules are on an index card on the fridge, under a magnet from a pizza place that closed in 2022. I wrote them. Brandon asked me to write them down because he said if it wasn’t written down he’d spend every single day asking me if it was still okay, and he’s right, he would, and that would defeat the entire point.
The card says:
Rule three is the one that matters. I’m on calls eight hours a day.
I do customer support for a mattress company. Not a good one. A direct-to-consumer one with a name like a bird and a hundred-night trial that people treat like a hundred-night hotel stay. I sit at a folding desk in the corner of our living room in Columbus in a headset, and for eight hours a day I tell people from Tulsa and Scranton and suburban Phoenix that yes, the foam smell goes away, and no, we can’t pick up the mattress, you have to donate it, and here’s a list of places that take them.
I’m good at it. My handle time is the best on my team. My supervisor, Deb, calls me “the mattress whisperer” in the team Slack, and I’ve never once told her I’m doing it in a skirt.
Brandon’s a line cook at a place in the Short North that does twenty-two-dollar fried chicken. He works four p.m. to close, which means he sleeps until noon and wakes up hungry and restless and walks out of his bedroom in basketball shorts and nothing else, right into the middle of my shift.
We’ve been roommates for two years. We’ve been this for four months.
How it started doesn’t matter as much as people think. We were drunk, and then we weren’t drunk, and the second time was on a Tuesday afternoon, sober, and he said “I don’t know what I’m doing” and I said “I do,” and afterward he lay on the kitchen floor staring at the ceiling and said, “I’d do that every day if I could,” and I said, “So do it every day,” and he looked at me like I’d told him the lottery was real.
He’s straight. He says so. He’s said so to me in bed, twice, with his hand on my ass. I don’t argue with him about it. It’s his word, not mine. What I care about is that he walks out of his room at 12:15 every day and looks at me first.
Tuesday. 12:17 p.m. I was on with a woman named Pam in Fort Wayne whose husband had “thrown out his back on the mattress, which is, I want to point out, your mattress.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that, Pam,” I said. “Is he doing okay?”
Brandon came out of his room.
Gray basketball shorts, no shirt, his hair flat on one side. He’s big. Not gym-big. Kitchen-big: shoulders from lifting stockpots, forearms covered in little pink burn scars from the fryer like somebody flicked paint at him. He has a tattoo of a chef’s knife on his ribs he got when he was nineteen and regrets.
He walked past me to the kitchen without saying anything, and filled a glass of water at the sink, and drank the whole thing standing there, and looked at me over it.
I was wearing a pleated gray skirt, the short one, and knee socks, and one of his old Ohio State hoodies with the sleeves pushed up. My headset was on. My hand was on the mouse. Pam was saying, “He’s been lying on the floor since Sunday.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “The floor, though, honestly, sometimes the floor is the best thing for a back.”
Brandon put the glass down.
He came over. He didn’t say anything. That’s part of it, too. He doesn’t have to ask, so he doesn’t, and the first few weeks he still did, every time, is this okay, are you sure, I can wait, and I kept tapping the card on the fridge until he stopped. Now he just comes over. It took him a while to believe me. I think about how long it took him and it makes my chest hurt, a little.
He stood behind my chair. He put his hand on the back of my neck, under the headset band. Warm. Heavy. It smelled like the lavender soap in his bathroom and, faintly, under it, fryer oil that never totally comes out of his skin.
“Pam,” I said, “can I put you on a brief hold while I pull up your order?”
“Fine,” said Pam.
I clicked hold. The little hold music started in my ear, a flute thing. I tipped my head back against his stomach and looked up at him upside down.
“Morning,” I said.
“It’s afternoon.” His voice was all gravel. “You got a lot of calls today?”
“Queue’s at forty-one.”
“Busy.”
“Busy,” I agreed.
He ran his thumb along my jaw. Then he took my chair by the back and rolled it out from the desk about a foot, with me in it, and turned it so I was facing him, and pulled his shorts down with his other hand.
He was already hard. His cock sprang up out of the waistband thick and heavy and a little curved to the left, the head flushed dark and already wet at the slit, and it smelled like him, like sleep and sweat and the warm inside of his sheets. He’d come out of his room hard. He always does. It’s the first thing on his mind when he wakes up, he told me once, lying face-down on my bed with his voice muffled in my pillow, like he was confessing to a priest, and I said good, and he laughed into the pillow for about a minute.
I looked at him. I looked at my screen. Pam’s hold timer said 0:41.
“You’ve got a customer,” he said.
“I’ve got a mute button,” I said, and took him in my mouth.
The trick to a hold is you can’t do one longer than two minutes without the system flagging you. So I did one minute fifty with my mouth on him, slow and wet and deep, my lips stretched around the base of the head, then more, then all of it, until he was nudging the back of my throat and my eyes were watering, the flute music tootling in my right ear, his hand spread across the back of my head, his other hand braced on the top of my monitor. He tasted like sleep and salt. When I swallowed around him he said “fuck” to the ceiling, very softly, like he was trying not to wake someone.
At 1:50 I pulled off, breathing, and wiped my mouth with my sleeve, and took Pam off hold.
“Pam, thank you so much for waiting. I’ve got your order up.”
Brandon made a sound that was almost a laugh. Rule three. I pointed at him without looking. He shut his mouth.
He was standing right there, a foot from my face, hard and wet and flushed, and I pressed the mute key on my keyboard and put my hand around him and stroked him while Pam talked.
“—and I’m not trying to be difficult—”
Unmute. “You’re not being difficult at all, Pam.”
Mute. Mouth. He grabbed the monitor.
“—it’s just that we’ve had it for eighty-four nights and I don’t think it’s getting better—”
Unmute, breathing through my nose, voice perfectly level. “I completely understand. Eighty-four nights is plenty of time to know.”
Mute. I took him all the way down and held him there and hummed, and his knees actually buckled, and he caught himself on the back of my chair and the whole chair rolled six inches and bumped the desk.
“What was that?” said Pam.
Unmute. “My cat, I’m so sorry. She thinks she’s a customer too.”
We don’t have a cat. Brandon had to walk away. He went and stood in the kitchen with his forehead against the fridge, right next to the card, shoulders shaking, hard dick bobbing, laughing completely silently. That’s how I know rule three is his favorite. He breaks it constantly and I let him.
I started Pam’s return. It takes about four minutes of clicking and a lot of “just one more moment while this processes.” I said it about six times.
He came back.
He put his hands under my arms and lifted me out of the chair like I weighed nothing, which, next to him, is roughly true, and sat down in my chair himself, and pulled me down onto his lap facing the desk. My back to his chest. My headset still on. My hands still on the keyboard.
He pushed my skirt up. Just the back. I wasn’t wearing anything under it. I never do, during my shift. That’s not on the card. That’s just me.
“Stay on your call,” he said into my ear, very quiet, on the side the headset didn’t cover.
I heard the cap of the lube he keeps in the drawer of my desk now, which was a whole negotiation, which he won. His fingers, slick and big and patient, one pressing against my hole and circling it until I relaxed, then sliding in to the knuckle. I clicked through a return authorization screen with my eyes half-shut while he opened me up, two fingers, curling, while Pam told me her husband’s name was also Brandon, “isn’t that funny,” and I said “that is funny” in a voice that almost went.
Then he lifted me by the hips and lowered me down onto him.
I bit my lip so hard I tasted it. The head of his cock stretched me open with a hot, bright burn that made my whole body go tight, and then gravity did the rest, inch by thick inch, until my ass was sitting flush in his lap and he was so deep I could feel him throb somewhere behind my belly button. It was a lot, all at once, the whole weight of me pressing down on him, and I sat there, full, with his arms wrapped around my waist and his chin on my shoulder, and typed CUSTOMER REPORTS CONTINUED DISCOMFORT, RETURN INITIATED PER 100-NIGHT POLICY into the notes field with shaking hands.
He didn’t move, at first. He just held me there on him and let me feel it while I worked. His breath on my neck. His heartbeat in my back.
“Pam,” I said, “you’re going to get an email in the next ten minutes with a link to schedule the pickup through our donation partner.”
He started moving.
Small. Slow. Rocking up into me from underneath, his hands on my hips, lifting me a little and letting me down, the chair creaking in rhythm, and I hit mute and let my head fall back on his shoulder and let out a sound I’d been holding for ten minutes.
“That’s it,” he said into my neck. “Good girl. Take it. You’re so good at your job.”
That undid me more than anything he did with his dick, and he knows it. He’s learned that. He learned it by paying attention for four months, which is more than any guy who ever called himself not-straight ever did for me.
Unmute. “—is there anything else I can help you with today, Pam?”
“I think that’s it, hon. You’ve been very sweet.”
“Thank you so much for calling. Enjoy the rest of your day.”
I ended the call. The next one started ringing immediately in my ear, forty-one in the queue. I hit not ready. I have eight minutes of not-ready a day before Deb gets an automated alert.
“Eight minutes,” I said.
“Okay,” said Brandon, and put me face-down over my own desk and fucked me for seven of them.
“Hands flat,” he said. “Don’t move them.”
I put my hands flat on either side of the keyboard.
“Good. Stay.”
He wasn’t gentle then. He didn’t need to be; it’s not on the card and I wouldn’t want it. He held my hips and drove into me, all the way out and all the way back in, every thrust punching a breath out of me, his balls slapping against me, hard enough that my keyboard clattered and my headset slid down around my neck and my mug of cold coffee walked slowly toward the edge of the desk until I caught it. “Seven minutes,” he grunted. “Whole shift. Sitting there in that skirt with this hole ready for me.”
“Yes.”
“Whose is it?”
“Yours. Brandon. Yours.”
He reached under me and took my cock in his fist and jerked me in time, rough and fast, and I came first, all over his hand and the inside of my skirt, clenching around him, and he groaned and followed me a few thrusts later, buried to the hilt, and I felt his cock pulse inside me, three, four hot throbs, filling me, his forehead dropping between my shoulder blades, his whole body shaking, saying my name.
At six minutes and forty seconds, he pulled out and tugged my skirt back down and kissed the back of my neck and pulled his shorts up.
“I’m gonna make eggs,” he said. “You want eggs?”
“Please.”
He went to the kitchen. I put my headset back on. I clicked ready.
“Thank you for calling, this is Jules, how can I help you today?”
It was a man in Sacramento whose dog had eaten a corner of the mattress. I could smell butter browning in the kitchen. I was sitting in a wet spot. My legs were shaking. My handle time on that call was four minutes, twelve seconds, well under team average.
1:30 P.M.
At 1:30 he put a plate on my desk. Two eggs, over medium, a piece of buttered toast cut diagonally, a little pile of the hot sauce he steals from work.
I muted. “Thank you.”
“You get your break at two?”
“Two.”
“I’ll be in the shower,” he said, and leaned down and kissed me on the mouth, and there was nothing on the card about kissing.
On Sunday we reread the card like we always do, standing at the fridge with our coffee. He read it out loud, all four rules, in the voice he uses to read tickets at work.
“Any changes?” I said.
He was quiet for a while. Then he took the pen off the fridge magnet and added a fifth one, in his terrible block capitals, and hung the card back up without looking at me and went to go take a shower.
5. EGGS AFTER.
It’s still there.
