The chemistry lab at Highland is empty after 8 PM. The fluorescents get turned down to half. The fume hoods stop humming. The building feels like it’s holding its breath.
Raj stayed late. I knew he would. He always stays late. He’s the kind of guy who shows up to office hours with questions he already knows the answers to, just so the professor knows he exists.
I had lab with him. Tuesdays and Thursdays, 4 PM. We were lab partners by accident — the TA assigned us on the first day and neither of us requested a change. Raj is quiet, precise, Indian, wears his lab coat like armor. He has a habit of pushing his safety goggles up into his hair when he’s thinking, which is always.
I noticed him on day one. He noticed me noticing him on day three. Neither of us said anything for six weeks.
Until Thursday.
The experiment ran long. Everyone else left — packed up their notebooks, said goodnight to the TA, filed out. Raj was still at our station, carefully measuring something with a pipette like his GPA depended on it. (It did. Raj’s GPA was a 3.97 and he was not about to let it slip.)
I was supposed to leave too. My bus came at 8:15. It was 8:07.
“You gonna be much longer,” I asked, leaning against the counter next to him.
He didn’t look up. “The titration isn’t finished.”
“You’ve been saying that for twenty minutes.”
“I’m being thorough.”
“You’re stalling.”
He looked up at me then. Through the safety goggles he’d pushed into his hair. And I could see it — the same look Marcus gets. The same look Tyler gets. The same look every straight guy on this campus gets when they realize I’m standing closer than expected and not moving away.
Oh.
It’s you.
I’ve been thinking about this.
I didn’t think it was real.
“You should go,” Raj said. His voice was careful. Controlled. The voice of a man who has spent his entire life not acting on impulse.
“I should,” I agreed.
I didn’t move.
He looked back down at the titration. His hand was shaking. Just slightly. Just enough that I could see the pipette trembling in his grip.
“You’re going to overshoot the endpoint,” I said.
“I know.”
“You’ve already overshot it.”
“I know.”
He set the pipette down. Carefully. Precisely. Like he was setting down something fragile.
Then he took off his goggles. Set them on the counter. Took off his lab coat. Hung it on the hook behind him with the same careful precision.
He turned to face me.
“You should go,” he said again. But this time it wasn’t a suggestion. It was a test.
I stepped closer.
“No,” I said.
The chemistry lab at Highland is empty after 8 PM. The fluorescents are at half. The fume hoods are quiet. The building holds its breath.
And at 8:23 PM, at station seven in the back corner of lab room 204, Raj finally stopped being careful.
He kissed me first. I want that on the record. He put one hand flat on the counter beside my hip and the other on my jaw and kissed me like he was checking a hypothesis, then kissed me again like the hypothesis had been confirmed. He tasted like the spearmint gum he chews during quizzes.
“Is this—” he started.
“Yes,” I said. “Whatever you were going to ask. Yes.”
He moved the burette stand to the next station. He moved the waste beaker. He capped the indicator bottle. He did all of it with one hand while still kissing me, which is the single most Raj thing I have ever witnessed, and then he picked me up by the backs of my thighs and sat me on the cleared epoxy counter of station seven.
The counter was cold through my shorts. I pulled him in by the belt.
“I’ve never done this,” he said against my neck. “With a guy.”
“Do you want to?”
“I’ve wanted to since the first day of lab.” He pulled back an inch. His glasses were crooked. “I would like to be very thorough.”
“I know you would.”
I undid his belt. He was hard in his khakis, straining against the zipper, and when I got my hand around his cock he grabbed the edge of the lab bench so hard his knuckles went white and said a word I had never heard Raj say, not even when he dropped a full Erlenmeyer flask in week two.
I slid off the counter onto my knees on the rubber lab mat. He looked down at me like I’d done something illegal.
“Raj,” I said. “Hands on the bench.”
He put his hands on the bench.
I sucked him slow, the way I’d imagined during six weeks of Tuesdays and Thursdays, watching him measure things. He was thick and warm and smelled faintly of the nitrile gloves he’d taken off. He didn’t make a sound for the first minute, and then he made a lot of them, low and choked, his head tipped back toward the fume hood. His hips kept trying to move and he kept stopping them.
“You can,” I said. “Move.”
He moved. Careful. Then less careful. One of his hands came off the bench and found the back of my head, and he held me there and fucked my mouth in slow, deep strokes, saying my name like he was reading it off a label.
“Stop,” he said suddenly. “Stop, I want— I want to—”
I pulled off. “Say it.”
He was red to the collar. “I want to fuck you. If you want that.”
I reached for my soccer bag, unzipped the side pocket, and held up a condom and a travel bottle of lube.
Raj stared at them. “You came prepared?”
“I’m very observant,” I said.
He bent me over station seven. My shorts were around my knees, my cheek on the cold black epoxy, the safety shower sign glowing green on the wall in front of me. Raj slicked his fingers and worked me open with the exact same attention he gives a burette reading, slow, one finger, then two, watching my face from the side for every reaction.
“Is that—”
“Good. More.”
“Tell me if—”
“Raj. I’ll tell you.”
When he pushed into me, he went so slowly I thought I’d die. He bottomed out and held still and put his forehead between my shoulder blades and just breathed.
“Okay?” he said.
“Move. Please.”
He moved. And then precise, controlled, 3.97-GPA Raj fucked me against the lab bench like he’d been thinking about it for six weeks, because he had. Long strokes. Deep. His hands on my hips, pulling me back onto him. The stools rattled. His goggles fell off the counter and rolled away under the next station and neither of us even turned our heads.
He found the angle that made my knees go, noticed exactly when it happened, and kept it there. Of course he did. He’s thorough.
“Touch yourself,” he said, rough. “I want— I want to feel it.”
I did. I came on the floor under station seven with my mouth pressed against my own forearm, and he felt it, every pulse of it, and groaned into my back and came a few strokes later, hips stuttering, both hands gripping me so hard I found fingerprints the next morning.
Afterward, Raj sat on a stool. I sat on the counter next to him. We were both a little breathless. He was re-buttoning his shirt with the same careful precision he uses for everything else. But his hands were shaking. And he was smiling. Not a small smile. Not a polite smile. A real smile. The kind that reaches the eyes.
“I’ve been thinking about this,” he said quietly, “since the first day of lab.”
“I know.”
“You knew.”
“I knew.”
“Why didn’t you say anything.”
“Because you weren’t ready.”
He looked at me. Really looked. And I could see the gears turning — the realization that I had known, that I had waited, that I had let him come to it on his own time.
“You’re very patient,” he said.
“I’m very observant.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“It is when it comes to you.”
He smiled again. Bigger this time. He picked up his goggles from the floor. Put them on his head where they belong. Picked up his lab coat from the floor. Brushed it off. Hung it back on the hook.
“We should go,” he said.
“We should.”
Neither of us moved.
“My bus came at 8:15,” I said.
“It’s 8:47.”
“I know.”
He looked at me. I looked at him. The lab was quiet. The fluorescents hummed at half. Station seven was a mess.
“My apartment is ten minutes from here,” Raj said.
“I know.”
“You looked it up.”
“I looked up a lot of things.”
He smiled. Picked up his bag. Headed for the door.
I followed.
The TA locked up behind us at 9. He saw the state of station seven. He saw the goggles on the floor. He saw the lab coat that had clearly been on the ground.
He didn’t say anything.
He just sighed, cleaned up station seven, and added a note to the log: “Station 7 — deep clean needed Monday. Floor too. — T”
Raj got an A on the lab report.
I got Raj.
And the chemistry TA got a story he’ll never tell but will think about every time he walks past station seven.
Caption: “Raj stayed late to finish the titration. I stayed late too. Neither of us was doing chemistry.”
