The apartment was small. One bathroom, no lock on it. A kitchen that fit one person standing up. A living room that fit a couch and a coffee table and nothing else, and my bedroom window looked out at the parking lot of a Denny’s.
Taylor’s window looked at a tree.
We moved in on the same Saturday in May. He answered the ad, I answered the ad, we met in the leasing office and signed the same paper and took two keys from the woman at the desk, and just like that we were roommates because rent was too high to be interesting about it.
I still have the listing screenshotted. It’s honestly all there.
The first thing I noticed about Taylor was that he leaves every door open. Bedroom door open when he works. Bathroom door open, because the bathroom doesn’t lock and he apparently considers that a design choice. The second thing was that he works from home in boxers and a T-shirt, and by day five I knew his footsteps when he got up for water, and by day six I knew he made a turkey sandwich at noon on the dot, and by week two I knew I was noticing way too much.
I’m Luna. I’m a femboy, and I’d like it on the record that I tried very hard to be normal about a guy who walked around in boxers.
I asked him once if he wanted a lock put on the bathroom door.
“Nah,” he said. “If you need to pee, come in.”
“While you’re in there?”
He shrugged. “I don’t care.”
After that I started closing the door every single time I used it. I don’t know why. He never asked me to.
We got quiet together before we got anything else. I came home at six and Taylor had already knocked off, and some nights he’d be on the couch in headphones and some nights he’d be boiling pasta and some nights neither of us could be bothered and we’d eat cereal out of mismatched bowls without even turning on the TV. I didn’t know silence could be something you shared.
On Tuesdays we started talking. Work. The neighbor’s dog. Whether we needed a rug. His sister, my mom.
The third Tuesday, he was standing at the counter eating pasta out of the pot when he said, not looking up, “Do you ever think about me?”
I looked at his face. “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
I did. “Yeah.”
He nodded like I’d confirmed the weather. “Okay. I think about you too. Since like the second week.”
“Okay.”
“Wanna do something about it?”
That was the first question we couldn’t answer at the speed we’d built.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“That’s fine. You don’t have to know tonight.”
He didn’t move toward me and he didn’t make a joke. I washed, he dried, and we went to our separate rooms, and I lay awake thinking that Taylor, who never closed a door in his life, had just closed one on purpose so I’d have somewhere to be.
Wednesday morning I made coffee. He came out at seven-thirty in boxers and a T-shirt, hair flat on one side, and I handed him a mug.
“I thought about it.”
He went very still. “Okay.”
“I don’t want to make it a thing.”
“Okay.”
“But yeah. I want to.”
“Me too,” he said. “Now, if you want.”
So I put my coffee down and walked over. “What do you want?”
He took one long breath. “I want you to do whatever you want.”
I went down on my knees. The kitchen tile was freezing through my pajama pants. I’d done this before, but not like this. Never in the kitchen of an apartment I shared with the guy, never before coffee, never with both of us still carrying sleep in our voices.
I pulled his boxers down and he watched my face instead of looking away. He was already hard, thick and a little curved to the left, and I wrapped my hand around the base and put my mouth on the head and he made a sound I’d been wanting to hear for a month.
I went slow. His hand settled on the back of my head, light, more of an answer than a grip. I learned him by ear, what made his breathing stutter, what made his thighs go tight against my shoulders. A little twist at the base, a long wet drag of my tongue on the underside. He said “Luna” in a cracked voice, and that was the sound I’d been after. He said it right before he came, and I stayed where I was, and swallowed, and held him until he stopped shaking.
I sat back on my heels. He looked kind of stunned, like he’d walked into a room and the walls were still where he left them.
“Do you want me to do something for you?” he said.
“No.”
His face dropped like he’d gotten it wrong. I shook my head. “No. This was what I wanted.”
“Since when?”
“Week two.”
He laughed once under his breath. “You waited that long?”
“I didn’t want to make it a thing.”
“Is it a thing now?”
I looked at the doorway to his room, standing open like always. “No.”
“Okay. Then we don’t call it one.”
I got up and closed the bathroom door behind me and put my back against it and slid down onto the floor, grinning like an idiot, with my pajama pants tented and wet, and I jerked off in about forty seconds thinking about the weight of him in my mouth.
The problem with saying something isn’t a thing is you still have to decide what happens next time.
Thursday morning he asked if I wanted to do it again that night. Thursday night he asked if the couch was okay. Saturday morning he asked if I wanted to do it before coffee, and I said yes before he finished the sentence.
By the end of that week he didn’t really ask anymore. He’d just stand in the kitchen doorway at seven-thirty in his boxers and look at me, and I’d put my coffee down.
By the second week I knew how he liked my hand at the base. I knew he liked slow first. I knew the exact noise he made when he was close, and that he always said my name right before he warned me. By the second week there was coffee after, and that was the part that got dangerous. Not the sex. The coffee. I’d stand up with my knees all rug-burned and he’d tuck himself back in his boxers and I’d pour two cups and we’d sit on the couch not talking. Some mornings he’d put his hand on my ankle. Some mornings I’d put my feet in his lap. Some mornings neither of us said a word until the mugs were empty.
Three weeks in, I was on my knees in front of the couch with the taste of him still in my mouth, and he said “Luna” after it was already over.
“Yeah?”
He looked like he was bracing for a car crash. “I think I love you.”
I waited for my brain to do something dramatic. It didn’t. The apartment stayed small. The coffee table stayed crooked. The Denny’s was still out my window.
“Okay,” I said.
His face fell.
I stood up. “Taylor. I think I love you too.”
He exhaled like I’d taken a boot off his chest. “Okay.” Then he got up and started making dinner. That’s Taylor. He tells you he loves you and then asks if you want pasta.
I sat at the little table in my pajamas and watched him cook in boxers and a T-shirt, and I looked at his face instead of his crotch for the first time in a month.
The next morning, after coffee, he asked the thing I’d been waiting for without knowing.
“Can I do something for you?”
My mouth started to say no out of habit. Then I thought about how the whole point of this apartment had become that neither of us had to guess.
“Yeah,” I said.
I took his hand and walked him down the hall to my room. It was the first time the closed door was ours instead of just mine.
I got on the bed in my sleep shorts and a tank top, and he knelt over me and pulled the shorts down, and my dick sprang up against my stomach, already leaking, and he looked at it like it was a present. “Hi,” he said, to it, seriously, and I laughed so hard I almost lost the erection, and then he put his mouth on me and I stopped laughing.
He wasn’t smooth. He was a little too eager and a little too wet and he kept looking up at me like he wanted a grade. I got my fingers in his hair and told him it was perfect, that he should just do that, right there, and he did, and when I started shaking he held my hips down against the mattress and took more of me. I said his name over and over. I think I said it forty times.
I came in his mouth with my back arched off the bed and my toes curled and the stupid sheets bunched in both fists. He swallowed. He wiped his mouth on his wrist, red-faced and proud. Then he crawled up and lay down beside me and I took his face in both hands and kissed him.
It was our first real kiss, and that was somehow more embarrassing than everything else. He tasted like me, and he kissed me back like he’d been waiting for permission to do that too.
We ended up on his bed watching a show I don’t remember, with my head on his chest and his hand in my hair, and his bedroom door stayed open the whole time.
By the fourth week, “not a thing” had picked up a lot of furniture. The morning ritual. Coffee. Dinner. My feet in his lap. His arm around me on the couch. The word love sitting between us like it came with the lease.
On a Tuesday he asked if I wanted to keep doing this. “Yeah.” “Every day?” “Every day.” He nodded. Then, careful, looking at his hands: “I don’t want to date anyone else.”
“Me neither.”
“I don’t want you to date anyone else.”
“Okay.”
He gave me a look. I smiled. “Yeah. It’s okay.”
Wednesday morning, he said, “Do you want to live in my room?”
I laughed, because we already lived in the same apartment. “What do you mean?”
“Your stuff. Your books. Your toothbrush. Sleep in my bed. Be in my room.”
I looked down the hallway past him. My door was open. His door was open. The bathroom door was open too, because some things never improve.
“Yeah,” I said. “I want to be in your room.”
I moved my books to his shelf. My clothes into half his closet. My toothbrush beside his. It took twenty minutes, and when I came back to the kitchen he was standing there with his coffee looking terrified and happy.
That night he took me in his bed, finally, all the way. He got me on my stomach with a pillow under my hips and went so slow I could hear my own heartbeat, and I turned my face to the side and watched his hand clench on the sheet by my head. When he was all the way inside he put his mouth against the back of my neck and just breathed. Then he moved, deep and steady, the headboard knocking the wall in a rhythm that I’m sure the neighbors learned by heart. I came untouched, rubbing against the pillow, saying his name into the mattress, and he followed with a groan like he’d been punched and collapsed on my back with his whole sweaty weight.
In the morning I woke up in his room.
He was in the kitchen before coffee. He doesn’t ask anymore. I’m on my knees on the tile before the machine finishes, and after, I pour two cups and we sit on the couch without talking.
The apartment is still small. The doors are still open.
The doors are always open.
