He tapped me at 11:34. I answered at 11:40.
I have a system. Two minutes reads as waiting, and then I spend the night being grateful at him. If I answer in fifteen, he’s already on to somebody in Glendale. Six minutes, he’s still sitting in his truck with his thumb over the app, deciding whether to feel stupid. Six minutes, he’s mine before he’s even seen me.
It was 108 degrees at eleven at night in North Phoenix. People from Ohio think you’re exaggerating. The pool in my complex had been drained since May. There’s a blue tarp over it that snaps when the wind comes through, and a working ice machine by the mailboxes that the whole building treats like a shrine. My AC unit cycles every four minutes. You can set a clock by it. I did, that night, without meaning to.
I was doing my nails when he tapped. Left hand finished, right hand two fingers in. Base coat, two coats of a color called Bruised Plum, top coat still to go. That matters later.
His profile had a torso, a truck, and three lines of bio. DL. masc. no fems no drama.
I screenshotted it for the group chat with no caption. Keyla sent back a single skull. We’re not mean about it. He wrote no fems no drama for himself, not for me. So that later, whatever happened, he’d have it in writing that he’s not the type. Take it off his profile and I bet he doesn’t tap anybody. So I leave it alone. Let him keep it.
Also, there was a girlfriend. You could tell from the photos. Three shirtless torso shots, all taken in the same bathroom, and in the corner of the second one, on the towel bar, a hair tie. Pink. Not his.
The distance said 900 feet.
Here’s what I do for money, in order of how much I make: I work the counter at a dispensary off Cactus, I do nails out of my kitchen for girls and three very loyal men, and I save. There’s a spreadsheet. It has a tab called LA and a number at the bottom that goes up slower than I’d like. I’m not going to anybody’s apartment in Silver Lake as a guest. I’m going as someone with first, last, and a deposit.
Tonight wasn’t for the spreadsheet. Tonight was for me.
At 11:40 I opened the message.
hey
That’s all he’d sent. Six minutes of me doing my ring finger and he had not added anything. He hadn’t sent a second message to cover the first. Didn’t u up, didn’t ?, didn’t send a picture. He just waited.
Okay, I thought. You’re a man who can wait. Noted.
hey, I sent back.
The dots came up.
The dots stopped.
This is the part nobody talks about. Not the message. The stopping. Somewhere 900 feet away, a man in an HVAC company polo was typing a sentence, reading it back, deciding it made him sound like something, and deleting it. You can watch a person argue with himself in real time now. It’s the most intimate thing a phone has ever done and nobody wrote a song about it.
The AC kicked on. I blew on my nails.
The dots came up again.
just curious honestly. never done this
There it is. First draft of the excuse. It was fine. It was a little thin. Never done this. You say that when you’ve done this. He’d have known I’d know, which meant it wasn’t for me. He was saying it so he’d have said it.
He wasn’t lying to me, exactly. He was working on it. Trying out a version to see if it held weight. I could help with that.
that’s ok, I wrote. long week?
Dots. Stop. Dots.
brutal week. 3 installs in this heat
so you deserve something nice, I wrote.
I watched that one land. You could feel it through the phone. That was a better excuse than any he’d come up with, and I’d handed it to him gift-wrapped: deserve, like a cold beer, like a day off, like something a hard-working man gets at the end of it and isn’t asked to explain.
yeah, he wrote. Then: you look kinda like a girl in your pics
And there’s the last load-bearing wall.
I looked at my pictures. I looked like a boy who’s good at being pretty, which is what I am. I have an Adam’s apple you could hang a coat on. But kinda like a girl is the door he needed to walk through, and I have never once in my life made a man hold a door open by himself while he figured out if he was allowed through it.
come find out, I wrote, and sent the address, and put the phone face down, and did my pinky.
The distance number is the best thing about the map and it’s also the cruelest.
900 ft.
I did top coat on the left hand.
600 ft.
He was moving. Not driving yet, walking to the truck probably, or sitting in it with the engine running and the AC on max, doing the last round of the argument. I know the parking lot by his building from the map the way you know a restaurant you’ve never eaten at.
400 ft.
Somebody across a bar wanting you is nice. This was different, and I’ve never found a good word for it. The closest I’ve got is arrived at. Watching the number go down and knowing that every foot of it is a decision he made again. He could have turned around at 400. At 300. There’s a Circle K on the corner, he could have bought a Monster and gone home. The map shows you every place he didn’t stop.
200 ft.
The AC cycled off. The apartment got very quiet. I held my right hand up in the air, fingers spread, top coat still wet, and I thought: okay. Okay. You’re doing it.
It took him four minutes to drive 900 feet. It should take ninety seconds. I don’t know what he did with the other two and a half minutes and I never asked. I think about it sometimes.
When I opened the door, he looked at my face first. He’d prepared for kinda like a girl, and he got me: eyeliner I’d done at nine for no reason, a white tank I sleep in, bare feet, one hand up in the air like I was about to be sworn in.
Then he looked at my hands.
His face didn’t change, exactly. His throat did. I watched the whole negotiated framework (curious, long week, kinda like a girl) try to reassemble itself around what was standing in front of him and fail. You can hear it. It’s a swallow.
He was bigger than his pictures, not fatter, just more solid, like a man built out of the parts that don’t break. Twenty-nine, I’d guess, sunburn on the back of his neck in a perfect collar line. Company polo, name tag unpinned and stuffed in his pocket, the clip still showing.
And his hands.
I’ve done a lot of hands. His were a working man’s hands and they’d been taken care of by somebody who wasn’t him. Cuticles pushed back, not cut. Nails filed short and straight, not bitten. There was a faint line of old lotion in the creases of his knuckles, the expensive kind, the kind that comes in a pump bottle on somebody else’s side of the sink. He had a wedding-ring-shaped nothing on his left hand, not a tan line, he wasn’t married, but the finger had a slight dent like he’d been trying on the idea.
Somebody loved this man’s hands. Somebody sat him down on a Sunday and pushed his cuticles back while he watched football and complained. And he let her.
Oh, I thought. He’s someone’s.
“Cody,” he said.
“Dev.”
“You’re—”
“Doing my nails,” I said. “Come in. Don’t touch anything, I’m wet.”
I watched him hear that sentence and decide not to hear the other half of it.
I took him to the couch, not the bed.
That’s on purpose. A bed is a decision. A couch is somewhere you ended up. Tomorrow, in his truck, he could tell himself it just kind of happened on the couch. It cost me nothing to give him that.
He sat. I stood between his knees with my right hand still up.
“I can’t use this hand,” I told him. “It’s drying.”
“Okay.”
“So you’re going to have to do some things for me.”
He looked up at me and I watched him realize what I meant, and I watched him realize he wanted to, and I watched him realize those two things had arrived in the wrong order.
“Your belt,” I said.
He undid his belt.
“Your shirt.”
He pulled the polo over his head and dropped it on the floor next to the name tag, which had fallen out of his pocket and landed face-up. CODY, it said, above a little snowflake logo. He saw me see it and he didn’t pick it up.
I put my left hand, the dry one, flat on his chest. He was hot. Not in the way I mean it, well, also in that way, but hot to the touch. He’d been out in 108 degrees for fourteen hours and his body was still giving it back.
“Tell me what you want,” I said.
“I don’t—” He stopped. Started again. You could see the dots. “Whatever you want.”
“That’s not how this works.”
“I don’t know how this works.”
“Yes, you do,” I said. “You’ve watched it a hundred times on your phone in your truck in a Home Depot parking lot. Tell me.”
He looked at a spot just past my hip. His voice dropped about half a register.
“I want you on your knees,” he said. “I want to watch you do it. And then I want you on top of me. I want you to—” He swallowed. “I want to see you ride it. I want to see your face.”
He’d rehearsed it. You could hear it. That was not a man who’d gotten curious at 11:34. That was a man who’d said those exact words to himself in the dark a few hundred times.
“Okay,” I said. “You can have that. Keep your hands where I can see them.”
I knelt. I kept my right hand up the entire time, wrist cocked, fingers spread, like a girl in a movie waving from a parade float, and I don’t care, it was the hottest I have ever felt in my life. Every time he reached for me I’d say “nails” and he’d stop, and put his hands back on the cushions, and grip them. By the end he’d pulled a thread loose from the seam.
He was already hard. He’d been hard since the door, I think. When I got his jeans down past his hips with my one good hand, his cock came up heavy against his stomach, thick through the base and slightly curved, the head flushed darker than the shaft and wet at the slit. A vein stood up along the underside as it finished hardening. He made a small, embarrassed sound, like it had spoken out of turn.
“Hi,” I said to it, and he laughed, shocked, and then stopped laughing when I licked him from the base to the head, slow, with my eyes on his face.
His hand came off the cushion. It was halfway to my hair.
“Nails,” I said.
He put it back. He gripped the cushion so hard his knuckles went white.
I took my time. I had nowhere to be and he’d driven 900 feet for this. I sucked just the head until he was breathing through his teeth, then took him deeper. The first deep pass caught hard enough to make my jaw ache and my eyes water; I backed off, swallowed, breathed once through my nose, and went down again. Then all the way, until my nose was in the trimmed hair at the base and I could feel his cock throb against the back of my tongue. I held him there. I counted to four in my head, the way I count between coats. Then I pulled off, wet and loud, and looked up at him with my hand still in the air.
“Can I—” he said. “Is it okay if I—”
“If you what.”
“Touch you. Anywhere. Please.”
Please. From DL. masc. no fems.
“You can touch my waist,” I said. “Not my hands.”
He put both hands on my waist like I might break, and then, when I didn’t, like he’d been waiting his whole life to find out how small it was. His thumbs pressed into the dip above my hip bones. He made a noise when he felt them, a low one, from his chest.
I climbed up onto him. Knees on either side of his thighs on the cheap couch cushions. One-handed, I got the lube out of the side-table drawer where I keep it, flicked the cap with my thumb, and slicked him, and he watched every second of it like it was surgery. Then I braced my left hand flat on his chest, still over his heart, and kept my right hand up in the air, and lowered myself onto him.
Slow. I did it slow because I wanted to, and because the look on his face while I did it was the best thing I’d seen all summer. His mouth opened. His eyes went from my face to where he was disappearing inside me and back to my face, like he couldn’t decide which one was the evidence.
“Oh my God,” he said. “Oh my God, Dev.”
“Stay still.”
He stayed still. He shook with it. When I was all the way down I sat there and let him feel it, how tight, how warm, my ass flush against his hips, and I rolled them once, just once, and his head fell back against the couch.
Then I rode him.
I set the pace and I kept it. Every time his hips tried to take over I stopped dead and waited, and he’d groan and go still again, and I’d start again. The AC unit cycled on behind us, and I found I was moving with it, and I don’t think he noticed, and I didn’t tell him. His hands stayed on my waist the whole time, holding on, not steering. My tank top rode up. He pushed it higher with his thumbs so he could see my stomach, and my cock bouncing hard against it, leaking, and he didn’t look away from that, either. He looked right at it.
“Touch it,” I said.
He wrapped his big, lotioned, somebody-else’s-Sunday hand around me and stroked me, clumsy at first, then not, matching me, and I had to put my forehead down on his shoulder for a second, my right hand still up in the air behind his head like I was hailing a cab.
Then, near the end, he said it.
Not girl. Not baby, which is the safe one, the one you use when you don’t want to pick. He said “Dev,” and then, right after, like it had been waiting behind my name the whole time, he said, “God, you’re a pretty boy,” and then he went completely quiet, and his eyes shut, and his hands came off my waist, and he didn’t grab for me, he put them over his own face.
He came like that, hands over his eyes, hips jerking up into me once, twice, a long broken sound coming out from under his palms. I felt him pulse inside me. I came a few seconds later, in his fist and all over his stomach, my right hand still up in the air, Bruised Plum, not a smudge.
Boy. Nobody asked him to say it.
After, he needed about four minutes. He sat up. He looked around the apartment like he’d been dropped into it by a helicopter. He wiped his stomach with his own polo, then looked at the polo like he’d have to explain it to somebody. He found the name tag and put it back in his pocket. He made one joke, and it was about the heat, and I laughed at it, because it was his, and he needed something that was his right then.
“Hot as balls in here,” Cody said.
“It’s an old unit,” I said. “It cycles.”
“I could look at it.”
That one surprised me. He meant it. You could see it: the professional part of him lighting back up, the part with a van full of gauges and a reason to be in someone’s apartment that he could say out loud.
“You want to look at my AC,” I said.
“It’s making that sound. That clicking. Your capacitor’s going.”
“It’s midnight.”
“Takes two minutes,” he said, and I let him go look at it, because what else was I going to do? I’m not going to punish a man for needing something to fix. He stood in my utility closet with the phone flashlight in his teeth and poked at something and said “yeah” in a satisfied way and came back and said, “Get your landlord to replace the capacitor. Forty bucks. Don’t let them charge you more.”
“Okay.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know.”
He stood in the middle of my living room with his hands in his pockets.
“Your nails look good,” he said.
I looked at them. Not a single smudge. Bruised Plum, all ten.
“I know,” I said, and he laughed, a real one, surprised out of him. Then he left.
I want to tell you I didn’t do the thing I did next, which is stand in my bathroom and look at myself for a long time.
Part of me knows exactly what I’m doing. No fems, the profile said, and he drove 900 feet in four minutes. I could put that in a spreadsheet too.
And then there’s this other part, smaller, that was standing at the mirror checking whether the eyeliner still read at midnight, checking whether my shoulders were narrow enough in the tank, whether he’d been looking at me or looking past me at something he’d decided I resembled. The part that heard pretty boy and, God help me, keeps hearing it. The part that likes being wanted that fast, and doesn’t entirely believe it would happen if I were less careful about every single thing.
I didn’t look at it any harder than that. I washed my face. I left the nails.
At 12:31 my phone buzzed.
Venmo. Cody M. sent you $40.00.
The memo said: for gas 😂
I sat on the edge of the tub and laughed until I had to put the phone down.
Forty dollars. Exactly the price of a capacitor. For 900 feet of gas, which is maybe a nickel.
I didn’t accept it or send it back. I just let it sit there.
Then I opened the map.
His dot was still in the lot.
I watched it. The AC cycled on. Off. On. You could set a clock by it. He was sitting in his truck in my parking lot with the engine running, I assume, because nobody sits in a truck in Phoenix in August without the engine running, and he was not driving home.
Six minutes.
Eight.
I typed you’re still here.
I didn’t send it. I held my thumb over it.
Eleven minutes after he left my apartment, the dot moved, slowly, out toward Cactus, toward the 51, toward wherever he goes, and the number went up. 0.2 miles. 0.4. 1.1.
I deleted the message one letter at a time, which is a thing I have never once done in my life, and which I realized, halfway through, was exactly what he’d been doing at 11:34.
Then I went to bed. Nails perfect. Forty dollars pending.
My capacitor’s still going, by the way. I haven’t called the landlord.
