devon is in my senior seminar and smokes newports. we’ve been doing smoke breaks since september, same back stairwell, same four feet of concrete between us. he’s twenty-two, six-two, black, and for two months he never said a word to me that wasn’t about the reading.
last tuesday he finished his cigarette slower than usual. i noticed because i noticed everything about how he smoked — the long first pull, the way he held the door with his shoulder, the exact number of drags a seminar’s worth of resentment takes. he said my name like a question he already knew the answer to. then he walked around the side of the building, past the dumpsters, to the stretch of wall where the motion light’s been broken since spring. i followed him. obviously.
i’d stopped wearing plain underwear on the first day of october. i don’t remember making the decision. i just remember standing at my dresser one morning doing arithmetic about what he might do and what i might need to be wearing for it. everything under my clothes since then has been a small, deliberate, private answer to a question nobody had asked yet. he never asked. he was taking his time. i let him.
he didn’t kiss me. he didn’t touch me. he just leaned back against the brick, lit a fresh newport, took one long pull, and looked at my mouth.
“open,” he said.
he said it the same way you’d say pass me the lighter. and i just did.
i got down on the gravel in my skirt and my heeled sandals, which was a mistake, my knees complained about it immediately and i ignored every single one of them. he didn’t help me. he didn’t rush me either. he let me arrange myself on the ground in front of him like a man watching a bird decide where to land, and when i was settled — skirt spread, hands coming up to his belt, chin already tilted — he reached down, took a fistful of my hair, and held my head where it needed to be. not low. not yet. just where he could see it.
he looked at me for a second, and it was the first time in two months anyone at that school had actually looked at me.
“look at you,” he said. “all dressed up to smoke.”
he didn’t say pretty. he didn’t have to; pretty was in the way the words came out. i’d worn the pink set under the skirt for two weeks straight by then, and the strap was showing where my blouse had ridden up, and he clocked it once, top to bottom, and his eyes held on the strap a second longer than the scan required.
“good girl,” he said. he took another drag and let the smoke go up over my head, slow, like he had all night.
he was already hard. i had the zipper open and his cock out in about three seconds — thick and heavy in my hand, the skin hot in the cold air — and i got my tongue on the head first, the way he’d want, working the underside until his breath caught. then i took him in. a few inches, pull back, a few more. when i went all the way down my nose hit the base of him and my throat locked up, and i gagged once, hard, spit running straight down my chin onto the gravel, and went right back down before i’d recovered, because the whole point of a standing appointment is that he never has to ask for the second one.
“you know how to do this,” he said. flat. not a compliment. a fact.
my throat clicked when i swallowed. that was the only answer i had.
he kept the cigarette in his left hand and his right in my hair, moving my head at his own pace, not rough, just certain. my jaw was aching by the fourth pass. he pushed me down another half inch and held me there, throat full, while i swallowed around him, and he groaned something that wasn’t a word. above me the smoke went up and the broken light stayed dark and somewhere across campus a chapel bell did its thing like it was rating us.
“say whose mouth this is,” he said.
i came off him just far enough to breathe and talk, spit strung from my lip to his cock. “yours,” i said. my voice came out wrecked, which is its own confirmation.
“again.”
“my mouth is yours.”
“that’s right.” and he put me back down and this time he didn’t let the rhythm stay polite, hips moving under me now, short and hard, the drags between visits to my mouth getting shorter until the cigarette was just burning in his hand, forgotten, and there was only the wet sound of it in the cold air and his fist in my hair. i was hard in the pink set and leaking against my own thigh and neither of us mentioned it. he never touches me below the waist, which has become its own kind of rule: the arrangement is my mouth. everything else is mine to handle on the walk back.
“my dark hand in your hair,” he said, low, watching himself do it. “look at you on your knees behind a building for me.” he held me down until my throat stopped arguing. “white girl on her smoke break.”
he came in my mouth in three hard pulses, fist tight in my hair, holding me through every one. i stayed and took it, swallowing around him, because pulling off right then would have felt like losing something i’d spent two months being ready for. when he finally let go i was still swallowing, chin soaked, the front of my blouse wrecked, mascara at least doing its job.
he exhaled, long, and looked down at me like he was filing something. then he took one more drag off the newport, which had burned down to almost nothing in his hand, and ground it out on the brick.
i got up, fixed my skirt, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. he was already zipping up, totally unbothered, the exact unbothered of a man who has another cigarette in his pocket and another day of me on the calendar.
“same time tomorrow,” he said.
not a question. i didn’t answer. i didn’t have to.
i washed my face in the second-floor bathroom, straightened the pink strap where it had twisted under my blouse, and stared at my reflection for a while. my mouth was swollen. my knees were going to be a conversation with my own mirror tomorrow. i caught myself smiling and didn’t bother stopping, and walked back into seminar late with his taste still in my mouth and sat one row behind him and took notes.
i smoke newports now. i started that week. he’s never asked why.
