I listed the vanity on a Sunday at 11 p.m. with the worst photo I’ve ever taken of anything.
I got fourteen messages. Thirteen were is this still available, which is the Facebook Marketplace default button, which means nothing. The fourteenth was from a man named Travis Kimbrough, whose profile picture was a bass on a dock with a hand holding it, and whose message said:
Travis Kimbrough: Can pick up tmrw after 5:30. Have a truck and a dolly. Cash ok?
That was the whole message. No hey. No is this still available. A truck and a dolly. I sold it to him for the dolly.
He came up the stairs at 5:52 on Monday in a KUB lineman’s shirt, the orange one with the reflective stripes, dark with sweat under the arms, and a pair of boots that had clearly been standing in a ditch that afternoon. Big. Thirty-something. Sunburned at the back of the neck. A wedding-ring tan line he was not currently wearing a ring over, which I noticed, because I notice.
“Remy?”
“That’s me.”
He looked at me for one half of one second longer than a person picking up a vanity needs to look at the seller. I was in bike shorts and a cropped KUB Fun Run t-shirt from 2019 I’d gotten at Goodwill, which I only realized when his eyes went to it, and then to my stomach, and then very fast back to my face.
“Nice shirt,” he said.
“I’m a big fan of the utilities board.”
He laughed, one short surprised breath through his nose, and I let him in.
He carried the vanity down by himself. He didn’t use the dolly on the stairs, just picked it up, the mirror and the drawers and all, and walked it down backwards with his forearms locked, and I stood at the top of the stairs and watched the backs of his arms and didn’t pretend I wasn’t. At the bottom he strapped it into the bed of a white F-250 with a ladder rack and a toolbox and handed me three twenties he’d folded in half.
“It’s for my sister,” he said, even though I hadn’t asked. “She’s been wanting one for her new place.”
“Tell her to tap the left bulb.”
“Tap the left bulb,” he repeated, and nodded like he was writing it down, and drove away.
That should have been it.
Travis Kimbrough, 9:48 PM: Hey this is Travis with the vanity. You left an earring in the top drawer
Travis Kimbrough, 9:48 PM: [photo]
The photo was a small gold hoop sitting in the palm of his hand. His hand was huge. The hoop looked like a ring for a doll. You could see the black under his thumbnail and a white scar across the heel of his palm.
Remy, 9:51 PM: oh my god thank you. i’ve been looking for that for a month
Remy, 9:51 PM: you can just leave it in there for your sister tho, she can have it
Travis Kimbrough, 9:53 PM: Nah that’s yours. I can drop it by
I looked at I can drop it by for a long time. Fountain City to wherever he lived. Over an earring worth maybe eleven dollars.
Remy, 9:54 PM: you really don’t have to drive back for one earring
The typing bubble came up. Went away. Came up. Went away. Came up.
Travis Kimbrough, 9:57 PM: I’m off Thursday
Three minutes to type four words.
I’ve been on apps since I was nineteen. I know what three minutes to type four words means. It means a man sitting in a truck in his own driveway with the engine off, typing something and deleting it, typing something else and deleting that too, and settling for the only sentence that sounds like an errand.
Remy, 9:58 PM: thursday’s good
He didn’t come Thursday.
He texted Wednesday night instead, at 11:14, which is not an errand hour.
Travis Kimbrough, 11:14 PM: Can I ask you something weird
Remy, 11:14 PM: you can ask
Travis Kimbrough, 11:16 PM: When I came to get the vanity. Were you wearing that shirt on purpose
Remy, 11:16 PM: the KUB shirt??
Travis Kimbrough, 11:16 PM: Yeah
Remy, 11:17 PM: travis i did not know you were a lineman. i didn’t know anything about you except you had a dolly
Travis Kimbrough, 11:17 PM: Ok
Travis Kimbrough, 11:17 PM: I thought about it all day at work. That’s weird. Sorry
I sat up in bed.
Remy, 11:18 PM: thought about the shirt?
The bubble. Gone. The bubble.
Travis Kimbrough, 11:21 PM: Not the shirt
I put my phone face-down on the comforter and pressed my hands flat against my face, and then I picked it back up, because I’m not stupid.
Remy, 11:22 PM: what then
Travis Kimbrough, 11:25 PM: I’ve never been with a guy. I’m not like that. I want to be clear I’m not trying to be a creep. I was married for six years. I just can’t stop thinking about you on those stairs
Travis Kimbrough, 11:25 PM: You can tell me to fuck off. I’ll mail the earring
He was going to mail the earring. I laughed out loud alone in my room.
Here’s the thing about a straight guy at 11:25 p.m. He’s standing at the edge of a pool in the dark. You can tell him the water’s cold, or you can tell him it’s fine, and either way he’s going to remember which one you picked for the rest of his life.
Remy, 11:27 PM: i’m not going to tell you to fuck off
Remy, 11:27 PM: what were you thinking about. on the stairs
Travis Kimbrough, 11:31 PM: Your legs. Your stomach in that shirt. The way you watched me carry that thing like you were thinking about something else
Remy, 11:31 PM: i was thinking about something else
Travis Kimbrough, 11:31 PM: What
Remy, 11:32 PM: your arms. whether you’d pick me up like that
The bubble came up and stayed up for a long time. Then:
Travis Kimbrough, 11:34 PM: Fuck
Travis Kimbrough, 11:34 PM: I’m hard as hell right now. I’ve been hard since 11
My whole body went warm from the stomach out. I slid down under the comforter.
Remy, 11:35 PM: where are you
Travis Kimbrough, 11:35 PM: In my truck. In my driveway. I didn’t want to do this inside for some reason
Travis Kimbrough, 11:35 PM: That’s stupid
Remy, 11:36 PM: it’s not stupid
Remy, 11:36 PM: can i call you
Forty seconds. I counted.
Travis Kimbrough, 11:37 PM: Yeah
He picked up on the first ring and didn’t say anything. I could hear the truck: that tick an engine makes cooling down, a dog somewhere far away, him breathing through his nose.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hey.” His voice was lower than in person. Rough, like he’d been yelling over a bucket truck all day, which he probably had. “This is. I don’t know what this is.”
“You don’t have to know.” I was lying on my back with the phone on the pillow next to my ear. “Are you still hard?”
A breath out. “Yeah.”
“Touch it for me.”
Nothing. The dog. The engine ticking. Then the sound of a belt buckle, heavy, clinking, a zipper, the creak of the seat as he shifted, and a sound he made in the back of his throat that I felt in my own.
“Tell me,” I said.
“Tell you what.”
“What it looks like. I want to picture it.”
“Jesus, Remy.” But he did. He did it the way I’m sure he talks on a job site, plain and precise, like a report. “It’s—it’s big. I’m big. I’ve been told. Thick. It’s leaking all over my hand, I’ve been hard for forty minutes. Head’s all red.” A pause. A wet sound. “I’ve never said any of this out loud.”
I had my hand in my shorts. I was hard and aching, and I pushed the waistband down and wrapped my fingers around myself, and I was slick at the tip too, and I told him so.
“You’re touching yourself,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yeah.”
“What are you wearing.”
“Nothing now. Just the shirt.”
“That shirt?”
“I put it on after you left,” I said, which was true, and I’d never admit it to anyone else, and he made a sound like I’d punched him.
“Slow down,” I told him. “I can hear you going fast. Slow down. I want this to take a while.”
“Okay.” His voice was shaking. “Okay.”
“Pretend it’s my hand.”
“It’s not small enough,” he said, and I laughed, and he laughed, and it was so strange and good to hear him laugh with his hand on his cock in a driveway I’d never seen, that I pressed my face into the pillow for a second.
“I’ve got a toy,” I said.
Quiet. Then, carefully: “What kind of toy.”
“A dildo. It’s pink. It’s about seven inches and it’s not as thick as you.” I didn’t know that yet. But I knew that yet. “I want to use it while you listen.”
“Yes,” he said, instantly. No bubble. No three minutes. “Fuck. Yes.”
I put him on speaker. I got the lube out of the nightstand and got on my knees on the bed with my ass in the air, facing the mirror on the closet door. The phone was on the pillow in front of me, where his voice could come right up out of it.
I told him everything. I told him how cold the lube was, and how I worked two fingers into myself first because I knew he’d want to hear it. I told him the sound it made, and I let him hear it. I told him when the head of the toy pushed against my hole and how my hole resisted it and then gave, that stretch that goes bright and hot and then melts. I told him how full it felt, sliding in inch by inch, and that I was pretending it was him, and that I’d need him to go slower than this at first, because he was bigger.
“Remy.” He was breathing hard. I could hear his fist moving now, fast, and the seat creaking in rhythm, and his other hand slapping the steering wheel once. “Remy, you sound—”
“Say it.”
“You sound like a girl,” he said, rough and helpless, like it was being dragged out of him. “You sound like the prettiest fucking girl I’ve ever heard.”
I came so hard I dropped my face onto the pillow and got my own spit on the phone screen. I came untouched, just from the toy pressing where it presses and his voice saying that, my cock twitching and spilling onto the sheets under me, my hole clenching around the toy, and I moaned right into the phone and didn’t care who heard it in my building.
He heard it.
“Fuck,” he said, and then he didn’t say anything, just a series of sounds, low and cut off, three, four, and a long breath out like a tire going flat, and then the seat creaking, and then nothing.
We lay there, in two places, breathing.
“I just came all over the inside of my truck,” he said finally, in a small, stunned voice, and I laughed so hard the toy slid out.
Travis Kimbrough, 6:02 AM: Still coming Thursday if that’s ok
Travis Kimbrough, 6:02 AM: For the earring
Remy, 6:40 AM: for the earring 🙂
He came Thursday at 6:30 in clean jeans and a gray t-shirt that he had obviously ironed. He had the earring in a Ziploc sandwich bag. He’d also, for some reason, brought the vanity back.
It was in the bed of the truck. Strapped down. I looked at it over the railing from the second-floor landing.
“Your sister?” I said.
He was standing at the bottom of the stairs with his hands in his pockets, looking up.
“There’s no sister,” he said. “I mean, I have a sister. She’s in Chattanooga. She doesn’t want a vanity.”
“You bought a sixty-dollar vanity to come up my stairs.”
“I bought a sixty-dollar vanity to come up your stairs,” he agreed.
He carried it back up. Same as before: forearms locked, walking it backwards, and I stood at the top of the stairs and watched his arms, and this time when he got to the top he set it down on the landing and straightened up and looked at me, standing a step higher than him so we were almost the same height, and didn’t do anything.
I could see him doing it. The math. His eyes went to my mouth and away. His hands opened and closed at his sides. He took a breath, and let it out, and I watched him think about the six years, the sister in Chattanooga, his truck, his coworkers, the ditch he’d stood in on Monday. His throat moved.
“I’m not—” he started.
“I know,” I said. “You don’t have to be anything. You’re standing on my stairs.”
He looked at me for another second.
“Holy shit,” he said, very quietly, to himself. “Okay.”
Then he picked me up.
Just like I’d said on the phone. Hands under my thighs, lifting me straight off the step, and I wrapped my legs around his waist and my arms around his neck, and he kissed me like a man who’d been thinking about it in a ditch for three days, clumsy and hungry, his stubble scraping my chin, and carried me inside and kicked the door shut behind us with a boot. The vanity was still on the landing.
He put me on the bed and stood over me, breathing hard, and pulled his ironed t-shirt off over his head. Chest hair. Farmer’s tan. A long white scar down one side of his ribs I’d ask about later. He unbuckled his belt and I sat up and pushed his hands away and did it myself.
He hadn’t been lying on the phone.
His cock came out heavy and already mostly hard, and got harder while I looked at it. Thick. Thicker than my wrist at the base, veined, the foreskin sliding back off a fat flushed head as it filled. He smelled like laundry soap, and under it like a man who’d come straight from work and showered too fast. My mouth actually watered. I’d told him on the phone my toy wasn’t as thick as him, and I’d been guessing, and I’d guessed low.
“Is it—” he started, and I think he was going to ask if it was okay, if it was too much, if I was sure, and I didn’t let him get there. I leaned forward and licked him from his balls to the tip in one long, slow stripe, and whatever he was going to ask turned into a sound.
I sucked him on the edge of my bed with his hand in my hair. He didn’t know what to do with his hand at first; it just sat there on my head like he was afraid of it. So I took his wrist and pressed it down, and he understood. His fingers closed. He pushed. I took him as deep as I could, and it wasn’t all of him, not close. My jaw ached at the stretch of it and my eyes streamed and I gagged on him once, hard, and pulled off coughing with spit hanging off my lip, and he said “shit—sorry, sorry,” and I said “again,” and went back down.
“Look at you,” he said, a minute later, hoarse, wondering. “Look at you. God, Remy. Good girl. Is that—can I say that?”
I looked up at him with my mouth full and my eyes wet and nodded as hard as I could.
“Good girl,” he said again, surer, like trying out a tool, and pushed himself deeper, and I moaned around him.
He fucked me the way I’d told him to on the phone. Slow at first.
I got on my back with my knees up and handed him the lube, and he looked at it like it was a part he’d never installed, and then he figured it out, because he’s a man who figures things out with his hands. He worked two thick fingers into me, then three, watching my face the whole time, and when I said “now” he said “you sure,” and I said “Travis,” and he didn’t ask again.
The head of his cock pressed against my hole and didn’t go in, and then did, and the stretch was nothing like the toy. It was so much bigger, a deep hot burning fullness that took my whole breath and held it. I grabbed his forearms and dug my nails in and he stopped dead.
“Don’t stop,” I said. “Don’t stop. Just slow.”
He went slow. He gave it to me an inch at a time, his arms shaking on either side of my head, sweat dripping off his nose onto my chest, his jaw clenched like he was holding up something much heavier than his own body. When he was all the way in, balls against my ass, I could feel him throbbing inside me. So full I could barely think. So deep I felt it in my stomach.
“Oh my God,” he said, into my neck. “Oh my God. You’re so tight. You feel—”
“Move.”
He moved.
At first careful, long, slow strokes all the way out and all the way back in, watching my face for anything wrong. Then, when my legs locked around his back and I started pulling him in, less careful. Then not careful at all. The bed frame hit the wall. His hand came down and pinned my wrist to the mattress without him seeming to decide to do it. He fucked me with his whole body, the way he’d carried that vanity down the stairs, like a job he intended to finish.
“Say it again,” I begged. “What you said on the phone.”
“You’re a girl,” he said, driving into me, breath ragged. “You’re my girl. Pretty girl. Say it.”
“I’m your girl.”
“Whose?”
“Yours.”
He wrapped his fist around my cock, rough and big and clumsy, and it didn’t matter. Three strokes and I was coming again, spurting all over my own stomach and his knuckles, clenching down on him so hard he groaned like it hurt.
He came a few seconds after. He shoved in deep and stayed there, his whole body going rigid over me, face in my neck, and I felt it. His cock pulsing, over and over, flooding me hot, and his breath stopped and then came out of him in one long broken groan against my throat.
And then he was just heavy. All of him. On me.
After a while he rolled off and lay on his back and stared at my ceiling fan.
“I bought a vanity,” he said.
“You did.”
“I drove a vanity back across town.”
“You did.”
He turned his head on the pillow and looked at me.
“I’m gonna need you to tell me where you want it,” he said.
It’s in the corner of my bedroom now. He put it there that night, in his boxers, at 10 p.m., on his knees with a level he had in the truck, because the floor in my apartment slopes and he said it would bug him.
The left bulb still flickers. He comes over Thursdays after his shift and every time he walks in, before he says hi, before anything, he goes and taps it.
