The app was in a folder on my phone called UTILITIES, between the flashlight and the level.
I’m Ryan. Thirty-one, journeyman wireman, IBEW Local 683. Most days I’m pulling wire in a building that doesn’t have walls yet, or I’m on my back in a drop ceiling over a Tire Discounters in Hilliard with pink insulation down my collar. Last spring I rewired the lighting rig at the Rialto on High Street, which is the only job I’ve ever done that people clap under. I’m engaged to Steph. She’s a dental hygienist in Grove City. She’s a good person, better than me, and nothing in this is her fault.
For eleven weeks I talked to a guy I’d never seen the face of. Most nights, around ten, on our couch, with Steph asleep against my arm and some baking show on, and my phone tipped toward my knee with the brightness all the way down.
The guys on my crew pass their phones around at lunch. Girls from Tinder, girls from wherever. If this had been that I’d have been fine.
It wasn’t that.
We talked about work. That was most of it. He asked what I did that day and I told him, and he asked a follow-up question, and then another one. He wanted to know why you can’t just put a bigger breaker in if one keeps tripping. He wanted to know what a GFCI does. He said so it’s basically a bouncer and I laughed out loud on my couch at 10:40 at night and Steph stirred and said what and I said nothing, guy from work.
First time I lied about it out loud. It came out so easy it scared me.
His profile, exactly, because I stared at it enough that I don’t need to look:
kai · 26 · 5'8 · 140 clintonville. i do eyebrows for money and opinions for free. not a secret, not a phase, not your first time’s problem. no face no chat. i’ll make an exception if you’re funny.
My profile was a gray square and the word hey. By his own rules he never should have answered me.
I found out later I was funny. That was the exception I got.
I had a rule for how this was okay. I’ll say it even though it makes me look like an idiot.
I’d seen his body. Neck-down pictures in the public part of the profile, a mirror in what I figured out was his bedroom. Slim and soft, and he wore things. Thigh-highs in one. A sweater hanging off one shoulder in another. In one he was on his stomach on the bed with his feet up and crossed at the ankle, and I looked at that one enough that I started worrying the app could tell.
So the rule was: he looks like that, so it doesn’t count. It’s the look. A guy can be into a look.
I ran that rule every day. On the ladder, in the truck, in the shower. Every day it held.
Week four, he had a problem with his apartment.
kai, 9:52 PM: ok electric man. question. kai, 9:52 PM: every time i use my hair dryer and the space heater at the same time everything in my bathroom dies kai, 9:53 PM: and then i have to go in the scary closet and flip the thing me, 9:55 PM: thats your breaker doing its job. same circuit. youre pulling too much kai, 9:55 PM: so get a bigger one me, 9:56 PM: NO me, 9:56 PM: do not let anyone put a bigger breaker on that. the wire is sized for the breaker. you put a 30 on 12 gauge and the wire becomes the fuse. thats how houses burn down kai, 9:57 PM: ok wow you got SO serious me, 9:57 PM: im serious. move the heater to an outlet on a different wall. try the bedroom kai, 10:04 PM: it worked kai, 10:04 PM: hair’s dry, i’m warm, nothing’s on fire kai, 10:05 PM: you just kept me from burning down my apartment and i don’t even know what you look like me, 10:06 PM: thats kind of the job kai, 10:06 PM: it’s kind of hot is what it is
I read that last one eleven times. There was a guy on TV torching a crème brûlée and I sat there with the phone against my leg reading it’s kind of hot like it was a pay stub.
Steph says I’m handsome. She said it on my birthday. This was different. It’s the difference between being told you did a good job and being told you’re good at something.
Week nine, he asked for the album.
You can lock photos on that app. Private album. You open yours, he opens his. It’s the only honest thing about the whole app, because somebody has to go first.
kai, 10:31 PM: ok. i’ve been patient kai, 10:31 PM: nine weeks. that’s a record for me kai, 10:32 PM: i’m not asking for a dick pic. i actually don’t care. i want to see you kai, 10:32 PM: send me literally anything and i’ll open mine
I didn’t answer that night. Or the next.
I didn’t have anything to send. I’ve got pictures of transformer vaults and panel work I’m proud of and a crappie I caught at Alum Creek in 2019, and a hundred pictures with Steph in them. There isn’t a picture of me that isn’t also a picture of my life.
Wednesday, Steph asked who I was always texting. We were doing dishes. She washes, I dry. She asked it the way you’d ask what time it is.
“Work,” I said. “Apprentice on the Italian Village job. Kid’s having a whole thing.”
“Poor kid,” she said, and handed me a plate.
She believed me instantly. It would’ve been easier if she hadn’t.
Thursday on lunch I sat in my truck in a Home Depot lot off Olentangy with the heater blasting and rain on the windshield and took a picture of my hands on the wheel.
Ten and two. Knuckles cracked from the cold. The band on my left ring finger. Steph and I both wear them, engagement bands, her idea. I thought about taking it off for the picture. I didn’t. I’ve thought about why a lot since.
I sent it before I could stop.
Delivered. Read. Then nothing, long enough that I thought, he wanted a face, you idiot, and he’s laughing at you in a salon at Easton with tweezers in his hand.
kai, 12:18 PM: oh kai, 12:18 PM: ok yeah. that’ll do it kai, 12:19 PM: 🔓
I tapped the album.
I’d been ready for a body. I had eleven weeks of excuses built to survive a body.
Nobody warned me about the face.
Just a selfie. Couch, oversized gray sweatshirt, no makeup, hair up in a claw clip, phone held a little above him, looking at the camera like I’d said something he didn’t quite believe. Dark eyes. A little mole by his mouth. A nose that had been broken once. A boy’s jaw. A boy’s throat. Eyebrows that were perfect, obviously, because that was his job.
He didn’t look like a girl.
He looked like Kai. He looked like the guy who called a GFCI a bouncer.
It took about four seconds. Rain on the glass, a Subway bag on the passenger seat, and the rule came down all at once without a sound.
me, 12:31 PM: can i come over after work kai, 12:31 PM: yeah kai, 12:32 PM: ryan. you don’t have to me, 12:32 PM: i know
I’d never told him my name. It’s on the Local 683 sticker on my dash, with my card number, in the corner of the hands picture. He’d zoomed in.
It’s twenty minutes from the Italian Village job to his place over a pho restaurant on Bethel Road. Straight up 315. I know every exit because I’d been doing the drive in my head for weeks without admitting it.
Lane Avenue, I could get off. Ackerman, I could get off. North Broadway. Henderson. I sat in the right lane with my blinker going at Henderson for no reason until a guy in a Civic laid on his horn.
The last place I could’ve turned was the Speedway on the corner of his block. I pulled in. Pump six. I didn’t get gas. I looked at myself in the rearview for a while and I don’t know what I was looking for.
I was hard. I’d been hard since North Broadway. I sat there with my jeans too tight and my face hot and thought about his throat in that sweatshirt and his mouth saying my name out loud instead of typing it, and I had to put my forehead on the wheel.
Then I drove the last two hundred feet.
He opened the door before I knocked. Same gray sweatshirt from the picture, leggings, thick socks, bare face. He was smaller than I’d pictured.
He looked at me for about four seconds, soaked from the walk, still in my Carhartt with a coil of 14 in the pocket, and I watched him read all of it. The Speedway. The blinker at Henderson. That I didn’t know what I was doing.
He wasn’t smug. If he’d been smug I could’ve turned around.
“Hey,” he said. “You can still go. I’ll still let you fix my outlets.”
I didn’t go.
The door shut behind me and I couldn’t get farther than the entry. His shoes were lined up on a mat. His phone was face-up on a little shelf by the coats, and while I stood there it lit with a group chat called night shift 🦇, and a preview I wasn’t supposed to see:
pip: is the electrician there or are we still pretending
Kai flipped the phone face-down without looking at it.
“Friends,” he said.
“They know?”
“They know there’s an electrician.” He stepped in close. I could smell whatever he put in his hair, something like pears. “They don’t know he’s shaking.”
“I’m not—”
He put his hand flat on my chest over the Carhartt and waited. I stopped trying.
“I don’t,” I said.
“I know.”
“I’ve never—”
“I know.”
I started that sentence maybe five times that night and he never once made me finish it.
He got up on his toes and kissed me. I put my hands on his waist and his waist was so small my fingers almost met at the small of his back, and I made a sound I’d never heard myself make.
“Look at me,” he said against my mouth.
I looked.
He undid the snaps on my Carhartt one at a time, top to bottom, like he was unwrapping something he’d paid for, and pushed it off my shoulders so it fell on his shoes. Then he put the heel of his hand on the front of my jeans, where I was so hard it hurt, and pressed.
I put my head back against his coats.
“Yeah?” he said.
That was the gate. One word, his hand not moving, waiting on me.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yes.”
He got down on his knees on the shoe mat.
He undid my belt and my jeans and pulled everything down just to my thighs, and I came out heavy and all the way hard in the stairwell light coming under the door. I’m thick through the middle and I curve a little left, and the head was dark and flushed and already wet at the slit, and I could feel my heartbeat in it while he looked. Kai looked for a long second, not at my face. At my cock. Like he was reading a panel schedule.
“Ryan,” he said. Just my name. Like a compliment.
Then he wrapped his hand around the base and put his mouth on me.
I’ve had head before. I’m thirty-one. It wasn’t like this. He kept his bare face tipped up so I had to see it, the mole, the broken nose, and he held my eyes while his lips closed around the head and his tongue pressed flat under the ridge. My knees went. Actually went. I slapped a hand flat on the door behind me to stay up.
He went slow, like he had all night. Wet. His fist twisting at the base, his other hand on my hip pinning me to the coats. My free hand didn’t know where to go. It hovered over his head like an idiot. He reached up without stopping, took my wrist, and put my hand in his hair, right at the clip.
I held on.
“Fuck,” I said. “Kai. Jesus.”
He pulled off with a wet sound, lips shining, and looked up.
“Tell me,” he said.
“Tell you what.”
“What you want. Out loud.”
I couldn’t. I shook my head.
“Ryan.” Patient. His hand still moving on me, slow. “Eleven weeks. Say one true thing.”
“I want your mouth,” I said. My voice cracked in the middle like a bad splice. “I want to see your face while you do it.”
“There he is.”
He took me back in and this time he went down. All the way down. I felt the back of his throat, felt it close tight around the head, and he gagged, a hard wet clench that went straight up my spine. His eyes flooded. He didn’t pull off. He held there for one shaking second with his nose almost to my stomach, then came up gasping, spit strung from his lip to my cock, and before I could say anything he went down again.
“Kai—”
He hummed around me. Didn’t stop.
My hand tightened in his hair. I didn’t mean it to. He moaned when it did, a real one, the vibration of it right on me, and he pushed his own head down harder against my grip, and I understood he wanted my hand to mean something.
“Like that?” I said.
He nodded with me in his mouth.
So I held his head and fucked his mouth, short and careful at first, then not careful. Wet sounds in a two-hundred-square-foot entryway. Pears and rain and spit. His hands braced on my thighs. Every time I let him up for air he took one breath and came back for more, lashes wet, lips swollen.
I was going to come. I pulled him off by the hair.
“Not yet,” I said. It sounded like somebody else.
Kai sat back on his heels, chest heaving, chin wet, and looked at me like he’d been waiting eleven weeks for me to be the one to say something like that.
“Okay,” he said. “Then fuck me.”
He stood, turned, and pushed his leggings to the middle of his thighs. Put both hands flat on the door next to mine. Arched his back and looked at me over his shoulder. His ass was small and round and pale, and between his legs his cock was hard and flushed pink, hanging heavy, leaking onto the leggings bunched at his thighs. I’d never seen another guy’s cock hard, in person, pointed at me.
I wanted it. That was new. I put it on the list of things I’d think about at pump six later.
He’d gotten lube from somewhere. The coat pocket. Which meant he’d put it there. Which meant he knew before I did.
“You do it,” he said, and handed it back to me.
My hands were shaking. I slicked my fingers the way I’d seen in videos I’d told myself I watched for the girls, and I put one against his hole and it was hot and tight and it gave, slow, and he said “yeah” into the door, and I put in a second, and he rocked back on them and said “yeah, okay, okay,” and I felt him open around my knuckles.
“Now,” he said. “Ryan. Now.”
I lined up. Pushed. The head pressed against him and nothing happened, just tight heat, and he sucked in a breath and his knuckles went white on the door. We both went still.
“Give me a second,” he said.
I gave him a second. I stood there with my cock against his hole and the stairwell light under the door and my heart going like a hammer drill.
He breathed out. Pushed back.
The head went in. He made a noise, a high hitch in his throat, and I watched myself disappear into him an inch at a time, so tight it was almost too much, so hot I stopped breathing. When my hips hit his ass he shook all over.
“Full,” he said, to nobody. “God. Full.”
“You okay?”
“Move.”
I moved. Clumsy. Too fast, then too careful. He reached back and grabbed my hip and set it, slow and deep, and then I had it, and then I had him. One hand on that waist, the other flat on the door next to his head. I fucked him against his own front door with my jeans around my knees and my work boots still on.
“Harder,” he said.
“Kai—”
“I’m not glass. Harder.”
I gave it to him harder. The door rattled in its frame. His coats swung. He was saying “yes, yes, like that, don’t stop,” and his voice was nothing like the typing voice, it was lower and wrecked and real, and it was mine.
My left hand was on the door right beside his face. The band on my finger was an inch from his cheek. He could’ve looked at it. He could’ve turned his head and bitten it or said something. He never looked at it once. He kept his eyes on the door and his hand on my hip and let me have it.
“Whose idea was this,” he gasped.
“Mine.”
“Say it.”
“Mine. I drove here. I wanted it.”
He clenched down on me so hard I saw white. He reached under himself and wrapped a hand around his own cock and started stroking fast.
“Don’t stop,” he said. “I’m close. Ryan, I’m—”
He came first. His whole body locked around me, his hole pulsing on my cock, and he spilled onto his own door in short white streaks and made a sound like he’d been hit.
That did it.
I shoved in deep and stopped. My cock kicked inside him. Once. Hard. Again. Again, pulse after pulse, hot, emptying into him while my forehead dropped onto the back of his neck and my knees tried to quit. I could feel it. I could feel myself filling him. I held his waist and couldn’t stop shaking.
At the end he turned his head over his shoulder.
I could’ve kept my eyes shut. I could’ve kept my face in his hair and made him into anyone.
I looked at his face. On purpose. Eyes open and wet at the corners, the mole, the broken nose, the eyebrows he does for money.
I knew exactly who I was looking at.
After, I sat on his floor with my back against the door and my belt still open. He went to the kitchen. The tap ran. He came back with a glass of water, sat cross-legged across from me, and waited while I drank the whole thing.
“Your space heater,” I said, eventually.
“Bedroom outlet. Like you said.”
“Good.”
I didn’t turn the radio on driving home. At the light at Bethel and Olentangy I picked up my phone. The album was still open. You hold your thumb on a picture and it asks if you want to save it.
I held my thumb on it.
Save to Photos.
It went into my camera roll between a panel I wired at a car wash in Reynoldsburg and a picture of Steph’s niece holding a pumpkin.
Steph was on the couch under a blanket. “You’re soaked,” she said. “Italian Village kid,” I said. “Poor kid,” she said, and I kissed the top of her head and stood in the shower until the water went cold.
That was four months ago. The picture’s still there, between the car wash and the pumpkin, and somewhere in settings there’s a switch I’ve never turned off that sends my camera roll to the iPad Steph keeps face-down by the stove for recipes.
Every night I don’t pick it up and check. Every night I don’t turn the switch off.
I go to Kai’s on Thursdays now. He keeps the lube in the coat pocket. The heater’s on the bedroom outlet.
Nothing’s on fire.
Yet.
