The stream had been live for forty minutes when Luna came in with two energy drinks and set one by his keyboard without asking.
“Thanks,” Noah said, not looking over. On screen his character crouched behind a crate, waiting for a spawn.
Luna cracked the other can. Sat in the second chair. Pulled her knees up.
They’d split this apartment for three years. Three years of her in the second chair, eating his chips, heckling his aim. Three years and she had never once come around to his side of the desk while the light was on.
For a while there was just the tap of his keys and the tinny voices of his squad in the headset. Noah leaned into the monitor when it got tense, leaned back when it didn’t. Luna watched the side of his face do it.
Then she got out of the chair.
Noah didn’t notice at first. He was calling out a position, three-syllable gamer shorthand, half a laugh in it. Luna crossed the small strip of carpet between the two desks. Knelt down at the side of his chair, out of frame, where the webcam’s little green light couldn’t reach.
She didn’t touch him. She just settled there. Cheek almost against his thigh. Waiting.
Noah’s callout trailed off in the middle of the second word.
“—one sec,” he said to the headset. His voice had gone careful.
He looked down.
Luna looked up at him. She had the strawberry sweater on, sleeves past her hands. Black polish. The green scrunchie on her wrist, which he’d asked about once, weeks ago, and gone red when she explained.
“Keep playing,” she said.
“Chat can see—” He stopped. “Chat can’t see you. Down there.”
“No.”
“Okay.” He said it like a question.
On screen his character just stood in the open, getting shot at, health ticking down. Nobody in the squad said anything for a second and then everybody said something at once.
Noah muted the mic. The whole room went quiet in a different way.
“You want me to move,” Luna said. It wasn’t a guess. It was an offer, laid flat on the table so he could take it or leave it.
“I didn’t say that.”
“I know. That’s why I’m still here.” She shifted her weight, just slightly. Her knees on the hardwood past the edge of the rug. “Don’t worry about anything but this.”
He didn’t say it.
She watched him not say it. Watched his hand come off the keyboard and hang in the air a second, not sure where it was allowed to go. Watched him look at the muted mic, then the door, then back down at her like the answer might be written somewhere in the room.
“You keep checking the door,” she said.
“There’s no lock.”
“There’s no lock and nobody’s coming and you keep checking anyway.” She tilted her head against his knee, finally, the smallest contact. “You’re not gonna get caught, Noah. That’s not the thing you’re scared of.”
His jaw tightened.
“What’s the thing I’m scared of,” he said.
She didn’t answer that. She’d said one true thing already and he’d flinched; two would be showing off. Instead she just stayed where she was, cheek warm against denim, and let the silence do it.
His character died on screen. The respawn timer started counting.
His hand came down. Landed in her hair. Light — barely there, the way you’d touch something you weren’t sure you were allowed to keep.
Luna went still under it. Didn’t push into it, didn’t do anything cute. Just let him find out that the floor stayed where it was.
The pressure changed. Not much. Enough.
“Don’t unmute yet,” he said. Rough.
“Wasn’t going to.”
The respawn timer hit zero. He didn’t reach for the keyboard.
Chat noticed before anybody in the room said a word. The second monitor kept scrolling. noah?? bro is AFK in the open hes getting pizza rip. Somebody tipped two dollars to ask if he’d died.
“They think you died,” Luna said.
“I did die.”
She smiled against his knee. Then she put her hand on his thigh, high up, flat, and left it there. Same as before. Not asking with her mouth. He breathed out through his nose and his legs fell open another inch, and that was an answer, and she was going to take it.
The zipper was the loudest thing in the apartment. She went slow on purpose, eyes on his face the whole way down, because if he was going to tell her to stop it was going to be now, while it was still just a zipper.
“Luna,” he said. Nothing after it.
He was already hard. Had been, she figured, since the callout died in his throat. She worked him out of his boxers, the gray ones with the hole by the waistband that she’d folded out of the dryer probably a hundred times without one single thought, and wrapped her hand around him. Warmer than she expected. Thicker than she’d guessed.
She had guessed. That was the part she was never telling him. She had absolutely guessed.
She licked the head once, flat and slow, just to see what he’d do.
What he did was grab the edge of the desk so hard the mouse skated off the pad.
So she did it again. Then she put her mouth on him for real, lips over her teeth, slow, the sleeve of the strawberry sweater pushed up to her elbow so it wouldn’t get in the way. He tasted like skin and the cheap bodywash from the hall closet. She took him as far as felt easy and came back up and did it again, and on the third time she heard him make a sound she had never heard come out of Noah in three years of thin walls.
The headset was still around his neck. Tinny, from a foot above her head: Noah. Noah, you good? We’re pushing B.
He laughed. It came out broken in half.
Luna pulled off with a wet little sound. “Tell them you’re fine.”
“I’m not unmuting.”
“So type it.”
He typed one-handed without looking. On the monitor it came out nrb. She laughed with him still in her fist and he groaned at the feeling of it, which made her do it again on purpose.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” he said. Quiet. Honest. Not the stream voice at all.
“You’re not supposed to do anything.” She took his hand off the desk and put it back in her hair, where it had been. “There. You can push. If it’s too much I’ll tap your leg. Twice.”
“Twice.”
“Twice. Otherwise don’t stop.”
She went back down on him. His hand stayed light for a while, like it had before, like he still thought she might disappear. Then it didn’t. Then he was holding her there, careful at first, then less careful, and she let him have it. Let him push past where she’d stopped on her own until her eyes were running and her throat fluttered around him and spit was going down his zipper onto his jeans and she did not care at all.
Her hand stayed on his thigh. Fingers spread. Not tapping.
“Fuck,” Noah said, a hoarse whisper, “fuck—”
She hooked a finger through his belt loop and pulled him back in. That was the answer to that one too.
The respawn timer had gone off again. His character stood in the spawn room doing nothing. Somebody in chat wrote he’s been gone 7 minutes this is a hostage situation.
“You look,” he started, and didn’t finish. His thumb was moving at her temple, at the edge of the scrunchie, back and forth, back and forth. “Luna. You look so— I can’t—”
He didn’t have to finish. She’d heard it.
“I’m gonna,” he said, and tried to ease her off, a polite little push at her head, so Noah of him that she’d have laughed if her mouth had been free.
She stayed down.
He came with his hand fisted in her hair and his other hand slapped over his own mouth like the mic could pick him up anyway. She swallowed. Kept him in her mouth through the aftershocks, soft and slow, until he flinched and said her name a third time in a completely different voice, and then she let him go.
She sat back on her heels. Her knees were bright red from the hardwood past the edge of the rug. She wiped her chin with her sleeve, looked at the wet spot, and then at him.
“This sweater’s going in with your boxers.”
Noah stared at her. His chest was going. His hair was stuck to his forehead. He looked at her like he wanted to do it again in about ten minutes.
On screen: 9 minutes. pizza confirmed. noah if you’re kidnapped type 1.
“Nine minutes,” he said.
“Eight and a half. You were wound tight.”
He laughed. Then he didn’t, and he looked at the second chair like the thought of her sitting back there was impossible.
“I want you to stay,” he said. “Don’t move.”
So she didn’t. She tucked him back into his boxers, did his zipper up for him, which was its own kind of intimate, and leaned her cheek against his knee again, out of frame, where she’d started.
He pulled the headset on. Unmuted.
“Sorry, guys. Had to deal with something.”
His voice was wrecked. Absolutely destroyed. Chat went off. why does he sound like that bro ran a marathon NOAH.
He played the rest of the stream like that, badly, with his free hand in her hair the whole time.
