Jess has a list.
She keeps it in her head, which is worse than any written list, because head-lists never get deleted. Hers has been running since college and it has exactly one standing item: find Miles someone good. For eleven months the name at the top has been Aaron.
“Aaron,” she says over the phone, with the energy of a woman defusing a bomb. “Vet tech. Works mornings, which means he’s home by five, which means he cooks, which means he owns the good olive oil, Miles. He’s grown, he’s straight, and he’s the straightest man I know. That’s why I picked him.”
“That’s a terrible reason.”
“It’s the best reason. He’s the one guy I know who won’t turn you into a performance. He doesn’t know how to perform. He brings his mom’s casserole to potlucks and apologizes for it.”
I hang up on her, because that’s how our calls always end. Then I sit on my bed and think about the sentence for an hour.
I work nights at a print shop, which means I know everything about people and nothing about rest. I’ve been a femboy a long time, and I know the math of first dates: you either hide the soft parts, or you find the one person who was never going to trade on them. I’ve been hiding for years.
Thursday, wine bar. I wear the green dress, because green is the color of not trying too hard, and I am trying extremely hard to look like I’m not trying.
He’s there first, at a table facing the door. A little shorter than I pictured, a lot calmer, a plain navy sweater with dog hair on one sleeve that he clearly tried to lint-roll and missed. He stands up when he sees me. He looks at the dress, then at my face, and smiles like both of them are good news.
“Miles. Hi. I’m Aaron. My dog’s name is Biscuit.”
“Okay,” I say. “Why did you tell me that?”
“Jess said I talk too much when I’m nervous and to lead with something true.” He sits back down. “That was the truest thing I had ready.”
The wine is good. He tells me Biscuit hates his cooking but eats it anyway. He tells me about the clinic cat who runs the back office like a landlord. He asks about the print shop and actually listens, and at some point he says the quiet jobs are the ones that wear you down, which is a sentence about my whole life that he had no data for, and I look at him and he’s looking back.
Second glass. I put it down.
“Jess said you were straight.”
He doesn’t get defensive. He turns his glass a quarter turn on the table. “I’ve always said yes when people ask. It was always true.” He looks up. “I also spent the whole drive over here thinking about what you’d look like, and I’m not sure what that makes me. I’d rather tell you that now than have you figure it out later.”
I don’t say anything for a second, because I’m trying not to grin.
“Do you want to get out of here?” he says. “I make a pretty decent pasta. If it’s bad you can tell me.”
His apartment is ten minutes away and smells like garlic and dog. Biscuit is a fat yellow mutt who inspects my shoes, approves, and lies down in the exact center of the kitchen floor so we have to step around him all night.
Aaron cooks with his sleeves pushed up. I sit on the counter in the green dress and steal pieces of parmesan, and every time he reaches past me for something his forearm brushes my knee, and every time it brushes my knee he gets a little worse at cooking. By the time he’s draining the pasta he’s burned his thumb and dropped the colander lid.
“You okay over there?”
“I’m great. I’m fine. I’m a professional.”
“You keep looking at my legs.”
He sets the pot down very carefully on the stove and turns around.
“Yeah,” he says. “I do.”
I hook a finger in the collar of his sweater and pull him between my knees. He comes easy. He puts his hands on the counter on either side of my hips, not on me, like he’s waiting to be told he’s allowed.
“You can,” I say.
He kisses me. He kisses like he’s been thinking about it since the wine bar, which he has: slow and a little shy and then not shy at all, one hand coming up to cup my jaw, the other finally landing on my thigh where the dress has ridden up. His palm is warm. He slides it higher and stops at the hem.
“Is this—”
“Higher.”
He goes higher. Under the dress, up my bare thigh, until his fingers brush the lace of my panties and the hard line of my cock pressing against it, and he makes a sound into my mouth like he just found the last step of a staircase in the dark. He doesn’t pull back. He presses his palm flat over me, curious, and I gasp, and he does it again.
“Okay,” he says, breathless. “Okay. That’s—yeah.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” He laughs at himself. “Sorry. Very articulate. I’m a vet tech.”
The pasta goes cold in the colander.
His bedroom has a quilt on it that I’m almost certain his mother made. He sits me on the edge of the bed and kneels on the floor, and he pushes the green dress up around my waist slowly, watching my face the whole time, like he’s taking a pulse.
“I’ve never done this.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know. I want to. Tell me if I’m bad at it.”
He peels my panties down and wraps his hand around me and just looks for a second, and the look is so open, so completely unguarded, that I have to put a hand over my eyes. He takes it away. Then he leans in and puts his mouth on me.
He is bad at it for maybe forty seconds. Too careful, too much teeth, too worried. Then I put my hand on the back of his head and say “slower, more tongue, yeah, like that,” and he listens, and “So good,” I tell him, “you’re doing so well,” and then he is not bad at it at all. He’s earnest and messy and so fucking into it that it’s almost overwhelming, his hand stroking the base of me while his mouth works the rest, little noises in his throat every time I swear.
I pull him up before I come. I want more than that.
I get his sweater off, and his jeans, and he’s thick and hard and a little embarrassed to be naked in front of me while I’m still half in a dress. I fix that by climbing into his lap. I take him in my hand and stroke him, slow, and watch him fall apart, and kiss him while he does it.
“Do you—have anything?” I ask. “Lube?”
“Bathroom.” He says it like he’s confessing. “I bought it this afternoon. After Jess called. I didn’t know if—I just wanted to have it, in case.”
“Aaron.”
“I know.”
“That’s the most romantic thing anyone’s ever done for me.”
He goes to get it, naked, stepping over the dog in the hall. Comes back with the bottle and a strip of condoms and a face like a man carrying a cake he’s afraid to drop.
I lie back on his mother’s quilt and show him. My fingers first, slick, while he watches with his mouth open, and then his, guided by my hand, two of them, slow. He’s so careful it makes me ache. He keeps asking, “Like this? Is this okay?” until I’m rocking down onto his fingers and saying “yes” just to shut him up.
He rolls the condom on with hands that aren’t quite steady. When he pushes into me it’s slow, slow, his eyes on mine, both of us breathing hard, and when he bottoms out he drops his forehead to my shoulder and says, wrecked, “Oh my God, Miles.”
“Move,” I say. “Please. Move.”
He moves. Long and steady, then harder when I wrap my legs around him and pull, and then he is fucking me properly, and he finds the spot almost by accident and I cry out and he freezes, terrified, and I laugh and tell him to do exactly that again, and he does. The headboard thumps. Biscuit barks once from the hall, offended, and settles. Aaron fucks me with the same total attention he gave the pasta, like he’s trying to get every part of it right, and he gets his hand around my cock and strokes me in rhythm, and I come with the green dress bunched up around my ribs and my nails in his back.
He’s right behind me, buried deep, groaning into my neck, his whole body shaking.
We lie there on the quilt, sticky and sore and breathing.
“So,” he says eventually, very seriously, into my hair. “I don’t think I’m the straightest man Jess knows anymore.”
“No,” I say. “Probably not.”
In the morning Jess is already in the group chat.
WELL?
i am not asking twice
I look over at Aaron, asleep on his stomach with one arm across me and the dog snoring at the foot of the bed. Last night’s pasta is still in the colander in the kitchen. My dress is on his floor.
I type: the pasta was cold.
Three dots. A long time.
MILES.
was it COLD because
oh my god. oh my GOD. i’m buying you dinner for a month.
Aaron opens one eye. “Is that Jess?”
“She says she’s bringing the casserole on Sunday.”
He groans into the pillow. Then he reaches over, takes my phone out of my hand, and drops it on the quilt.
“Sunday’s far away,” he says, and pulls me back down.
