The first text Kit ever sent me was technically a customer-service response to a message meant for my brother.
I was twenty-two, standing beside a dead Corolla in the west parking structure, and trying very hard not to become the kind of person who calls campus security because he cannot identify the positive terminal on a battery.
My brother had jumper cables.
My brother also had a phone number ending in 47.
I texted 74.
you still have the jumper cables? i’m dead in west structure level 3
Four minutes later:
i don’t have jumper cables but i can have jumper cables in like fifteen minutes if you tell me what kind to buy
I stared at the message.
Then I checked the number.
Sorry. Wrong person.
The reply came immediately.
i know. offer stands though
A second bubble appeared.
i’m kit. autozone is six minutes away. do you actually need help or are you good?
There are situations in which accepting help from a complete stranger is obviously stupid.
There are also situations in which your phone is at twelve percent and your car is making a noise like a disappointed refrigerator.
I typed:
I actually need help.
Kit sent a thumbs-up.
Then:
what level again?
The silver Civic arrived nineteen minutes later.
Kit parked one space over, got out, and held up a bright yellow box like he had won it at a carnival.
He was about five-four, maybe, wearing black dolphin shorts and an oversized cream sweater with the sleeves pulled over most of his hands. Dark hair, soft face, beat-up Vans. Twenty, he told me later.
At that moment, all I knew was that the stranger from the typo was prettier than anybody who voluntarily shops for electrical equipment should be.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
“I bought the medium ones.”
“The medium jumper cables?”
“There were categories.”
“I didn’t know there were categories.”
“Good. So this is educational for both of us.”
He walked over and set the box on my hood.
“I’m Kit.”
I gave him my name.
“Cool.” He opened the package. “Now, important disclosure: I have never done this.”
“You went to AutoZone.”
“I said I could acquire jumper cables. I made no claims about expertise.”
I laughed.
That seemed to relax him.
We read the little instruction card together under the parking-garage lights. I popped both hoods. Kit stood beside me holding the red clamp with two hands and looking at it like it might bite.
“Positive first,” I said.
“You sound confident.”
“I have become confident in the last forty seconds.”
“Hot.”
He froze.
I froze.
Kit’s entire face changed color.
“I mean—”
“No, it’s okay.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s really okay.”
He looked at me carefully.
“Was that weird?”
“A little.”
“I can stop.”
I should probably have said yes.
Instead I said, “You drove to AutoZone for a wrong number.”
“That wasn’t flirting.”
“What was it?”
He thought about it.
“Poor impulse control with a community-service component.”
I laughed hard enough that I had to lean on the fender.
Kit smiled.
“Okay,” he said. “That was worth twenty-four dollars.”
We connected the cables.
When I reached past him for the ground clamp, my knuckles brushed his palm.
He did not jerk away.
Neither did I.
He looked at our hands, then at me.
“Can I stay until it starts?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.”
He rested one hip against the Corolla while I got into the driver’s seat.
The engine turned over on the first try.
I actually cheered.
Kit threw both hands in the air like we had just won something.
“Medium cables!”
I leaned out the window.
“You want the money for those?”
“No.”
“Kit.”
“I own jumper cables now. This is character development.”
“You cannot spend twenty-four dollars rescuing random strangers.”
“I can if I only do it once.”
“Then let me buy you coffee.”
He tilted his head.
“Is that payment?”
“It can be.”
“And if I don’t want it to be payment?”
That stopped me.
The garage hummed around us. A car passed on the ramp below.
Kit tucked his hands into the sleeves of his sweater.
“Sorry,” he said. “Direct question. Are you asking because you feel guilty, or because you want to see me again?”
I looked at him.
It would have been easy to joke.
He had not joked, though.
He had asked cleanly and left me room.
“Both,” I said.
Kit smiled.
“Okay. That’s a better answer.”
He pulled out his phone.
“Can I text you tomorrow when your car isn’t actively dying?”
“You already have my number.”
“I know. I’m asking if I can use it on purpose.”
That got me.
“Yeah,” I said. “Use it on purpose.”
He nodded like a small contract had been signed.
Then he walked back toward his Civic, stopped halfway, and turned around.
“Also?”
“Yeah?”
“Coffee can be a date if you want.”
My heart did something embarrassing.
“I want.”
“Cool.”
He kept walking.
I called after him.
“Kit.”
He turned.
“You forgot the jumper cables.”
He looked at the bright yellow box on my hood.
Then at me.
Then he grinned.
“No,” he said. “I’m creating a reason to text you.”
At 9:06 the next morning, my phone buzzed.
hey wrong number
Then:
how’s the battery?
Then, after a full minute:
and do you still want the date? just checking that part separately
yes, I typed. still want the date. battery’s fine. i’m less fine.
why are you less fine
because i’ve been thinking about your sweater for twelve hours
Three dots. Gone. Three dots.
ok good, Kit wrote. same but about your forearms. saturday?
Coffee on Saturday lasted four hours, which is three and a half hours longer than coffee lasts. We sat in the back corner of a place near campus with terrible chairs, and Kit told me he was a junior studying graphic design, and that he had once driven forty minutes to return a stranger’s AirPods case, so the jumper cables were “within normal range for him, actually.”
“So I’m not special.”
“You’re special,” he said. “The AirPods guy didn’t get a second text.”
When the barista started stacking chairs around us, Kit looked at his phone and said, “I’m parked in west structure.”
“Level three?”
“Level three.” He tucked his hands into his sleeves, that same cream sweater. “It’s empty on Saturdays. I checked. Which—I checked on purpose. I want to be honest that I checked on purpose.”
“What are we doing in an empty parking garage, Kit?”
He looked right at me.
“I was going to kiss you in my car,” he said. “And then see what you wanted after that. If the answer’s just the kiss, that’s a great answer.”
Level three was empty except for his Civic and a pigeon. He’d parked in the exact spot my Corolla had died in. I don’t think that was an accident and I didn’t ask.
We got into the back seat because the front had a gearshift and Kit said, very seriously, “I’m not trying to get impaled on a manual transmission on a first date.”
Then he climbed into my lap.
He kissed like he texted: direct, a little nervous, and then not nervous at all. His hands went into my hair. His knees were on either side of my thighs on the seat and the black dolphin shorts had ridden up so far that when I put my hands on his legs I was basically holding his ass.
“Is this okay?” I said.
“Yes. Keep going. That’s a standing yes for the car.” He kissed my jaw. “I’ll say if it stops being one.”
He was hard. I could feel it against my stomach through those stupid thin shorts. When I pressed my palm over him he groaned and dropped his forehead onto my shoulder.
“Okay. Okay, I want to suck you,” he said into my shirt. “Is that—can I?”
I said yes so fast he laughed.
It was a Civic. There was not enough room. He got onto the floor somehow, folded into the footwell with his knees on my sneakers and his shoulders between my legs, and undid my jeans with that careful two-handed focus he’d used on the jumper cables.
“Positive first,” I said.
“Shut up.”
Then he took my cock out and put his mouth on it and I stopped being able to make jokes.
He was good at it. Better than good. Soft wet lips and a hand at the base and his eyes on my face the whole time, checking, the way he’d checked before reaching for the red clamp. He’d pull off and lick a long stripe up the underside and then sink back down, deeper every time, until his nose was in my hair and he was making little choked sounds that the concrete threw back at us.
“Kit. Kit, I’m going to—”
He pulled off, breathing hard, his mouth red and shiny.
“Not yet,” he said. “I want you to fuck me. If you want that. I have stuff.” He jerked his head at the front seat. “Glove box.”
“You checked the garage and packed the glove box?”
“I’m a planner. I said I’m a planner.”
He hadn’t said that. I didn’t care.
It was awkward. I need that on the record. He knelt on the back seat facing the rear window with his shorts around one ankle and his sweater shoved up, and I knelt behind him with my head bent against the roof liner, and I got lube on the upholstery, and he said, “That’s fine, that’s a fine stain, I’ll explain it to no one.”
I opened him up with two fingers while he pushed back on them and swore at the headrest. When I rolled the condom on and pressed against him he reached back and grabbed my hip and pulled.
“Slow,” he said. “Slow and then not slow.”
Slow. His body giving way around me an inch at a time, so hot and tight I had to stop halfway and put my forehead between his shoulder blades. He laughed, breathless.
“You okay back there?”
“Give me a second.”
“Medium cables,” he whispered, and I lost it, laughing into his sweater with my cock buried in him, and he clenched around me on purpose and the laugh turned into something else.
Then not slow. I held his hips and fucked him into the back seat of his own car, the whole Civic rocking on its suspension, his palm smacked flat against the fogging window. He was loud. He’d warned me he was loud. There. Yes. There, don’t stop, don’t you dare stop. I reached around and stroked him in time, and he came first, all over the seat back, shaking, and I followed him with my teeth in the shoulder of that cream sweater.
Afterward we sat in the back seat with the windows completely fogged, his legs across my lap, sharing the one napkin he’d found in the door pocket.
“For the record,” Kit said, “this is the first date I’ve ever had in a parking garage.”
“You picked the parking garage.”
“I know,” he said. “It’s where we met. I’m sentimental.”
That night I opened his contact again.
Kit — Right Number.
I changed it one more time. I’m not going to tell you what to.
