The rule started because Luis hates cooking and I hate dishes, and for about two years that was the entire rule: whoever cooks gets thanked.
At first thanked meant I did the dishes. Then it meant a kiss on the back of the neck while he was still at the stove. Then, one Tuesday, I scrubbed the last pan, dried my hands on my sweatpants, and heard myself say, “You cooked. What else do you want?”
Luis looked up from his phone.
The whole kitchen changed. I felt it in my knees. I hadn’t planned the voice, it just came out lower than normal, and he put the phone face down on the counter and gave me a long look.
“Are you offering?”
“I’m asking.”
He leaned back against the counter and crossed his ankles. He’s a quiet guy, my boyfriend. Dark curly hair, glasses he pushes up with one knuckle, a way of going completely still when he’s thinking something filthy. He went completely still.
“Maybe I want you on your knees.”
My stomach turned over. “Maybe?”
“I want you on your knees.”
“Better,” I said, and did it.
That was the first time. Right there on the tile in front of the dishwasher with a dish towel still on my shoulder. I was grinning like an idiot until he got his belt open, and after that I wasn’t grinning, I was busy. It was that easy. It had been sitting there for months waiting for one of us to say it out loud.
After that the rule got an update. Luis wrote it on the whiteboard on the fridge with come still drying on his stomach and his glasses crooked, and nobody has erased it since.
Some nights the cook picks dishes. Some nights it’s a back rub. I never knew when the thank-you was going to turn into the thank-you, and that was the hottest part.
Weeks later he made roast chicken.
I want to be clear: Luis does not cook. Luis owns one pan and a lot of takeout menus. But for some reason that Thursday he came home with a whole chicken and a bag of potatoes and a head of lettuce and said, “Don’t talk to me for an hour,” and I sat at the little table like a good boyfriend and watched him sweat over a cutting board in his lounge pants and his old hoodie.
The chicken was a little dry. The potatoes were perfect. The salad was a salad. I told him it was the best meal of my life and he threw a napkin at my head.
When we finished I stacked the plates. I loaded the dishwasher, the pan too, because the pan doesn’t fit and I jammed it anyway. I closed the door. I pressed the button. The machine started its low hum. I turned around.
Luis was standing by the stove watching me. He had a glass of wine in one hand. His eyes were very dark behind the lenses.
“What kind of thank-you?” I said.
He smiled slowly.
“The kind where you ask me again in thirty seconds.”
I walked across the kitchen. Took the wine glass out of his hand, set it down on the counter by his phone, and kissed him. His mouth tasted like red wine and rosemary. He kissed back with a little pleased noise, one hand finding my jaw, and I held onto the front of his hoodie, and for about thirty seconds that was all we did.
Then I let go of the hoodie and went down on my knees on the tile.
His smile disappeared. It really did. Like I’d said something that took the words out of him. I put both hands on his thighs, flat, feeling the warmth of him through the cotton, and I looked up.
“What do you want?”
“You know what I want.”
“Specific.”
He looked down at me. The kitchen was clean. The dishwasher was running. There wasn’t a chore left in the room to hide behind, no dish, no pan, no excuse, just me on my knees and him standing over me with his face going soft.
“I want your mouth,” he said.
I smiled up at him. “Good answer.”
I hooked my fingers in the waistband of his lounge pants and pulled them down. His cock was already hard, pushing up against the front of his boxers with a dark wet patch at the tip. I mouthed it through the cotton, just once, and he sucked a breath through his teeth.
“Aaron—”
“Thirty seconds,” I said. “You promised.”
“I’m pretty sure you’re the one who—”
“I’m very punctual.”
I pulled the boxers down and he sprang out, thick and flushed, warm against my chin. I breathed in. He smelled like laundry soap and skin and him. I licked a slow stripe up the underside, from the base to the tip, and swirled my tongue around the head and he made a noise I’ve never heard from anybody else.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes. Fine. Yes.”
I took him in my mouth.
The dishwasher hummed under the counter. Water sloshed somewhere inside it, a tick, a slosh. Luis’s hand went to my hair, and then it stopped, hovering like it was afraid, and I reached up without stopping and pressed it down onto my head myself.
He held on. I felt his fingers curl into my hair, the whole warm weight of his hand against the back of my skull, and I took him deeper.
I went slow. No rush. I wasn’t paying off a debt, that’s what made it so good. It didn’t feel like service. It felt like something I was getting to do. I wrapped my fist around the base and let my mouth slide up and down the rest, tongue pressed flat underneath, feeling the thick vein pulse against it, tasting salt and the faint sweetness of him at the tip. He was leaking steadily. I swallowed it.
I looked up at him while I did it. I always do.
He had one hand in my hair and the other braced on the counter behind him, white at the knuckles. His glasses had slid down his nose. His lips were parted and his eyes were barely open. When he saw me looking he breathed, “God, look at you.”
I sucked him harder. He made a small broken sound.
His grip tightened a little. I took more of him. I let the head hit the back of my throat and held there, breathing through my nose, and his thighs shook under my hands.
“Fuck,” Luis whispered.
I pulled off, wet and gasping, and wiped my mouth with the back of my wrist. “Language.”
He stared at me. “You are literally—”
I went back down. Argument over.
He laughed once, a broken little breath, and then he stopped laughing entirely. I felt it happen. The moment he went from joking to gone. His hips started to move, tiny rolls into my mouth, and I let him, I hummed around him and he gasped and grabbed a handful of my hair.
The whole kitchen smelled like roast chicken and hot skin. The chicken was still sitting in the pan on the stove, going cold, a piece of rosemary stuck to the skin. Someone’s dish towel was on the floor. I was on my knees on a tile floor in the light of the range hood with my boyfriend’s cock down my throat and I thought, I would do this every night of my life, and it scared me how true it was.
“Aaron,” he said. His voice was shaking. “I’m close.”
I didn’t pull off. I wrapped my hand tight around the base and sucked harder. I could feel him swelling against my tongue, the pulse of him getting faster, his balls drawing up tight against my chin.
“Aaron. I’m gonna—”
I didn’t pull off. I stayed there. He came with a shout that he muffled into his own fist, his whole body bowing over me, one hand dug into my hair and the other slapping the counter, and he shot hot and thick across my tongue, pulse after pulse after pulse. I swallowed it all. I kept my mouth on him through the aftershocks, soft and slow, until his knees went and he sagged back against the counter and said “okay, okay, stop, stop, I can’t” in a voice like he’d been running.
I sat back on my heels. My jaw ached. My own cock was a hard line in my sweatpants and I’d been so busy I’d forgotten it existed.
Luis hadn’t. He looked down at me, flushed and wrecked, glasses crooked, and a slow smile spread across his face.
“Come here.”
I climbed up. He pulled me against him and slid his hand down the front of my sweatpants and found me soaking wet, and I let my head fall against his shoulder and just moaned. He barely had to move. Four strokes, five, his chin on top of my head and his other arm tight around my waist. I came all over his hand and the front of his hoodie, shaking, with my face pressed into his neck.
After, I sat on the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinets and he slid down next to me, and we both looked at the dishwasher humming in front of us like it had personally witnessed something.
I reached for the dish towel hanging off the oven door.
Luis grabbed my wrist. “Absolutely not.”
“Cleanup.”
“That’s the one we use for the pans.”
“It’s—”
“Different towel, Aaron.”
I laughed so hard I almost slid sideways. I got up, dragged a clean towel out of the drawer, and came back and wiped his stomach, then mine, slowly, both of us still grinning stupidly.
We never really talked about it. We didn’t have to. Dinner became a signal, a little electric hum in the apartment every time one of us said “I’m cooking tonight.”
The next week Luis burned the pasta. Completely black. Smoke alarm and everything.
I stood in the kitchen with the scorched pot in my hands and looked at him.
“I think this voids the rule.”
He threw a dish towel at my face.
