3. December, The Kitchen
DECEMBER, THE KITCHEN
Todd came back from break four days before anybody else because the Wagoneer needed the good ramps at his uncle's lot and because his mother had a new boyfriend he described only as "a guy named Rick."
So for four days it was me and Todd and a house with the heat set at fifty-eight, which was a whole separate war I was fighting all year and losing.
I was at the fridge with the door open, in the shirt, looking for something that wasn't there, which is most of what a fridge is for. The cold came out around my legs. Todd came in behind me and stopped.
He'd been in the shower. He had a towel and basketball shorts and nothing else, and I turned around with the door still open and my shoulder blade against the cold edge of it, and I looked at him and he looked at me and neither of us said anything for about four seconds.
Then I looked down, because the shorts were the thin ones, and Todd Ruzicka had no secrets from anybody.
He was hard. Not on his way there. All the way there, tenting the front of those shorts out and up so the fabric had lifted clear of his thigh, and there was a wet spot the size of a dime where the head was pushing.
Twelve weeks. Twelve weeks of pots and laundry and jokes, and there it was in a kitchen at ten at night, and neither of us could pretend the other one wasn't looking, because the fridge light was on and it was the only light in the room and it was pointed straight at both of us.
He said, "Okay, so, that's from the shower."
"Todd."
"Water pressure."
"Todd."
He put the towel in front of himself, which was the funniest thing that had happened in that house all year, and he started to say something about going upstairs, and I closed the fridge with my hip and the room went dark except for the streetlight through the window over the sink, and I got down on my knees on the linoleum in front of him.
I didn't ask. That was the entire point of me. Asking would have wrecked it.
He said, "Ange," and his voice had gone up, and he said, "hey, you don't have to do the," and I took the waistband of the shorts in both hands and pulled them down over the shelf of it and his cock came up and out and slapped against his own stomach, and Todd stopped talking about what I didn't have to do.
It was thick. That was the first thing. Not long particularly, but thick through the middle in a way that made my jaw ache before anything had touched it, and darker than the rest of him, and there was a shine on the head from the wet spot he'd been apologizing for.
I love that moment. I loved it then and I still do. The instant the fabric comes down and it's out in the air and it's yours and there's no getting it back in.
I put my hands on the fronts of his thighs and I didn't touch it for a second, just breathed on it, and heard him swallow.
Then I took the base in my fist and licked him from where my fist stopped to the top, one pass, flat and slow, and got the sharp clean taste of a man twenty minutes out of a shower and under it the salt of what had been leaking out of him since he walked into the room.
He said, "Oh my God."
He got harder. That's the part nobody writes down. He was already as hard as I thought a person got, and then my tongue went over the ridge under the head and his cock jumped in my fist and got harder still, thicker across my palm, and I felt the blood arrive.
I took the head into my mouth and stopped there, and I let him feel my tongue go around it, and I looked up.
He was gripping the counter behind him with both hands. Knuckles white on the edge of a counter, holding on to the room to stop himself doing anything, and I thought: no. No, absolutely not, we are not doing that here.
So I reached up and took his wrist, and I peeled his hand off the counter, and I put it on the top of my head.
That was the tilt. That's the exact second the year turned over.
He made a sound like he'd been hit in the stomach and his fingers went into my hair and closed, and after that Todd Ruzicka stopped apologizing.
He pushed. Not hard, not the first time.
Just an inch further than I'd gone on my own, testing whether it was true, and when I let him he did it again and got another inch, and then his other hand came off the counter and both of them were in my hair and he started to fuck my mouth in slow short strokes with his hips while I knelt on the linoleum and let him.
My knees hurt. I want to include that. The linoleum at one-fourteen was over a concrete slab and by a minute in my kneecaps were on fire, and my jaw hinge was clicking on every stroke because he was thick enough to hold it wide, and I was drooling down my own chin and onto my tits through the shirt, and none of that reduced the thing by one degree.
It was the thing. Being uncomfortable in the service of being useful was ninety percent of what I'd been chasing since I was seventeen.
He got faster. He was saying words, mostly my name and mostly the short version, and the sound of it, Ange, Ange, God, Ange, was the sound of a man who had run out of the ability to be cool about it, and my hand was between my legs by then and I hadn't decided to put it there.
Then he tried to pull out. Of course he did.
He got his hips back and said "I'm gonna," in a strangled way, and I took hold of the backs of his thighs and pulled him in, and I looked up at him with him in my mouth and my eyes streaming and I did not let go.
He said, "Oh, fuck."
You don't feel it leave when it's going straight down. You feel the run-up. You feel the vein along the underside go rigid against your tongue and the whole shaft swell out against the roof of your mouth, and you feel one dry throb, a pulse with nothing in it, half a second of warning.
Then the first shot hit the back of my throat hard enough to make me gag around him, and I swallowed it and the second one arrived while I was still swallowing, and I got a hand up under his balls and felt them draw and jump.
He kept coming. He came like a man who had been storing it since September, thick and salty and more of it than I could keep up with, and some of it came back around him and out of the corners of my mouth and down my chin, and he was making a noise up there that I can only describe as a man being deflated slowly.
His hands went slack in my hair. His cock throbbed against my tongue three more times, giving up less each time, the last one nearly nothing, and I kept my lips sealed around him and sucked the end of it out of him until he flinched away from me and put both hands back on the counter and said, "Okay. Okay. Okay."
I sat back on my heels on the freezing linoleum with my chin wet and my jaw ticking and a smear of him on the collar of his own dealership t-shirt.
He was still hanging out of his shorts, red and slick and softening, and he looked down at me with an expression I'd been trying to produce in a man for four years.
He said, "Thank you."
And I came. Not from the hand I still had between my legs, though that helped.
From the two words. I put my face against his thigh and shook against my own fingers on the kitchen floor and he stood there and let me, with his hand back on my head, and afterward he pulled his shorts up and gave me a hand to get off the floor because my knees had locked.
We stood in the dark kitchen. He got two glasses of water without being asked, which is the closest thing to a love letter I have ever received.
He said, "So, like. Is this a thing that happened once."
And I said the sentence I'd been building since September.
I said, "Todd. Tell the others."
He looked at me over the glass for a long second. Then he grinned, and it was the worst grin I have ever seen on a human face, and he said, "Scott is gonna want it in the notebook."
He told Scott at twenty past eleven that same night, on the phone, long distance, and charged it to the house.
Four dollars and fifteen cents.