And we were off.
I'm not going to pretend I was working.Somewhere in the first ninety seconds the story slid off the table entirely and it was just the two of us, two gray squares in a building full of gray squares, except these two had found each other.
you here for the convention?
God no.Here for work.You?
something like that.you don't look like the praying type
I'm not.It doesn’t seem like you're here to pray either.
depends what you're praying for
I huffed a laugh into my warm soda water.Across the bar a politician of some sort was loudly explaining tax policy to nobody.Down in my hand, a stranger was turning the dial up a half-degree at a time, and I let him.
Careful.A man could get the wrong idea about you.
what idea is that
That under that very respectable torso there's somebody who knows exactly what he wants
There was a pause.Three dots, gone, back again.I'd hit something—I could feel it through the glass, the way you feel a fish test the line.
and if there is
Then I'd tell him he could say it to me.I'm very good at keeping a secret.
you have no idea how much I want to find out if that's true
My collar was too tight.I shifted on the bar stool.I decided to up the ante, see how far this thing could go.
So tell me.What would you do to me if nobody was ever going to know.
The dots churned for a long moment.
I’d get on my knees for you.Take your cock in my mouth and I’d take my time.Then I’d hold you open and use my tongue until you stopped caring who might hear us.Then I’d fuck you hard enough that you’d feel it for the rest of your life.
I read it twice.The second time my cock gave a hard, unmistakable throb against the zipper of my dress pants.My face was hot.I shifted on the stool and the movement made it worse.
I keep thinking about your face.It’s the only real one on here.I haven’t been able to stop looking at it since you walked in.
I read it three times.The bar noise went to a dull roar somewhere behind my own pulse.Something turned over in my chest, low, warm, and dangerous.
so.you want to get out of here
I looked up once.Scanned the room over the top of my phone—the suits, the rings, the backward lanyards, the brown liquor sweating in two hundred hands.Any one of them.He could've been six feet away or sixty, watching me read him the exact way I was watching all of them.
I looked back down.
Yeah sure.Room 1218.
The app froze.
Just—froze.The little send-wheel spun, and spun, and the whole interface locked up tight, and then a gray box:Connection lost.Try again later.
I glanced up, and it was the funniest and saddest thing I'd seen all day: all across the bar, in the same half-second, a dozen heads came up from a dozen phones, frowning, thumbs jabbing, that universal flicker of a man who's just lost his signal at the worst possible moment.
The servers had finally buckled under the weight of all that need.
