Chapter 9: Long Distance Temptation
The silence after he left had been a physical thing—a thick, velvety emptiness that smelled of him and sex and my cheap coconut conditioner. I’d spent hours just lying in the wreckage of my bed, my mind a staticky FM dial between stations. I’d finally dragged myself to the shitty market, stocked shelves with jars of patis and canned mais, and smiled my customer-service smile that felt painted on and cracking.
Now, back in my room, the emptiness was worse. It had morphed from velvet to a cheap, synthetic polyester—scratchy and static-charged. I was sprawled across the bed, one hand tracing the dent his head had left in my pillow. My phone buzzed on my stomach.
A photo.
It was dim, lit by the harsh, unflattering glare of a hotel bathroom. Omar. The white terrycloth robe was huge on him, the belt loosely cinched around his plush hips. It gaped open at his chest, showing a sweep of smooth, brown skin and a hint of dark hair. His face wasn’t in the frame, just from the collarbones down. The caption read: Lab was exhausting…wish you were here to unwrap your data properly.
A current, hot and immediate, jolted through my lethargy. I sat up. The polyester silence evaporated, replaced by the low hum of anticipation. He was playing my game, from three hundred miles away.
I stared at the image. The robe was standard issue, starched and impersonal, but on him it looked obscene. The way it barely clung to the curve of his hip threatened a collapse. I could smell the hotel soap—that generic, clean scent—and underneath it, him. My mouth watered.
I held the phone to my lips, pressed record. My voice came out a sleep-deprived growl, scratchy with intent.
“Turn around, habibi,” I murmured into the microphone. The words were quiet, but they held the weight of a command. “Show me that Saudi ass I own. Don’t make me ask twice.”
I sent it. A green void on the screen. The three pulsating dots appeared almost instantly. He was typing. Then they stopped. No text came.
A new image loaded, slower this time, a pixelated strip unveiling itself.
My breath hitched.
He’d listened. The same bathroom, the same cruel light. This time, his back was to the mirror. He’d pulled the robe up, gathering the thick fabric in his hands at the small of his back. The terrycloth was crumpled against his spine. The full, perfect expanse of his ass was exposed—the generous, soft curves, the deep crease where his thigh met his cheek, still faintly pink from this morning’s attention. The light caught the fine hairs and the shadowed cleft between. He was bent forward just slightly, presenting.
No caption. Just the image. A silent, brazen offering.
Heat pooled, heavy and urgent, in my groin. I was hard, straining against my briefs. The visual was a spike driven directly into my lower brain. But it was the obedience, the instantaneous compliance across the distance, that made my heart kick against my ribs.
I hit call. Voice only.
He answered on the first ring. I heard a shuffling, the rustle of fabric, then his breath—shallow, expectant.
“You’re following instructions,” I said, no greeting. My voice was lower now, a private frequency.
A soft exhale. “You sound… close.”
“I’m in my bed. Your smell is still on my sheets.” I let the fact hang, a shared intimacy. “Now talk to me. What do you see?”
More rustling. I imagined him looking in the mirror, at his own exposed reflection. “I see… what you wanted to see.”
“Be specific.” I tightened my grip on the phone. “Use your engineer words. Describe my property.”
A pause. Then his voice, hesitant at first, then gaining a clinical precision that was its own kind of filth. “The substrate is… pliant. Warm to the touch. There is residual erythema from earlier… tactile interaction. The central cleft is… deep. Promising high degrees of… friction.”
“Tang ina,” I breathed, a laugh of pure admiration. “You’re insane. Now touch it.”
I heard the sharp intake of breath. A beat of silence. Then a soft, wet sound—a lick of a lip, a swallowed moan. “My… my fingers are cold.”
“I don’t care. Do it. One finger. Trace where I was this morning.”
A shaky sigh, then a faint, almost inaudible sound of skin on skin. A hitched breath. “It’s… soft.”
“Inside.” The word was a bullet.
“David…”
“Now.”
A gasp, sharp and truncated, flooded the line. I could picture it perfectly: his face flushing, his body bowing as he obeyed, pushing a single finger past the tight ring of muscle. The hotel silence around him, this secret violation under fluorescent lights.
“What does it feel like?” I demanded, my own hand sliding under the waistband of my briefs, taking myself in a firm, knowing grip.
“Empty,” he whimpered, the clinical tone shattered. “It feels… empty. It wants… it wants…”
“It wants what?”
“You.” The word was a ragged plea. “It wants you. Fuck. Please.”
His breakdown, the collapse of intellect into pure need, was the most potent thing I’d ever heard. I stroked myself in time with his ragged breaths. “You’re touching yourself thinking about my cock. Aren’t you, you desperate little whore?”
“Yes.” A sob. “I am. I’m hard. I’m—I’m picturing you waking me up like that. The stretch. The way you… you talk to me.”
“Say it. Say what you want me to do to you when you get back.”
His voice fractured, a mixture of Arabic and English, a stream of conscious filth. “I want you to… to use me. I want you to not ask. I want to be sore for days. I want your marks on me. I want you to call me those names while you… while you hold me afterwards.”
The last part undid me. The violence and the tenderness, inseparable in his request. My rhythm faltered. My release climbed, sudden and volcanic.
“Come for me,” I ordered, my voice strangled. “Come all over that ugly hotel bathroom floor. Now.”
A cry—muffled, as if he’d buried his face in the robe—ripped through the phone. I heard it, the helpless, shuddering urgency of it, and that was enough. I came into my own hand, pulsing hot stripes across my stomach, my head thrown back, teeth clenched so hard my jaw ached.
Silence again, but now it was different. Charged. Sated. Filled with the echo of shared ruin. I could hear him trying to steady his breathing, small, wet sniffles.
I looked at the mess on my stomach. The emptiness in the room was gone. He was here, in the afterglow humming on the line.
“You made a mess,” I finally said, my voice returning to its normal register, edged with worn-out amusement.
A weak laugh from his end. “So did you, I think.” A pause. The rustle of fabric—the robe falling back into place, perhaps. “I should… clean up.”
“You should.” I didn’t want to let him go. “Your flight back is Sunday night?”
“Yeah. Lands at nine.”
“Text me when you’re on the ground.” It wasn’t a question.
“Okay.” Another pause, longer this time. “David?”
“Hmm?”
“This… helped. The data collection. Very… affirming.”
I smiled at the ceiling. My clever, filthy engineer. “Good. Now go to sleep. You have robot wars to win tomorrow.”
“It’s a civil engineering materials symposium, but okay.” He was smiling; I could hear it. “Goodnight.”
The call ended. The quiet in my room was no longer empty. It was brimming with the ghost of his gasp, the memory of his submission, and the terrifying, sweet promise of his return. I lay there, sticky and spent, tracing the path of a lone sequin’s reflection on the wall. The transaction was complete. The power had been exerted across state lines.
So why did my chest feel so dangerously, vulnerably full?
The sound of my front door opening and closing, followed by loud chatter and the clatter of grocery bags in the kitchen, shattered the cocoon. My roommates, Mateo and Chloe, were back. Reality, with its brutal, fluorescent overhead lights, slammed back into place.
“David! You alive in there?” Chloe’s voice echoed down the hall. “We got pancit! Don’t make me eat your share!”
I hauled myself up, wiping my stomach with a discarded t-shirt. I looked at the locked door, then at my phone, dark and silent on the rumpled sheets. The digital intimacy felt suddenly fragile, a delicate soap bubble threatening to pop against the coarse texture of my real, crowded, neon-lit life.
“Coming!” I called back, my voice sounding strangely normal. I pulled on a pair of sweatpants. For a moment, I just stood there, caught between the lingering taste of his obedience and the smell of stir-fried noodles creeping under my door. The two worlds were on a collision course, and I was standing squarely in the middle, naked and utterly unprepared.
The two worlds were on a collision course, and I was standing squarely in the middle, naked and utterly unprepared.
I took a final breath, holding the hotel-room silence and his whispered “okay” in my lungs, then exhaled it all into the stale bedroom air. It was time to become David the roommate, not David the commanding voice on the phone. I yanked the sweatpants up, swiped a cleanish shirt from the floor, and opened my door.
The kitchen was a blast of noise and steam. Mateo, wiry and perpetually sunburned from his pool-service job, was wrestling a giant wok over our one working burner. Chloe, her pink hair in a lopsided bun, was slamming mismatched plates onto the rickety table. The greasy, savory smell of pancit canton hit me, overloading the last traces of coconut and sex in my nostrils.
“There he is!” Mateo yelled without turning around. “Thought you died in a sequin avalanche, hoy.”
“My funeral would be fabulous,” I shot back, sliding into a chair. “You’d all be underdressed.”
Chloe plopped a sweating bottle of San Mig in front of me. “You look rough. Good tips at the market today?”
I cracked the beer open, the hiss loud in the small space. “Mrs. Garcia yelled at me for ten minutes because we were out of banana ketchup. So, you know, the usual.” I took a long pull. The beer was cold and bitter, a useful anchor.
Mateo dumped a mountain of noodles onto the plates. “Screw banana ketchup. This is the good stuff. My tita’s recipe.” He finally turned, handing me a plate. His eyes narrowed. “Wait. You have your ‘I just got laid’ glaze. But also your ‘I’m thinking too hard’ forehead crease. What happened?”
I shoved a forkful of noodles into my mouth to buy time. They were perfect—salty, with just the right bite.“No glaze. Just tired.”
Chloe wasn’t having it. She kicked my shin under the table. “It’s the Saudi kid, isn’t it?Mr. ‘Data Collection’.”
The casual mention of him in my kitchen, over pancit, felt like a physical jolt. My friends knew about Omar in vague terms—“that smart kid from UCLA I’m seeing.” They didn’t know the specifics. They couldn’t. The words I used with him would sound like monstrous cuts here, not the twisted currency of our intimacy.
“Maybe,” I mumbled, chasing a shrimp around my plate.
“Is he, like, your boyfriend now?” Mateo asked, mouth full. He said it lightly, but the word hung in the air like smoke. Boyfriend. It was a soft, civilian word. It didn’t fit the sharp, fractured thing we were building.I snorted. “No. God, no. It’s just… it’s complicated.”
“Everything’s complicated with you, inggitero,” Mateo laughed. “You make simple shit complicated. You like him, he likes you. You fuck. What’s complicated?”
Chloe watched me, more perceptive. She twirled noodles around her fork. “Complicated means you actually like him, David. Like, like him. And that scares the sequins right off you.”
I felt exposed, under the bright kitchen light, in a way I never did with Omar in the dark. Here, there were no roles to play, just my own messy truth. “He’s… different.He listens. And he’s so fucking smart it’s annoying. He makes jokes about… about the things we do.” I couldn’t elaborate. “He makes it sound normal. Or at least… shared.”
Mateo’s expression softened. “So he gets you. Your whole…,” he waved a hand in a circle near his head, “...David ecosystem.”
“He’s leaving,” I said, the words escaping before I could stop them. The reality of it, which had felt abstract during our call, suddenly solidified. “Not just San Francisco.After UCLA. He’ll go back. Or get some fancy job somewhere. He’s not… he’s not staying in this shithole apartment eating pancit.”
The room got quiet, save for the hum of our ancient fridge. I stared at the oily sheen on my noodles.
“Shit,” Chloe said softly.
Mateo leaned back in his chair, the plastic creaking under his weight. “So you have him for now.So what? Enjoy the now. Fuck the future. Since when did you plan anything past next week’s gig at The Bunker?”
He was right. That had always been my philosophy. A series of nows, bright and disconnected. But Omar was weaving my nows together into something that looked suspiciously like a timeline, a story with a looming, unhappy ending. It felt like building a set for a show you knew was closing on Saturday.
My phone, still face-down on the table where I’d placed it, vibrated. Once. A text notification.
All three of us looked at it. Mateo grinned, his earlier sympathy evaporating into teasing. “Speak of the devil. Or the engineer.”
“Aren’t you gonna check it?” Chloe prodded, her own smile returning. “Might be important. A diagram of your dick or something.”
I flipped the phone over, trying to keep my face neutral. The screen lit up.
It wasn’t a text. It was a photo notification, a preview. A close-up, slightly blurry, like it was taken hastily. It was a hotel notepad, the kind with the chain’s logo at the top. On it, drawn in what looked like blue ballpoint pen, was a simple but precise schematic.
It was a side-view diagram of two interlocking parts. One part was labeled “SUBSTRATE A (PLIANT, WARM).” The other was labeled “COMPONENT D (8”, TAPERED)”. A dotted line showed the insertion path. At the bottom, in his neat, all-caps handwriting, it read: PROPOSED RE-CALIBRATION UPON RE-ESTABLISHMENT OF LOCAL CONNECTION. SUNDAY, 21:30. AWAITING AUTHORIZATION.
A laugh burst out of me, sudden and unfiltered. It was so perfectly, absurdly him. The clinical filth of it. The joke only we shared. The callback to his words on the phone—substrate, pliant. It was an armor-piercing round of flirtation, designed specifically for my psyche.
“Well?” Mateo demanded. “Good news?”
I locked the screen, the image burning behind my eyes. The collision I’d feared—the world of Omar and the world of this kitchen—didn’t feel like a crash. It felt like a sudden, startling synthesis. My friends were here, with me, in the messy present. And he was there, already building a meticulous, dirty blueprint for our immediate future.
“Yeah,” I said, my voice steadying, a genuine smile spreading across my face for the first time all evening. I picked up my fork. “It’s good. Just… finalizing some plans for Sunday.”
“Atta boy,” Mateo said, clinking his bottle against mine.
Chloe just shook her head, smiling. “Complicated.”
We finished the pancit. The conversation drifted to Mateo’s terrible boss, Chloe’s art school deadlines, the leak in our bathroom ceiling. The normal, grating symphony of my life. But underneath it, a new rhythm held steady—a countdown to Sunday, 21:30, waiting for my authorization. The uncertainty was still there, a dark shape on the horizon. But for now, the now was bright, clear, and expertly diagrammed.
I helped with the dishes. My phone stayed in my pocket, a warm, quiet weight against my thigh. Later, back in my room, I’d send my reply.One word. AUTHORIZATION GRANTED. But for these minutes, I let the domestic chatter wash over me, a familiar anchor in the strange, deep water I was suddenly swimming in.
But for these minutes, I let the domestic chatter wash over me, a familiar anchor in the strange, deep water I was suddenly swimming in.
The phone in my pocket was a small, demanding sun. Its warmth radiated through the thin fabric of my sweatpants, a persistent reminder of the schematic and the countdown it contained. Sunday, 21:30. The numbers organized the chaotic buzz in my head into a neat queue. I scrubbed a dried bit of egg off a plate, the steam from the sink fogging the window overlooking the alley.
"Okay, spill," Chloe said, not looking up from drying a bowl. Her voice was casual, but it had that tuned-in frequency. "The plans for Sunday. Is this a date date? Or a David-date?"
I rinsed the plate, watching the soap bubbles swirl down the drain. "A David-date," I said, the classification feeling instantly inadequate. "He's just coming over."
"Just coming over," Mateo echoed, leaning against the fridge with a knowing smirk. "For more 'data collection'? My god, what is this guy writing, a thesis on your dick?"
"Something like that." I shrugged, a calculated nonchalance. "He's an engineer. He has a peculiar way of talking about things." I couldn't explain the notepad diagram, the cold, hot precision of it. They’d either be horrified or think it was a cry for help. For me, it was a love letter in a cipher only I could read.
Chloe hung the towel on the oven handle. "We're gonna meet him, right?" She finally looked at me, her gaze direct. "I mean, if he's a thing. We meet the things.Eventually."
"Eventually," I conceded, the word sounding like a surrender. "Just... let me feel it out first."
"Weak," Mateo declared, but he was grinning.
"Fine," Chloe said, heading towards the living room. "But if we hear a PowerPoint presentation coming from your room on Sunday about structural integrity or whatever, we're barging in with snacks."
They left me with the last of the dishes. The water in the sink had gone cold. I finished quickly, the stillness of the apartment settling around me again, thicker now after their departure. I went back to my room, closed the door, and leaned against it. I pulled out my phone.
The diagram was still there. I studied it, tracing the lines with my eyes. COMPONENT D. A smile tugged at my mouth, helpless. My thumb hovered over the screen. I opened a new text window.
AUTHORIZATION GRANTED.I typed. Then, after a moment's hesitation: CARBON-BASED LIFE FORM D IS PREPARED FOR RECALIBRATION. DON'T BE LATE.
I sent it.
The three dots appeared, then vanished. No immediate reply. He was probably sleeping, or lost in some engineering problem set. The silence felt okay this time. It felt like a shared space, not an empty one.
I moved to the bed, but knew I wouldn't sleep. The conversation with Mateo and Chloe had opened a valve. Talking about him, even in the vaguest terms, had made him more real in this space, less of a secret ghost. I needed to exorcise him fully into the open air of my life, if only for myself.
I grabbed my laptop from the floor and opened it. The screen flared to life, illuminating the glittery chaos of my walls. I opened a blank document. A stupid idea, but one that felt necessary. I started typing, not a story, but a confession to the empty page. A way to map the weird goofball taking up residence in my head.
His name is Omar, I began.
He’s 19, a Saudi orphan with a trust fund and a UCLA ID. He engineers things. He also gets stupidly, gigglingly high on my shitty weed and tries to explain quantum entanglement to me while staring at my neon nail polish like it’s a universe.
I stopped, my fingers resting on the keys. The memory was sharp.
He showed up to one of my Daphne shows a month ago, I typed, the words coming faster. I didn’t know he was there. He told me afterwards, face completely serious, that he’d been “mesmerized by the kinetic application of sequins as a deflection mechanism for societal projection.” Then he laughed, this snorting, goofy laugh that made his whole plump body shake, and said, “Also, you lip-synced the shit out of that Celine Dion song, ate.”
Ate. He’d used the drag slang perfectly, his accent wrapping around the word, making it sound both alien and intimately understood. He saw the performance and the performer separately, then fused them together with a joke. No one had ever watched Daphne like that.
He’s an orphan, I wrote, the fact feeling heavier now. His parents died in a car crash when he was twelve. He has uncles somewhere, but they just manage his money. He says the trust fund is “a numeric ghost.” He uses it to pay for school, for this shitty apartment he hates but is too lazy to change, for the fancy graphing calculator he brings over like it’s a security blanket. He’s completely alone, but he’s not lonely. He’s just… self-contained. Until he isn’t.
Until he’s in my bed, unraveling. Asking for the dark stuff, the rough stuff, the words that should cut. And then, after, asking to be held. He translates my filth into his clinical observations and my tenderness into a problem he hasn’t solved yet. He thinks love is a non-linear system, too complex to model.
I stared at the last sentence. The cursor blinked, a persistent, rhythmic pulse in the dim room. My heart was doing something similar in my chest.
I think, I typed slowly, each key press a definitive click in the quiet, I might love this weird goofball.
There it was. Black letters on a white screen. A statement of fact with no audience, no recipient, no power dynamic attached. Just a terrifying, quiet truth hanging in the digital ether of my document. It didn’t feel like a explosion. It felt like a settling, a final piece of a complex component sliding into place with a soft, irrevocable click.
I didn’t delete it. I saved the document, titling it “DATA.TXT” with a grim smile, and closed the laptop.
The phone on the bed finally buzzed. A single message from Omar.
AUTHORIZATION ACKNOWLEDGED. COMPONENT O WILL BE PUNCTUAL. INITIATING COUNTDOWN: 46 HOURS, 22 MINUTES.
Followed by another, a second later.
I MISS THE SMELL OF YOUR ROOM. EVEN THE CHEAP PERFUME. IT’S TOO CLEAN HERE.
I read the messages once, then again. The countdown was a promise. The admission about the smell was a vulnerability, a tiny crack in his own containment. I brought the phone to my chest and lay back on the bed, amid the silk and the sequins and the lingering scent of us.
Forty-six hours. The time stretched, a vast desert of waiting. But for the first time, the destination on the other side wasn’t just a fuck, a transaction, a night. It was him. The orphan, the engineer, the boy with the weird laugh who called my drag kinetic. The one who drew schematics of our sex and missed my chaotic perfume.
The one I loved.
The acknowledgment didn’t calm the restless energy in my veins; it electrified it. Love, for me, had never been a soft thing. It was a fierce, possessive, terrifying current. And now it had a name, a shape, a countdown.
Forty-six hours. I knew exactly how I’d greet him.