Chapter 1: Breakfast Confessions and Tinder Temptations
Sunlight cut across the worn wooden table, illuminating dust motes dancing in the warm air. The smell of cheap coffee was thick and familiar. Evan kept his eyes on the chipped rim of his bowl, chasing the last few soggy loops of cereal with a spoon, trying to ignore the fact that Luna was, for all practical purposes, naked.
The oversized football jersey she wore—Ben’s, obviously—swam on her frame, the collar stretched off one shoulder. It just barely covered the curve of her ass as she leaned against the counter. Her legs, bare and long, were crossed at the ankle. She hummed to herself, a low, satisfied sound.
“You’re quiet,” she said, not looking at him. She poured coffee into a mug that said ‘BOSS BITCH’ in cracked lettering.
“Just thinking,” Evan mumbled. His own mug, a plain blue one, was already empty. He’d been holding it for ten minutes.
“About your book?” She padded over and slid into the chair opposite him, the jersey riding up another dangerous inch. Her hair was a chaotic firestorm of red, tumbling around her shoulders and into her eyes. She blew on her coffee.
“Yeah. The book.”
“Liar.” She grinned, a wide, perfect flash of white teeth. “You’re thinking about how I’m basically indecent. Relax, Ev. It’s just skin.” She took a sip, her green eyes watching him over the rim. They were sharp, those eyes. They missed nothing.
He felt his neck grow hot. He was thinking exactly that, and also about the fact that the jersey’s fabric was thin in places, and the morning light was unforgiving. He focused on a knot in the wood grain. “Did you sleep okay?”
She let out a laugh, a single, bright note. “Sleep? Who needs sleep?” She stretched her arms over her head, the hem of the jersey lifting. Evan quickly found a fascinating crack in the ceiling plaster. “Ben finally left around four. That man is a machine. I am completely, utterly ruined in the best possible way.”
Evan’s spoon clattered against the ceramic bowl. He picked it up, his fingers clumsy.
“I mean, seriously,” she continued, her voice dropping into a conspiratorial purr. She leaned forward, resting her chin in her hands. The neck of the jersey gaped, and Evan’s gaze snagged for a fatal second on the soft, heavy swell of her breast before he wrenched it away, his heart hammering against his ribs. “It’s like he knows exactly what I need. Last night was… god. He just pins me down and goes for hours. That thick cock of his just stretches me right where I need it. I was seeing stars. Literally seeing stars.”
The hum of the refrigerator seemed to grow louder. Evan’s cereal turned to cement in his stomach. He could feel the heat in his face, a prickling embarrassment that was part arousal, part shame, part sheer, overwhelming inadequacy. He’d never had sex for hours. He’d never made a woman see stars. His experiences, a clumsy, fumbling trio of incidents in college, had been brief, apologetic, and shrouded in darkness.
“That’s… good,” he managed, the words ash in his mouth.
“Good? It’s transcendent.” She sat back, tracing a finger around her mug. “It’s what I’ve always wanted, you know? Someone who doesn’t get intimidated. Someone who just… takes over. All those boys my age, they’re all talk. Ben’s almost thirty. He knows what he’s doing.” She looked at Evan, her head tilted. “You’d like him. He’s quiet. Like you.”
“I’m sure he’s great,” Evan said, pushing his bowl away. He wanted to disappear into the floor. He wanted to be in his room, with the door shut and his notebook open, where people didn’t talk about transcendent sex and thick cocks before ten a.m.
Luna’s expression softened, but it wasn’t with pity. It was with a kind of blunt curiosity. “C’mon, Ev. When’s the last time you even got laid?”
The question hung in the coffee-scented air, brutal and simple. His fingers twitched on the tabletop. He thought about reaching for his phone, a pointless shield. He could lie. He should lie.
The silence stretched, becoming its own answer.
“That’s what I thought,” she said, not unkindly. She reached across the table and poked his forearm. “You need to get out there. You’re a cute guy. You’ve got that whole sensitive writer thing going. It works on some girls.”
But not on you, he thought. The words screamed in his head. He was five-nine. He was thin in a way no amount of half-hearted gym sessions seemed to fix. His last girlfriend had sighed, mid-hookup, and asked if he was in yet. He’d written a whole short story about that sigh. It was the most painful thing he’d ever written.
“It’s fine,” he said, standing up abruptly, his chair scraping the linoleum. “I’m not really looking.”
“Everyone’s looking,” Luna said, finishing her coffee. She stood up too, and the jersey settled around her thighs. She was taller than him in her bare feet. She moved to the sink, her movements loose and unselfconscious. “Even when you think you’re not, you are. It’s biology. You should let me set you up. I know a girl from my art history class who’s super into poetry. She’s kind of intense, but you’re intense.”
“No,” he said, too quickly. The idea was a special kind of horror. “Thanks. I’m good.”
She shrugged, the fabric pulling across her back. “Suit yourself. Your loss.” She rinsed her mug and placed it in the drainer. “I’m gonna shower. Ben’s picking me up at noon. We’re driving up to the lake.”
She padded out of the kitchen, leaving a trail of her scent—jasmine, sleep, and sex—in the sunlit air. Evan stood still, listening to the pipes groan to life in the walls, the sound of the shower starting a moment later.
He finally let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. He looked down at his hands. They were trembling slightly. He closed them into fists.
He walked to his room, a small box at the end of the hall, and shut the door. He opened his laptop, the blank document glaringly white. He wanted to write something profound about longing, about the distance between people in the same small space. But all he could think about was the casual, crushing weight of her words, the effortless way she existed in her body, and the detailed, joyful map of pleasure she’d drawn with a man who wasn’t him.
He typed a single sentence: The sun was a brutal informant. He deleted it. It was a terrible line. Cliché.
From the bathroom, he heard the water shut off. A few minutes later, her bedroom door clicked open and shut. The apartment was silent again, save for the relentless hum of the fridge.
He pulled out his phone. His thumb hovered over the notes app, where he kept fragments, observations. He added a new one:
—Kitchen. Morning light. The gap between the word ‘transcendent’ and the word ‘fine.’ The geography of a stretched collar. The sound of a spoon hitting a bowl when you know you are, and will always be, on the wrong side of the door.
The front door clicked shut behind Luna, leaving the apartment humming with a silence that felt heavier than before. Evan stared at his phone, thumb hovering over the app store icon, then tapped it, downloaded Tinder, and within twenty minutes of swiping with a dull, mechanical rhythm, had secured a blandly pleasant date with a girl named Chloe for that evening.
Evan stared at his phone, thumb hovering over the app store icon, then tapped it, downloaded Tinder, and within twenty minutes of swiping with a dull, mechanical rhythm, had secured a blandly pleasant date with a girl named Chloe for that evening.
The bar date was fine. Chloe laughed at his awkward jokes and her knee brushed his under the small table. They kissed outside her Uber, a dry, testing press of lips that tasted of IPA and mint gum. Back at the apartment, a sliver of light glowed under Luna’s door and the muffled soundtrack of a sitcom leaked into the hall. Evan moved quietly, finger to his lips, and Chloe nodded with wide, understanding eyes.
In his room, the momentum took over. Clothes fell to the floor in a heap on the worn rug. Her skin was cool. His hands felt clumsy but she guided them, murmuring, “There, yeah.” The first time was a frantic, nervous release, over too quickly for her. The second was slower, a grinding, experimental rhythm where he focused on his breathing, on the sweat-slick feel of her back under his palms. He lasted.
The third time, in the deep blue hour just before dawn, something shifted. Fatigue stripped away his anxiety. He moved with a determined, steady pace that made her gasp, her nails digging into his shoulders. She came with a sharp, shuddering sigh he felt through his entire body. After, she nestled into the crook of his arm. “You’re full of surprises,” she mumbled, already half asleep.
He stared at the ceiling, listening to her breathing even out. A thin, triumphant thread wound through the hollow in his chest. It snapped when she checked her phone at six, dressed quickly, and gave him a polite, distant smile at the door. “That was fun,” she said. The apartment was silent. Luna’s door was still closed.
The hollow triumph of the night evaporated in the silent hallway. Evan showered, the water scalding his skin as he replayed every moment, every sound Chloe had made. He climbed into his cold bed, the sheets still smelling faintly of her perfume and his own sweat. Just as his eyes grew heavy, the low murmur of voices seeped through the wall.
He froze, listening. It was Luna’s voice, a soft, rhythmic murmur, and then a higher, lighter one—Chloe’s. They were whispering. He pressed his ear to the cool plaster, heart thudding, but could only catch the occasional consonant, a soft laugh that felt sharp as glass. The words themselves were just out of reach, a secret shared in the dark. He laid back, staring at the ceiling until the whispers stopped and the apartment fell into a deep, judgmental quiet.
Sunlight found him at the kitchen table again, pushing scrambled eggs around his plate. Luna floated in, wrapped in a silk kimono this time, her hair a damp cascade. She poured coffee, leaned against the counter, and studied him with a slow, conspiratorial smirk.
“So,” she said, her voice bright with faux innocence. “How was your big night?”
He shrugged, keeping his eyes on his plate. “It was fine. She was nice.”
Luna’s smirk widened. She took a deliberate sip. “Mhmm. Chloe texted me this morning.” She let the statement hang, watching the color drain from his face. “She said you were… an okay fuck.” Luna’s tone was clinical, almost bored. “But that she wouldn’t want to do it again. Said you’re just… not that good.” She delivered the verdict with a casual shrug, as if commenting on the weather, then turned to open the fridge, the hum of it filling the devastating silence she’d left behind.