Saturday Night

The morning sun poured into the room, warm and golden. I lay tangled in the sheets, savoring the remnants of the night, while Dominic stood at the foot of the bed—a silent, solid figure. His arms were folded across his thick bare chest, expression unreadable but not cold. Something in the proud, soft curve of his belly and the way he stood—still, alert—made me feel both exposed and oddly safe.

“You planning to stay down there all day?” he asked, voice rough with sleep and gravel.

I stretched, letting the sheet slip to my waist. “Depends. Are you planning to get back in?”

He didn’t answer. He simply uncrossed his arms and stepped closer, the mattress shifting as he sat on the edge of the bed. He didn’t touch me. Just looked toward the window, the sunlight catching the silver at his temples.

“You always stare like that?” he asked.

“Only when I like what I see.”

He turned then. His eyes, still heavy from sleep, softened slightly. He reached out and placed his palm on my chest—not grabbing, just resting there. His hand was warm and wide.

“I haven’t wanted to wake up next to anyone in a long time,” he said quietly. “Not like this.”

I placed my hand over his. He leaned in, his belly brushing mine, his weight settling over me like a second blanket. Our lips met—slowly, deliberately. The kiss deepened, not rushed, just real. I wrapped my arms around his back, fingertips tracing the soft skin at his sides.

Dominic pulled back slightly. “You ready?”

I cupped his face. “As ready as we’re ever going to be.”

He nodded, once, then kissed me again—deeper, steadier—like something was being decided in the space between us.

Early evening Friday, we were standing inside the gallery. The street outside buzzed with traffic. Inside, the space was all white walls, cold wine in plastic cups, and soft chatter echoing off polished concrete.

Dominic paused just inside the door, hands in his coat pockets.

“So this is what a firehouse turns into when nobody needs fires put out anymore,” he said.

“Progress?” I offered.

“Depends who you ask.”

We moved through the “Flesh in Repose” exhibit: black-and-white portraits of aging bodies, sagging skin, scarred surfaces, eyes staring down the camera. Dominic didn’t say much, but he didn’t rush either.

Then Julian appeared.

“Darling,” he said, approaching in soft boots and a scarf with cranes embroidered along the hem. He kissed both my cheeks. “You’re here.”

“Julian, this is Dominic.”

Julian turned and extended a careful, limp handshake. Dominic took it without hesitation.

“I’ve heard your name,” Julian said. “You work with machines?”

“Wiring, mostly. Fuse boxes, panels.”

“A little less conceptual than what I do, I imagine.”

“Could be,” Dominic said. “Harder to fake, though.”

Julian gave a little laugh, then gestured to a nearby photograph of a pale man lying naked on cracked linoleum, half in shadow. “What do you make of this?”

Dominic looked at it for a while. “He’s alone. No blanket, nothing to sit on. Looks hungry. Could be a hospital. Maybe prison.”

Julian raised an eyebrow. “He’s a performance artist. It’s about surveillance and dissociation.”

Dominic nodded. “Still hungry.”

Julian gave a cool smile. “Literal-minded?”

“Observant,” Dominic said.

Trying to soften the edge, I offered, “Julian runs a space in Bed-Stuy. Digital installations, mostly.”

Dominic nodded. “You need to know programming for that?”

“Not really,” Julian said. “But you have to follow theory.”

“My nephew taught himself to code. Got a job writing dialogue for some horror game. All from a busted laptop in a trailer.”

Julian blinked. “Seriously?”

“Pays better than welding. His mom hates it.”

Julian gave a short laugh. “She’ll get over it. We always do.” Then he turned to me, his voice just low enough. “Not your usual type.”

“Neither are you,” I replied.

Julian’s smile thinned, and he excused himself.

We stayed a little longer, drifted through two more rooms, and stepped out into the warm night.

Dominic lit a cigarette. The glow briefly lit his face. “Your friend’s something else.”

“Someone from my past.”

He offered me the cigarette. I shook my head. We walked in silence, the streetlights coming on around us.

Saturday, we took the train out to Woodhaven. Dominic just said, “Aunt Maureen’s getting wobbly,” and that was enough. I offered to come. He nodded.

Her building smelled of boiled cabbage and old varnish. The hallway was narrow, the apartment door armored with three locks and a dusty Christmas wreath clinging into March.

Dominic knocked twice.

“Use the key, you mule!” came the voice from inside.

He did.

Maureen sat at the kitchen table in a faded housecoat, bright lipstick slightly smudged, hair collapsed on one side. There were already two mugs on the table.

“Christ, you’ve gotten bigger,” she said as he bent to kiss her cheek. “You bringing pastries or guilt?”

“Raspberry rugelach.”

“That’ll do.”

She turned to me, squinting. “You’re not the barber.”

“No,” I said. “I’m—”

“His friend,” Dominic said, placing the pastries on a chipped plate.

“I’ve got enough friends,” she muttered, but she shook my hand.

The kitchen was cluttered with ceramic roosters and calendars with scratched-out years. Dominic filled the kettle like he’d done it a hundred times.

“So, what are you?” she asked me. “You talk nice. Some kind of professor?”

“Translator.”

“Books or people?”

“Both.”

She looked me over, then shot Dominic a glance. “And you brought him here?”

“He wanted to come.”

“Hmph.”

The tea was weak, served in mugs from hardware stores and banks. Maureen ate three rugelach without offering any. The conversation was mostly between her and Dominic, filled with teasing and long pauses that didn’t need to be filled.

At one point, she turned to me. “He used to wire his GI Joes with twist ties. Made them electrocute each other.”

“I was eight,” Dominic said.

“Still. Precise.”

Later, Dominic tightened the knobs on her walker. He checked the pill bottles. Pulled a bag of Ensure out of the hall closet without being asked.

Then came the thud of heavy footsteps. Leo—his cousin—appeared in the doorway, thick arms folded, eyes narrowing when he looked at me.

“This the friend?” he asked. “Now it makes sense. You bringin’ your boy around Maureen’s like it’s nothing?”

Dominic didn’t flinch. “He’s with me.”

Leo scoffed. “Yeah. I can see that.”

Before I could speak, Maureen slammed her hand on the table. “Leo, shut your damn mouth. This is my house. Anyone Dominic brings here is welcome. Now get me another rugelach or get out.”

Leo hesitated, grumbled, and disappeared down the hall.

Maureen smoothed her housecoat. “That boy never could read a room.”

As we were leaving, she tugged my sleeve.

“You’re a soft one,” she said. “Don’t let him run you over.”

“I won’t.”

She looked at Dominic. “And don’t expect to be understood. It never lasts.”

He kissed her cheek. “I’ll be back next week.”

We stepped into the wide Queens afternoon.

“She likes you,” Dominic said after a while.

“She called me soft.”

“Coming from her? That’s approval.”

We stopped at a corner store. I bought water. He got ginger ale and a lotto ticket. Outside, we sat on a bench. He handed me a rugelach.

“Leftover,” he said.

We ate it quietly. The sky above was dull blue. A bit of paper blew past, catching on the curb.

The door clicked shut behind them, the groan of the old hinge giving way to stillness. Dominic turned the bolt and let out a breath that came from somewhere deep in his chest.

“That’s that,” he muttered, slipping off his boots by the radiator.

I leaned back against the door, hands in my coat pockets. “Your aunt is sharp.”

“She’s eighty-eight and thinks everyone’s a spy,” he said. “If she didn’t grill you, she wouldn’t like you.”

I smiled. “So I passed.”

He looked at me then, properly. “You did.”

The flat was warm, its heat thick with the smells of old wood, leather polish, something faintly vegetal. Dominic moved into the kitchen without ceremony, filled the kettle, set it on the gas burner. I shrugged off my coat and folded it over a chair. The silence wasn’t tense. It just hung there between us—still shaped by two days of politely navigating each other’s origins, answering well-meaning questions, adjusting to the odd fact of our presence side-by-side.

“Thanks for today,” I said when the kettle started to rumble, wishing he could slide the words neatly into the room instead of flinging them out awkwardly. “I know it isn’t—It’s not easy, showing someone around inside your past.”

Dominic measured ground coffee into the press. His hands—the way he heaped then leveled the scoop, the little shake to settle the grounds—made it look like an act of concentration. When he answered, there was a clipped musicality to it, almost like he’d rehearsed. “Wasn’t all for you. She’s been on my case about meeting someone decent.” He looked up then, eyes catching and holding. “But you did good. Leo’s got a mouth, Maureen’s got knives, but you made it through.”

The kettle shrilled. Dominic poured and waited, watching the dark steeple of rising grounds. “Funny,” he said, “how you think you know yourself until you see it through someone else’s eyes.”

It was astonishing, how quickly the last forty-eight hours had rearranged everything. The careful barriers of politeness, the old scaffolding of jokes and gentle evasions—they’d been knocked away by those slow, nervous family conversations, by the easy way Dominic’s hand drifted to his when nobody was watching. The closeness, the tacit reminders of flesh against flesh, how a finger brushing a knuckle could reach so far up inside his brain he felt hollowed out and trembling.

I wanted him. There, blunt and idiotic in its obviousness. The shape of it was nothing like lust from before, all sharp wanting and strategy. This was different. This was the aftermath of something earned.

Dominic was watching him, chin propped in his palm. “You’re staring again.”

“I can’t help it.”

I reached over and took Dominic’s hand—bigger, rougher, familiar now. He drew his thumb along the wrist bone, feeling the thump of pulse beneath. The gesture knocked the breath right out of him; he used to think these little touches were for idiots or actors. Now he couldn’t think of anything else but doing it again.

Dominic didn’t flinch. Instead, he squeezed back, then pulled him out of the chair and into his lap. There was some shifting, the mug nearly overturning, a brief huff of laughter against his jaw

Neither of us moved. He was inches away, taller by a shoulder, broad and solid. The kitchen light was yellow and soft. His flannel shirt was open at the collar, the pale undershirt beneath it stretched a little at the chest. I reached out, touching the placket of his shirt, not tugging, just resting two fingers there.

His mouth parted slightly.

“I want to kiss you,” I said.

“You’re standing right there,” he answered.

So I did. It wasn’t hesitant. It was breath against breath, the kind of kiss that starts like a question and gets answered fast. His hand slid behind my neck, palm rough, fingers curling under my hair. I pressed closer, and he backed me into the wall without letting go of my mouth, his thigh wedging between mine with the same workman’s precision he probably used to install fuse boxes.

The space between us collapsed. I reached up slowly, fingers brushing the collar of his flannel shirt. “Can I?”

His body was heavier, warmer, solid in a way I found grounding. I kissed him slowly, letting my lips rest on his a moment longer each time, until we stopped thinking entirely. His mouth tasted of coffee and the faint sweetness of his aunt’s marmalade.

As we undressed, it wasn’t frantic, but deliberate—like every button, every inch of revealed skin, mattered. We stood before each other, shirts slipping from our shoulders, belts quietly unfastened, trousers eased down—not in haste, but reverence. I watched Dominic’s body come into view: solid, familiar from the outside, yet somehow newly mysterious in its complete unveiling. His belly, soft and slightly rounded, moved with his breath. The hair across his chest caught the light like a dusky halo. He looked at me not with hunger, but with a kind of quiet surrender—an expression that said he was ready to be seen, fully, maybe for the first time.

My own body—pale, a little heavier than I liked to admit, touched with its own uneven marks of living—was no longer something I wanted to hide. Not from him. We were both, in different ways, used to being observed or measured—him in physical space, me in conversation, in classrooms, in expectations—but this was different. This stripped us bare in every sense. No performances. No scripts.

Our nakedness wasn’t just about lust. It was a levelling. A quiet miracle. The differences in how we were raised, in how we moved through the world—those things fell away as our clothes did. Flesh is honest in a way words often aren’t. We touched each other with a kind of reverence, not to claim, but to understand. He ran a hand slowly down my chest, not to grope but to know. I traced the curve of his lower back with my fingers, feeling his breath shiver under my touch.

Dominic met my eyes, his own wide, uncertain but full of something deeper than need. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. The way he looked at me—chin tilted slightly down, pupils wide, mouth half-open—was a question and an offering at once. I nodded, unable to speak.

When I knelt before him, it wasn’t to impress or perform—it was to be closer. To feel him. To be of use to him in a way that felt intimate and necessary.

He gasped when I took him in my mouth, his hand steadying itself on my shoulder. “Jesus,” he murmured, barely audible.

Dominic was already hard—the kind of thick, solid build that seemed almost improbable, a perfect fit to the rest of him. The weight of it in my mouth was grounding. I pressed my tongue along the underside, slow, deliberate, feeling Dominic’s thighs tense under his hands.

"Fuck," Dominic whispered, not loud but resonant. His hand found its way to the back of his head, fingers tracing through his hair with a surprising gentleness.

I worked my mouth around the shaft, jaw already aching, lips stretched wide. Dominic’s breath hitched whenever he grazed the rim with the edge of his teeth. He wanted to laugh at the way every gasp, every quiet profanity, felt like praise. He fell into the rhythm, in and out, letting himself be controlled by Dominic’s cautious grip and the heat pulsing against his tongue.

I pulled back, stood, and rested my forehead against his. "Let’s go to the bedroom."

He nodded again, and we walked down the hallway, naked, our shoulders and hips brushing against each other, I laid him back and began to explore every part of him that had been concealed earlier. I kissed the soft curve of his belly, my tongue dipping into his navel. I ran my fingers through the dark hair on his chest before leaning down to take one of his nipples into my mouth, teasing it with my teeth.

Then, I guided him onto his stomach, my hands gripping his hips firmly. I positioned myself between his legs, my hard cock resting against his ass. I didn't ask for permission aloud; instead, I waited until he looked back at me, his eyes meeting mine, giving me the go-ahead silently, without turning away.

"I'm yours," Dominic whispered, his voice barely audible but filled with desire.

I took my time, my penis circling his hole before gently pushing in. He tensed briefly, then exhaled slowly, his body relaxing as I began to fuck him . His fingers clawed softly at the sheets feeling his body open up for me.

I began to move in earnest, my hips pistoning in and out of him, our flesh slapping together with each deep thrust. Dominic's moans grew louder, filling the room as he took my entire length again and again.

“Fuck Me!”

My body jerked as my orgasm hit, my cock pulsing as I shot my cum deep inside Dominic. I could feel his body responding, his muscles tightening around me as he came undone beneath me spilling his semen onto the sheets

Panting, I collapsed on top of him, our hearts hammering against each other's chests. We lay there, entangled, basking in the afterglow.

After, he rolled onto his side with a grunt and stared at the ceiling. I stayed on my back, catching my breath.

“I’ll make the tea now,” he said.

“Leave it,” I murmured, one arm across my chest, the other stretched toward him.

He reached for my hand and folded it into his.

They lay in silence for a while, their hands still joined, breath slowing into something easy. The hum of the old radiator filled the room, steady and low.

Dominic turned his head toward me, propped up slightly on one elbow. His chest rose and fell, still damp with sweat, his hair mussed in odd directions.

“You want to stay the night?” he asked, humorously.

I turned to face him, nose nearly brushing his. “You always this romantic?”

He shrugged. “This is me trying.”

He kissed me again—not like before. Slower. Simpler. A kiss that wasn’t about heat but about knowing. Then he settled back, tugging the old wool blanket over both of us. I shifted closer, resting my head against his shoulder.

Outside, the wind picked up. Inside, the room stayed warm.

We didn’t speak again that night. But as I drifted off, still pressed against the solid warmth of him, I found myself thinking—without fear or hesitation—that maybe this odd, quiet, stubborn man beside me was the one I’d somehow been walking toward all along.

And he, in his own way, was already clearing space for me in his life.

The hum of the radiator filled the room, and in its rhythm, I imagined mornings like this—not just once, but always.