After the Con

I woke up with my face half in the pillow and one leg hooked over Dylan's, and for a second I didn't know what hotel this was or why my thighs ached like I'd run stairs all day. Then it came back. The con, the afterparty, the elevator, this room. The light through the cheap curtains was thin and gray and it caught the edge of a plastic Batman on the nightstand, still in its packaging, and a stack of takeout containers by the TV.

Dylan was still asleep, flat on his back with one arm thrown over his eyes, and the sheet had slid down to his hip. Twenty-nine years old, same crooked nose he'd had at that college party seven years ago, when I was 21 and he was 22 and we drank too much punch and talked about Sandman for three hours. We dated for about two months after that. It didn't stick. We broke up and drifted and then last year, at the opening night mixer of this same convention, he found me working security at the door and grinned like no time had passed at all.

We'd been texting for about eight months since then. Friends, he called it. Friends was a word that meant something different in a hotel room at three in the morning.

I lay there and did the math on my body. Everything was sore in that specific way, the way that tells you exactly what you did and how many times you did it. I was not going to sit through a four hour shift in a security uniform without thinking about every hour of last night, that was for sure.

The afterparty was in a rented hall two blocks from the convention center, open bar, terrible DJ. Dylan had found me by the snack table around eleven. He had a badge around his neck and ink smudged on the side of his hand from sketching all day at his table in artist alley, and when he said hi he put his hand flat at the small of my back and left it there. Just left it there. We'd done that dance for months, close enough to touch and not touching, and last night his hand decided it was done waiting.

"You survived the crowd," he said, picking a lanyard off my shoulder and straightening it.

"Barely. Some guy in a full Iron Man suit tried to bring a metal sword in. I talked to him for twenty minutes."

"And?"

"I confiscated it and he cried inside the suit. I could hear him."

He laughed and his hand stayed and we stood there grinning at each other like idiots while the DJ played something neither of us would ever listen to on purpose. And I remember thinking, clear as anything, that I was going to say yes to whatever he asked next, and that scared me a little because Dylan had always been the one thing in my life I couldn't schedule.

We left around one. His hotel was the cheap one catty corner to the center, the one with the flickering sign. In the hallway outside his door, third floor, carpet that smelled like twenty years of cigarettes, he turned around and looked at me and didn't say anything smart this time. He just leaned in slow enough that I had time to stop him, and I didn't stop him, I pulled his shirt instead.

That kiss. God, that kiss. Seven years collapsed into nothing. My whole chest went warm, that old crush from the college party lighting right back up like it had been sitting on a pilot flame this whole time. He pressed me into the door and I fumbled behind me for the handle and we almost fell into the room together and he was laughing against my mouth, and I was laughing too, and it felt like being 21 again except we both knew what we were doing now.

Inside, the room was a mess of con merch and print portfolios. He sat me on the edge of the bed and stood between my knees and put two fingers on my collarbone, just tracing the line of it, slow, over the strap of my dress. His mouth was close to my ear.

"I've thought about this for months," he whispered. "Let me make you feel good. That's all I want tonight."

"So ask me straight," I told him.

"Okay. Daphne. Come to bed with me. Yes or no."

"Yes," I said, and that was the last full sentence for a while.

I won't claim I remember it in order, because I don't. I remember pieces. His jacket on the floor. My dress somewhere near the TV. The ceiling light was off and the bathroom light was on, so everything was this soft orange half dark. He took his time, which nobody had done for me in a long time. He used his hands and then his mouth and he paid attention, actually paid attention, watched my face when I reacted and went back and did that thing again, harder, until my hips came off the mattress.

The toy came out of his bag somewhere in the middle. I heard the zipper and rolled up on my elbows.

"What are you doing?"

"Got a present at the con," he said, holding up this slim little thing, pink, with a remote in his other hand. "Artist alley had a booth. Don't judge me."

"You bought a vibrator at a comic convention."

"The same booth sold me this Batman. I have range."

He asked, and I said yes, and he put it inside me slow while I was still pulsing from his mouth, and it wasn't big, it was slim, and it settled deep and he didn't turn it on at first. He just left it there and pulled me up to kiss him, and we talked in between kisses, dumb talk, about the sword guy and about the college party and about the mixer last year where he'd almost not come over to my door. The whole time it sat inside me and I could feel every time I laughed or clenched around it, and I told him that.

"That's the point," he said, grinning. "Keep it in."

He flicked the remote low while we were kissing and I gasped into his mouth and he swallowed it. Low, then off, then low again, on and off for what felt like an hour, so my body never got to decide if it was coming or not. At some point I grabbed his wrist and said his name in a way that wasn't casual at all, and he pushed me back into the pillows and the remote went to high and stayed there and I came so hard I grabbed a fistful of sheet and tore it half off the corner of the mattress.

After that he was inside me and the toy was still in, both at