The Promotion Blow

Bonnie Kessler was twenty-three years old and she had never given a blowjob. She was twenty-three, married, a full-time librarian, and that particular box sat there unchecked, and she thought about it more than she liked to admit.

She'd married Danny at twenty-one. They had dated for exactly one year before that. Her mother had said it was too fast. Her mother had said a lot of things. But Bonnie had known by the third date that Danny was the one, mostly because he laughed at her jokes even the bad ones and he never once made her feel dumb for not knowing things.

She hadn't known a lot of things. She grew up in a small town outside Salem, went to a church school, and the sex talk her parents gave her lasted about ninety seconds and ended with the word "later." Later never really came. She figured things out from books, which was ironic given her job. The library had a surprisingly thorough collection. She just read it after hours, alone, like a woman doing research for a paper she'd never turn in.

Danny was the same in one way. Twenty-four, worked as a production assistant on indie films in Portland, and had never received a blowjob either. They had never actually said that part out loud. It just hung there. They did plenty of other things and they did them happily, but that specific door stayed shut, and every time it came close to opening Bonnie chickened out and kissed her way down his stomach and then back up again like she'd changed her mind about the destination.

Two years of marriage. She loved him more than anything. She just wanted, for once, to be brave about one thing.

* * *

It was a Thursday in October when she drove downtown with two coffees in the cupholders and a plan to surprise him. Their anniversary was Friday but she had a shift at the library, so Thursday it was. Three years together, two married. She'd bought him a vintage lens cleaning kit from a pawn shop and wrapped it in purple paper.

The studio was a converted warehouse on the east side. She'd visited once before, early on, and remembered it as chaos. It still was. A kid at the door with a clipboard waved her through when she said she was Danny's wife. The kid looked about nineteen, which made Bonnie feel ancient at twenty-three.

The shoot was a low-budget sci-fi thing called Orbital Decay. She followed the noise down a corridor and came out near the edge of the set, which was a spaceship corridor built out of plywood and gray paint. Someone had lit it very well. Props everywhere. Old coffee smell mixed with dust and theatrical paint, that particular sticky-sweet paint smell that gets in your sinuses and stays.

She spotted Danny right away. He was standing near the monitor tent, talking to an older guy with a gray beard and a coffee of his own. That would be Rufus Garza, the director. Danny talked about him constantly. Bonnie had met him once at a wrap party and he'd called her "the librarian" like it was a nickname and told her to keep Danny honest.

Danny looked tense. She could see it from thirty feet. Shoulders up around his ears, hands moving too fast while he talked.

She hung back by a rack of costumes, meaning to wait for a lull. And that's when she heard it. Rufus had a voice that carried.

"The promotion thing," Rufus was saying, "comes down to one damn thing, kid. You've got the brains for assistant director, you've got the eye. But you negotiate like a kid at a lemonade stand. You fold the second I raise an eyebrow. He needs to loosen his damn jaw is what he needs. Loosen that jaw and actually ask for what he's worth."

Bonnie stood very still.

Loosen his jaw.

Her brain, trained on two decades of sheltered living and a few years of quiet reading, went somewhere Rufus Garza had absolutely not intended. She heard loosen his jaw and her mind filled in the rest. An assistant director. A promotion. It was some kind of crude joke, she decided, some industry thing where the director was telling Danny, in front of everyone, what the job really required. Her face went hot. Her stomach did something complicated.

She should have just walked over and said hi. That was the correct move. But Bonnie had spent her whole life taking figurative things literally and literal things figuratively, and so she turned around and slipped away down the corridor toward the storage rooms, heart pounding, a plan forming that was absolutely insane and absolutely hers.

* * *

The storage room was cramped and cluttered, prop crates doubling as shelves and one crate clearly doubling as a stool. Boxes of gaffer tape. A mannequin torso wearing half a spacesuit. A lamp on a clamp.

Danny found her there twenty minutes later. She'd texted him, "I'm in the storage room off corridor B, come alone, it's important."

He came in fast, looking worried, coffee still in hand. "Bon? Hey, hey, happy almost anniversary. Everything okay? You never say 'come alone.' Is your mom okay? Is the library okay?"

"Everything's fine." She set her coffee down on a crate. "Sit down, Danny."

He sat on the mannequin crate. It creaked. "Okay. You're scaring me a little."

"I heard you talking to Rufus," she said.

Danny's face did a thing. "Right. Yeah. The promotion. It's Friday, actually, my meeting is Friday morning, which is why I'm a wreck today, sorry, I didn't want to dump that on you before our anniversary."

"He said you need to loosen your jaw," Bonnie said. Her voice came out strange and flat and determined all at once. "For the promotion."

Danny blinked. "What?"

"He said, and I wrote it down in my head so I'd get it right, he said you need to loosen that jaw and ask for what you're worth." She took a breath. "Danny, I know what that means. I mean, I think I know what that means. Rufus hires people and apparently there are things people do and I'm not judging, I'm really not, I just. If that's what it takes. If that's what you have to do."

There was a long silence.

Then Danny made a noise that was half cough and half laugh and it came out strangled. "Bon. Bonnie. No. No, oh my god. He meant, he was talking about negotiating. Like, jaw tension. I clench my jaw when I get talked over. He's been on me about it for two years. Loosen up, stop looking like a scared rabbit, say the number out loud. That is the entire matter. It's about asking for more money."

Bonnie stared at him.

"Oh," she said.

"Yeah."

"Oh my god." She put both hands over her face. "I just summoned you to a storage room to. Oh my god."

"To what?" Danny said, and then his face changed, because Danny was slow about exactly one thing in life and it was never this. "Wait. To what, Bonnie?"

"Nothing," she said through her hands.

"You were going to. In here. In a storage room. Because of what Rufus said about my jaw." He was grinning now, she could hear it, that awful delighted grin. "You were going to blow me to get me a promotion."

"Do not say it like that," she said, dropping her hands. Her ears were on fire. "I was going to do it because I wanted to. The promotion was just. It was context. It felt urgent. You were tense and I thought, well, that's one way to help him relax before his big meeting."

Danny put his coffee down very slowly, like he needed both hands free for what came next. "Bonnie."

"What."

"Nobody has ever. You know we've never. Right? I know we've never actually said it out loud but you know that about me and I know that about you and we've been married two years and you were about to just. In a storage room. With a mannequin watching."

"The mannequin doesn't count as a person," Bonnie said. "And yes, I know we've never. That's kind of the entire point. I've been working up to it for months, Danny. Months. I read about it. I practiced on, on things. Bananas mostly. The library has a break room, don't ask."

"You practiced on bananas in the library break room," Danny said.

"For you," she said. "And then I chickened out like eight times and now I find out I misheard a director talking about negotiation and I've made a complete idiot of myself and you're laughing."

"I'm not laughing," Danny said, and he wasn't, anymore. He looked at her with an expression she'd only seen on their wedding night. "I'm the opposite of laughing, actually. I'm trying very hard to be a mature adult about this."

"How's it going?"

"Badly," he said. "So the promotion thing. The real one. Rufus wants me to actually negotiate on Friday and I don't know how and I've been stressed sick about it for a week. And my wife just followed me into a storage room to."

"To help you relax," Bonnie said. "Before your meeting."

"Before Friday's meeting. There's still a day in between."

"Details," she said. She stepped closer, between his knees, and put her hands on his shoulders. Her heart was loud and her mouth was dry but she had come this far over a misunderstanding and she was not going to waste it. "Danny. I want to do this. I've wanted to for a long time. I'm asking for real, no misunderstanding, no Rufus quote to hide behind. Can I?"

Danny swallowed. His jaw, she noticed, was very tense.

"Yeah," he said. "God, yes. Please."

She dropped to her knees on the concrete floor, and then thought better of it, because concrete is concrete. She grabbed a folded furniture pad off a prop crate and spread it down first.

"Okay," she said. "That's better. Ignore that. Librarian knees."

"Bonnie, you don't have to do the whole setup like you're shelving me."

"Hush. I've imagined this step about forty times and I'm not skipping it now."

She put her hands on his belt. Her fingers were shaking a little and she made herself stop and breathe. Danny watched her. He had his hands flat on the crate behind him like he was gripping a rollercoaster.

"Talk to me," she said. "If I do something wrong, tell me. I've only got banana data."

"You're going to be great."

"That's what people say about oral presentations too and then I grade them down. So. Feedback. In real time."

He laughed, and she felt the laugh through the belt buckle as she worked it open. She unbuttoned his jeans. She pulled the zipper down slow, the way the articles said, and heard him stop breathing for a second.

She hooked her thumbs in his waistband and pulled down, underwear and all, and his cock came out hard and bounced against his stomach.

"Oh," Bonnie said. "Hello."

"Hi," Danny said, voice cracked in the middle.

She'd seen it before, obviously. Two years of marriage, a shower with a glass door, a honeymoon where she'd touched it plenty. But she had never looked at it from this angle, this close, this on purpose. It looked different from down here. Thicker. She wrapped one hand around the base and it jumped in her grip and Danny made a small sound.

"Okay," she whispered, mostly to herself. "Okay, okay."

"You keep saying okay."

"I'm psyching myself up. It's a whole thing. Do you want a countdown?"

"Bonnie, for the love of god, please stop doing a librarian bit and put your mouth on me."

She grinned. And then she leaned in and licked the head, once, slow, and watched his whole face come apart.

"Oh my god," Danny said.

So that worked. Encouraged, she did it again, and then again, and then took him into her mouth, just the head, and closed her lips around it.

Danny said a word he would normally apologize for.

She worked her tongue where the articles said to work it. She took a little more in, then a little more, keeping her teeth out of the way, breathing through her nose like she'd practiced. Her hand stayed wrapped around the base, doing what her mouth couldn't. She found a rhythm. Down, up, twist of the wrist. Down, up, twist.

"Bon. Bonnie. That's. Yeah. That's really." He gave up on sentences.

She hummed a little, an experiment, and his hips jerked forward and she pulled off fast, coughing.

"Sorry! Sorry. Too much?"

"No, that was me, that was all me." He was red-faced and gripping the crate edge. "You hummed and my brain left."

"Do you want me to do that again?"

"Please do that again."

She laughed and went back down. She got braver now, took him deeper than before, felt him hit the back of her mouth and eased off before it became a problem. The articles had a whole section on that part and she'd decided she wasn't ready to be a hero on her first day. She could hear the wet sounds she was making and knew she should be embarrassed and found she wasn't, even a little. His cock was slick and hot and she had it in her mouth and her husband was coming apart