After Wrap

I’d been thinking about pegging Felix since around month three. Second project review, March, a conference room the client had booked without a window - he said something precise that cut through an hour of circular feedback, and I watched his hands on the table and thought: him. Not vaguely. Specifically. On his back, my harness on, his voice doing whatever it did when there was nothing professional holding it in place. I’d been carrying that picture quietly for five months while we worked alongside each other on three separate projects and said nothing about it, which required more discipline than I usually bother with.

Tonight the project wrapped. The dinner ran long - good wine, the particular looseness that settles over people when something hard is finally finished. He was the last one at the table. I asked if he wanted to come up and he said yes without checking his phone or manufacturing a reason not to. In the elevator he stood close enough that I could have touched him without reaching far. I didn’t. I’d been patient for eight months. I could survive another thirty seconds.

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Felix designs sound - commercial post, the work that has to make something happen inside a viewer in thirty seconds or less. He’s been doing it long enough that he does it with his whole body; he listens differently from most people in a room, tracking what’s being said and the space around what’s being said at the same time. His reactions arrive after everyone else’s and they’re always correct. We’d talked for three hours at a client dinner back in April, a canal walk after that, both of us circling something we didn’t name and then didn’t mention again. I’d thought about his hands a lot in the months after that evening. I’d thought about them again in the elevator going up.

The dinner had been good. At some point near the end, someone had asked him how he knew when a mix was finished. He’d set down his fork and said: “When there’s nothing left to add that makes it better. Not when everything’s in.” I’d been looking at his hands while he said it and thought: tonight.

He asked for the bathroom when we got up to my apartment. I pointed down the hall and went to get wine.

I heard him stop.

I know that specific silence - what it sounds like when someone has seen something they weren’t expecting to see. I put the bottle down and came around the corner. He was standing in the doorway of my bedroom, still, looking at my nightstand.

The toy was there. I’d been using it earlier in the week and hadn’t put it away. Weighted silicone, the size I want when I want to feel properly full, heavier than anything modest. The reservoir in the base was visible if you knew what you were looking at. He knew what he was looking at.

The embarrassment arrived fast. Not shame about my sexuality - I’m past that - but the specific exposure of a private thing seen before I’d chosen to show it. I was wearing the wrong expression and I knew it. I waited for him to do the gracious thing: look away, say sorry, pretend.

He didn’t.

“Is that yours,” he said. Not quite a question.

“Yes.”

He looked at it for another moment. Then, in the exact same register he uses to explain why a room needs more acoustic treatment in the mid-range: “I was hoping you were into something like that.”

Eight months of careful professional distance ended in approximately four seconds.

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“On the bed,” I said. “Take your clothes off first.”