Luke grips my waist, helping me, thrusting up to meet my descent. “Come on. Come on, York. Take it.”
I squeeze my eyes shut. The pleasure is a white-hot wire pulling tight in my belly. I’m right there. I’m falling over the edge.
DING-DONG.
The doorbell rings. It is loud. It is insistent. It echoes through the apartment.
My eyes fly open. Luke freezes mid-thrust.
“The Breville!” I shout.
The realization hits me at the exact same moment as the orgasm. I come hard, crying out, my body convulsing around him. Luke groans, thrusting up one last time, and finishes with a shout that is partially a curse word and partially my name.
We collapse.
I fall forward onto his chest, panting, completely spent. The room is silent for three seconds.
DING-DONG.
“Preston,” Luke wheezes, staring at the ceiling, his chest heaving under me. “Did you just climax to the sound of a delivery buzzer?”
I lift my head. I am flushed, sweating, and completely unrepentant.
“It’s a very high-quality machine,” I say breathlessly. “Stainless steel. Conical burr grinder. It excites me.”
Luke laughs. He laughs so hard the bed shakes. He kisses my forehead, then swats my ass.
“Get off. I have to go get your mechanical child before they take it back to the depot.”
Luke puts on sweatpants—grey sweatpants, bless him—and goes downstairs.
I stumble out of bed, wrap the duvet around myself like a toga, and shuffle into the kitchen to assess the situation.
I pause. I squint.
“This is a structural hazard,” I whisper.
Luke’s kitchen is… lived in. That is the polite term. There are spices on the counter. There is a stack of mail on the table. There is a blender that looks like it’s from 1990.
Where is the Breville going to go? It needs space. It needs a shrine.
I start moving things. I stack the mail. I move the blender to the top of the fridge (sorry, blender). I organize the spices by height. I clear a pristine two-foot square of counter space near the outlet.
The door opens. Luke walks in, carrying a massive cardboard box. He looks disheveled and sexy and domestic.
“It’s heavy,” he says, dropping it on the floor. “Jesus, York. Did you order the industrial size?”
“It’s the Barista Express,” I say, kneeling to open the box with a steak knife I found in the sink. “It’s necessary.”
We spend the next twenty minutes setting it up. I am in my element. I flush the lines. I fill the hopper. I dial in the grind size. Luke leans against the counter, drinking a glass of water, watching me with an amused smile.
“You look happy,” he observes.
“I am happy. I’m making proper coffee. Hand me the tamper.”
He hands me the tamper. Our fingers brush.
“There,” I say, stepping back to admire the gleaming chrome machine sitting amidst the chaos of his kitchen. “It’s beautiful.”
