Juno Cooper, Untitled 1 – contact sheet, 2025, silver gelatin print, 1" x 4".

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Fifteen minutes later, he’s killed the leftover soda he found on my counter and is lying on my couch in his sweaty button-down. I spot the white-rimmed collar of an undershirt and tell him to take that thing off. When I turn around, he’s topless on my couch. His oversized khakis are belted high around his waist. He looks like an overfed, fallen king.

​

“Come here, lady,” he says, and motions.

I ignore him and busy myself straightening papers, shifting around piles of mail from one side of my desk to the other.

“I want to hold you,” he says.

“What about that speech?” I ask. I’m trying to milk whatever control I might have now. Build on it, greedily, like bluffing my way to a flush with only a pair in my hand.

“I talked to my mother yesterday. She told me I shouldn’t be messing with a twenty-eight-year-old woman. She says, ‘Every time we have sex, I’m making you a promise.’”

“That’s your mother’s line?”

I realize my posturing has worked because this is a confession. He’s letting me in on the fact that he was only a conduit of that speech, not, at least, the sole author. I remembered him saying a version of this before, during one of our phone calls, and it had hurt me then, the embarrassing truth of it.

He nods vaguely and then looks at me, grinning. “Come here.” He pats his stomach.

“It’s a good one,” I say. “I thought it was yours.” I’m distracted, wondering what else came from her, a woman he calls selfish to strangers.

Hunter beckons with his eyes fixed on me.

 I crawl on top of his sticky, city-worn chest and lie there breathing him in. He wraps his arms around me.

“Now I can help you find the man of your dreams,” he says.

“Can you not talk like that?” I whine, propping myself up.

“Well, can you help me find the woman of MY dreams? My W-O-M-D.”

“Your womb?” I say.

“My W-O-M-D,” he says, landing hard on the “d.”

“Ah, ‘woman of your’ No. I cannot help you.”

​

“Why not?”

I back off of him and he stops. I start telling him a story about the time my mother and her seventy-five year old cousin found my vibrator in a dresser drawer. The dresser had originally belonged to my great grandmother, and I told them they could look through the old scraps of cloth and quilt parts she used to keep in there, forgetting I’d hidden it among them.

“Come here,” he keeps saying as I talk, reaching out his arms and dropping them, alternately smiling and pouting.

“I will only come if you don’t mention --”

“My WOMD,” he says.

It still sounds like womb. 

Finally, we agree, and I slide back on him, and then he turns on his side, and I fall cradled between him and the couch’s back. The city’s moving parts grind and contract outside, then expand in the muggy night as we go silent.

“You give mediocre blowjobs,” he says.

“What?”

“Never mind," he says.

“Never mind? What do you mean, I give bad blow jobs?” I pull myself out of the gap.

“It’s just that you’re really good at everything else, so it’s a little surprising. They’re not bad, they’re fine. Just not like ‘blow me’ away.”

I sigh. “Tell me what I'm doing wrong. I need to know.”

“They’re just too loose.” He shows me with his mouth. “You need to create more of a locked-in feeling and tension, like around it. Also, you barely move your tongue. You can practice on me,” he says, like it’s an act of pure goodwill. “But I have to take a shower first.”
“Somehow I don't think that would be the best idea,” I finally say. I lie back down, and we breathe in silence. “Let me finish my story.”

Soon his lids flutter, his body settles, and his breathing starts to change. His eyes stick. I laugh to myself that I’ve put him to sleep in thirty seconds flat. But then he pulls me in closer with a sharp squeeze and scrambles his hand down my skirt, onto my butt cheek. It’s the closest I’ve come to seeing him sleep. He rarely goes to bed before four am, and if I say I’m going to bed, he drives home. He groans and pulls me in again. Then he takes his hand out to scratch his arm, and then digs it back down under my skirt.

When the phone rings, I extricate myself and go to answer it. Ten minutes later, as I walk back into the living room, he opens his eyes, his long, spindly lashes parting like black webs. He looks at me from across the room, disoriented and sleepy.

“Hey,” he says. “What are you doing?”

“You can keep sleeping.”

“No. Come here.”

I go back over and stand above him. I try to memorize this scene, being the one in the position to give or deny. He reaches his arms up into the air and pulls me down, wraps me up, and we kiss. He closes his eyes and moans.

“Lick my mouth,” he says, and I do. I kiss his nipples and flutter my lips over his eyelids. Then I go back to his mouth.

“I want to fuck you so bad,” he says. “Let’s go into your room and have sex, no condom. I want to feel you for real.”

It’s a hackneyed line, but there’s a reason why it’s overused. I laugh, and he bites the fleshy part of my arm like I like.

“I'm not letting you get all clear-headed. I think I'd rather keep you like this,” I say.

He sighs and puts his head back down, quiet for a second. “You have total domain over me now, anyway.”

​

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​

Later in my narrow kitchen, he tells me about his notorious ex-girlfriend again. How crazy she was for the taste of his cum. How she wanted to spit it back in his mouth. How one time she had him masturbate onto a plate and then licked it up.

“It was really weird how much she liked it,” he says. “Some kind of fucked up psychological thing, probably. But flattering, of course. A girlfriend who did things girls are only supposed to do in porno films.”

“They pretty much only do,” I say.

“Now you see why I can’t be in a relationship,” he says.

Now I feel like a reincarnated sage commingling with a fool.

Standing near the counter, Hunter curves forward and shovels spoonfuls of sauce-covered bowties into his mouth, then gulps down coffee.

“Slow down,” I say. “You’re a maniac.”

He stops and looks up at me from the bowl. It’s a look like he’s finally put his finger on something formerly out of reach. I know by now to be nervous.

“You’re just afraid of never finding someone as crazy but also as grounded as me,” he says.

I open my mouth to object. Instead, I give him a look that says maybe, maybe not.

“Well, I know someone, but you said we can’t do that for each other, said you won’t help me find my WOMD.”

“That’s right,” I say. “I won’t help you.”

“Fine, I won’t tell you who it is.”

“Fine,” I say.

“Okay,” he says, as in, your loss. Then he meets my eyes, and I start to believe that he actually has someone in mind.

“Okay, who do you know? Who?” I bite.

He half-laughs, his face deep in the bowl, “Nah, I don’t know anyone.”