JINX // 03:17 // STILL OPEN

do not finish

I kick the door shut with the heel that has been killing me since noon. Keys in the bowl. No lights. The monitor in the other room is already on because I never turned it off this morning. That glow is enough. That glow is the whole religion.

I have been edging since the train.

Not cute. Not performative. Just that slow, stupid drip that starts in my shorts on the platform and turns into a crime by the time the elevator hits my floor. I sit down still dressed. Taking it off would be a kindness I am not offering myself.

The doc is empty. Cursor blinking like it knows. I type three words. Delete them. Type them again.

Do not finish.

First touch is through cloth. Two fingers mapping the exact swollen shape I have been sitting on for six hours. Breath punches out of me. Not a moan. Not yet. I press until the fabric goes dark. Count to thirty. Take the hand off like it bit me.

Rule for tonight: touch. count. leave.

Again.

The story I sold myself was clean. Come home. Edge until the brain goes static. Sleep. The story that actually happens is older. Meaner. Every time the hand comes back my hips answer before I do. Shorts come off because they are soaked and in the way, not because I decided I deserved skin. Couch. Bare. The wet sound is filthy in a quiet apartment.

I open the camera I swore I would not open.

Not live. Not yet. Just the little window. My own face: wrecked mouth, blown pupils, that ugly pretty flush. I watch my fingers drag through the slick and smear it up over the small, neglected cock that has been leaking into every pair I own. Dark. Shiny. I circle the head once. Twice. Stop.

Fuck you, I tell the reflection.

The reflection already won.

Four is the ugly one. Thighs shaking. Free hand murdering the throw pillow. I am so close the room shrinks to heat and that stupid throb screaming now now now. I rip the hand away and pin both palms to my own throat instead. Swallow. Pulse. Body trying to finish without me.

Forty seconds.

Then I go back.

By seven the document is a mess. Filthy looping sentences with no grammar. One hand typing. One hand ruining me. Cursor keeping time with the stroke. Sometimes I lose track of which one is the writing.

You can look. You can pay to look. You can watch me fail at stopping.

The links sit at the bottom of the draft like a loaded gun I left on the table on purpose.

I do not come. That is the whole point. That is the nasty little church of this night. Orgasm locked behind my teeth. Denial fed to it instead. Every time I get close enough to taste it I yank back, shaking, laughing once because it is so dumb and so good. Couch destroyed. Stomach painted. Air like sex and rain and the candle I lit two hours ago and forgot.

After midnight the edges stop having numbers. There is only the next one. And the next. Voice wrecked when I finally talk to the empty room.

Stay.

I mean the feeling. I mean the person on the other side of a screen with a fist moving in the same ruined rhythm. I mean me.

I do not come.

Laptop shuts when the sky starts lying about morning. File saved. Body still buzzing, still dripping, still one stupid stroke away from the thing I refused all night.

Shorts stay on the floor.

Door stays unlocked.