It was one of those humid late-July afternoons when the air feels thick enough to chew. I’d walked four blocks to the waterfront in a tie and a jacket I regretted bringing, and my shirt stuck to my back before I reached the hostess stand. I hung my jacket on the back of my chair and rolled my shoulders like a man shedding armor.

A strategic review, the calendar invite said. In our company, that means two people from different branches sit across a table and agree on numbers they’ve already agreed on by email. I’d still rehearsed my concerns about the Q3 projections in the shower. I’d picked the bistro for its linen napkins and its view of the marina. I wanted to look like a man who took this seriously.

Marcus was twenty minutes late.

I saw him cross the patio, phone in one hand, the other raised in a half-apologetic wave. Pale blue linen shirt, already dark between the shoulder blades. And shorts.

I’d known Marcus for four years, the way you know someone from the other branch. Quarterly meetings, a holiday party, one long email war over a vendor. He was thirty-eight, lean, funny without trying. In four years, I had never given his legs a second thought. Not on purpose, anyway.

I thought about them now. The shorts were beige, washed so many times they’d gone soft and nearly sheer, cut wide through the leg and ending a few inches above the knee. Elastic waist. No belt. They hung off his hips like something borrowed.

“Traffic,” he said, dropping into the chair across from me. “Don’t say anything. I’m melting.”

“You look underdressed.”

“It’s a hundred degrees. I’m not wearing a tie to eat a salad.” He grinned. “Look at you, though. Suffering. It’s kind of beautiful.”

I ordered a beer, which was a mistake. I’d wanted a clear head.

For twenty minutes, nothing happened. I want to say that plainly. We talked about the vendor, the new regional director nobody trusted, his kid’s soccer league. I laid out my concerns about Q3, and he took them seriously, and we got somewhere.

He talked with his whole body. He leaned in, gestured, and dragged a hand through his hair as he worked something out. At some point, he crossed one ankle over the other, and I didn’t notice. Why would I?

Then I dropped my napkin.

I bent for it, one hand on the table, and as I came up my eyes passed under the edge of the tablecloth, which stopped well short of the floor. His right ankle was resting on his left knee. The wide leg of those shorts had fallen open like a curtain.

It took a second to understand what I was looking at.

The pale inside of his thigh. And where the fabric hung away from his body, something darker and heavy rested against his skin. No underwear. Or none that was doing anything.

My heart dropped like a tray. I felt it in my throat, in my ears, in the tips of my fingers still curled around the napkin. I came the rest of the way up too fast, and the patio swam, bright and flat, like a room when you stand up after sitting too long.

I put the napkin in my lap. I picked up the beer. It was cold enough to hurt my teeth, and I drank a third of it because my hands needed something to do.

“You okay?”

“Wrong pipe.”

“The napkin went down the wrong pipe?”

“The beer,” I said, my voice a half-step too high. He laughed and went back to the distribution agreement.

My face was burning. Not blushing, burning, that dry prickling heat that starts at the collar and climbs. I was sure it was visible from the street. I kept waiting for him to say, “You’re all red,” and he didn’t, because he was looking at his fork. I took a breath and tried to let it out slowly. It caught halfway, ragged, and I turned it into a cough.

The food came. Plates, glasses, a little bowl of lemons: a landscape that hid everything below his ribs. I was relieved. Then I was disappointed. That was the first time I understood how much trouble I was in.

I couldn’t tell you what my sandwich tasted like. I knew I’d eaten half of it. I knew it had bacon because I later found a piece on my napkin. My whole body had gone somewhere else, into a low, steady hum, like standing too close to a power line.

And my cock had come awake.

It had started with the first glimpse, a slow, heavy swelling I’d tried to ignore. Now it was fully there, pressed against my zipper, stupid and insistent. I shifted in my seat, and it only got worse. I crossed my legs, which pinned it against my thigh, hot and thick, every heartbeat giving it a small, humiliating throb. I could feel the damp where I’d started leaking into my underwear. Of all the places to be hard, I’d picked one with white tablecloths and a waiter named Dennis.

I spread my napkin across my lap and smoothed it flat, like a man arranging his dignity.

“Legal’s going to push back on the indemnity clause,” Marcus said. “You know how they are.”

“Legal,” I said.

I tried to listen. The words arrived one at a time, like sounds from the next room. Indemnity. Carve-out. Timeline. The meaning slid off, somewhere past the roaring in my ears.

He slid down in his chair. The heat had finally beaten the posture out of him, and he stretched both legs out under the table, and his knees drifted apart. The hem of the left leg had ridden up. The fabric folded on itself, leaving a deep, shadowed gap. He shifted his weight to reach for his tea, and the whole thing swung open and settled again, and in between I saw him.

Not all of him. The loose weight of his balls, darker than the skin of his thigh, flushed from the heat. And lying along the thigh above them, thick and soft, the end of his cock just showing past the hem, the skin of it blunt and pink and entirely unaware.

Two seconds. Then he sat forward, and the cloth fell closed, and there was nothing to see but a man in khaki.

I stopped breathing. I noticed only because the noise in my chest got louder. My mouth went dry, so dry my tongue felt thick against my teeth, and when I swallowed nothing happened. My cock jumped hard against my thigh, one fierce, involuntary pulse, and I pressed my knees together as if I could hold it down by force.

“…so I told him we’d need it in writing.”

“Good,” I said. I have no idea what I was agreeing to.

I excused myself to the bathroom.

I stood with the napkin held low in front of me and my jacket draped over one arm like a waiter’s towel. Every step was a negotiation. The restaurant had never seemed so long.

The bathroom was cool and tiled and empty. I locked the stall door and braced my hands against it, breathing through my mouth. My heart was going so hard I could see it in my shirt. I looked down. The front of my trousers was straining, a stubborn ridge, and a dark, wet spot the size of a coin had spread on the gray wool.

“Get a grip,” I whispered to no one.

I ran cold water over my wrists, like my mother used to tell me when I got upset. I splashed my face. In the mirror, a red-cheeked, wild-eyed man looked back at me, tie crooked, collar gone dark with sweat. He looked like someone who’d been caught at something. I couldn’t tell which scared me more: that Marcus might have noticed, or that I wasn’t sorry. I tried to think about Q3. I tried to think about taxes, my dentist, my grandmother. It took ten minutes, and when I came out I was soft and shaky and half-ashamed, with the dull, bruised feeling of having run in the heat.

Marcus was on his phone when I got back. He looked up and smiled.

“There he is. I was about to send a search party.”

“Sorry. Long walk.”

He didn’t know. That’s what stayed with me. He sat there, open and easy, a man who had never once thought of his body as something anyone might look at.

I gave myself a lecture. Decent. Professional. A man with a kid in a soccer league, who’d come here to do a job. I made myself meet his eyes and notice the lines around them, the smear of dressing he’d missed at the corner of his mouth.

It worked for about eight minutes.

Then he laced his hands behind his head, spread his knees, and leaned back in the chair to stretch.

I looked. I didn’t pretend otherwise. The angle was better, and the light was kinder, and the shorts did nothing at all. He was soft, heavy, lying along the inside of his thigh, the head shifting a little against the fabric when he breathed. A faint dark line of hair climbed from beneath it. Nothing about it was for me. It was simply there, exposed, like a hand.

Four seconds. Five. The world narrowed to a bright tunnel with that one point at the center. The restaurant noise dropped away, the clink of silverware, the gulls, his voice. There was only my own pulse, and a thick, aching heat that went through me from scalp to knees, so complete I thought for a moment I might be sick. I was hard again, instantly, in a rush that was almost painful. My fork hung in the air, forgotten.

“Hey.”

I looked up. He was watching me, hands still behind his head, an easy, puzzled smile on his face.

“You still with me?”

My skin went cold, then hot. My eyes had been on his lap. His eyes were on my face. Had he followed my gaze? Did he know?

“Sorry,” I said. “Zoned out. It’s the heat.”

“Tell me about it.” He dropped his arms and sat forward, and the shorts fell closed. “Dessert? I feel like we’ve earned it.”

I said no. Then I said yes, because I couldn’t stand for it to end and I couldn’t stand for it to continue, and some weak, wanting part of me still hoped for a third look.

There wasn’t one. We finished the agenda. The check came, and he reached for it before I could, and I watched him pull out his wallet with that careless ease, a man with nothing to hide.

When we stood to leave, I held my jacket in front of me and hoped he’d think I was cold.

In the parking lot, heat came up off the asphalt in waves. Marcus stood by his car with one hand in his pocket, squinting at the sun.

“Good lunch. I feel like we got a lot done.”

“We did.” My voice sounded normal. I was proud of that.

“Same time next quarter?”

“Wouldn’t miss it.”

He shook my hand, a firm, damp, friendly grip. I held on a half-second too long. He got in, rolled down the window, waved, and drove off, and my knees went loose as I watched him go.

* * *

I did not go back to the office.

I sat in my car with the engine off and the windows up. My hands were trembling on the wheel, a fine, ridiculous shake I couldn’t stop. The heat built. I loosened my tie, then stopped pretending I was cooling down and unbuckled my belt.

I was hard enough to hurt. I wrapped my hand around myself, and it was almost too much, a bright, shameful jolt. I closed my eyes, and he was right there: the pale inside of his thigh, his weight, his head shifting against the fabric as he breathed. His voice in my head, saying You still with me? I stroked fast and not well. I was shaking by the end. I came with my forehead against the headrest and my teeth set, hot across my stomach and my hand, and a sound came out of me that I’d never made before.

Afterward the adrenaline drained out of me all at once. My arms felt hollow. My shirt was soaked through and cold against my back, and my pulse slowed until I could hear the engine ticking as it cooled. It wasn’t regret, exactly. It was the stunned quiet of a man who’d just learned how much he could want without anyone knowing.

My phone buzzed on the passenger seat. An email from Marcus, sent at 4:12.

Great catching up. I’ll send the deck Monday. Next time, you’re buying.

I read it three times. Next time.