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When Kaufmo clocks out, he always smells like popcorn.
It's not a bad thing, not really. And it's also definitely not something Pomni's become overly aware of, from all the times he's joined her and Jax at the arcade after their shifts, from the times when she trails after the both of them to their apartment to watch a movie on their sinking couch before she goes home, from the sparse few occasions where she meets up with him without anyone else around—like now.
It's just a Normal thing, to have noticed and to continue to notice, about a guy who's her friend, and the best friend of someone she has totally uncomplicated and very straightforward feelings about. The sky is blue, the earth is round, and Kaufmo smells like popcorn. Buttery and salty and a bit like the sizzle of oil, just enough to make your mouth water.
And, okay, that's. Maybe romanticizing it a bit, and it's really not something she should be ruminating on, anyway, especially not in this exact moment.
He'd been kind enough—or, at least, easy-going enough—to agree to help her put together her new bed frame. The slats in her old one had finally broken down enough that she couldn't sleep without fear of the whole thing caving in on itself, and the one she'd found listed on eBay ($50 trundle day bed good condition in parts will deliver for gas $) fit all her requirements… and was an absolute bitch to assemble. The bag of unlabelled screws really should've clued her in when the guy had delivered it, and if not that then the fact that, despite the listing mentioning it being "lightweight", it was made of pure fucking cast iron, heavy enough that it'd taken her half a dozen trips to get all the parts into her apartment. But the lack of any kind of instructions combined with the weight had made it an insurmountable task for one person alone.
It's not like she'd been bereft of options. Zooble might've said yes, if they hadn't mentioned plans with Gangle and Ragatha after work. Gummigoo would've agreed to it, too, but one of the pythons was egg-bound, so he was pulling extra hours to keep an eye on her. She could've asked Jax.
He was annoyingly good at wrestling weird projects like this, had joked once, to the laughter of no one in the group except for Pomni—under her breath, hidden behind a cough so he wouldn't get an ego about it—that he had magic hands. But for a reason she really wasn't unpacking, the thought of inviting him over to her apartment made her stomach flip. Kaufmo was an easy get. When she'd approached him about it, all he'd done was tilt his head a little, asked what time she was heading out, and, as she'd started to turn on her heel with a promise to meet him after work, called behind her—
"You got beer at your place?"
Which had led them here. With Kaufmo hoisting up one of the panels of the bed frame while Pomni manuevers around him, making use of her small fingers to fit the final screw into place.
Her position means she's kind of snug against his side, her cheek smushed a bit into his stomach, not that he seems to mind. Or notice, even, beyond the few times he's shifted his weight on his feet. The fabric of his polo is soft, somehow, unlike the scratchier material of her own. She makes a mental note to ask him what detergent he uses another time, when she's not seconds away from being pissed off.
"Stupid fucking—" The curses fizzle out of her in a groan of frustration. Above her, Kaufmo laughs a little. It's primarily a puff of air over the lip of his beer bottle—Pomni is trying very hard to also not think about the fact that he's very hefting the mess of dense metal with one hand, easily enough that he hasn't had to put his drink down—but the act of it jostles his belly just the tiniest bit, and she feels it against the side of her face.
All the aggression that'd been building up in her over the bedframe leeches out of her all at once, hissing into nothingness like air out of a balloon. Instead, all that's left knocking around in her brain is the sudden desire to turn her head, just a bit, and bite down.
She should not. She won't.
It would be so easy.
His shirt has ridden up a bit. None of his skin is showing, but it's a near thing, the hem of his polo sitting just at where his belt is looped through his pants. Unhelpfully, her brain supplies her with the thought of how simple it'd be, to shift a little and nudge it up with the tip of her nose. Barely any pressure needed and he'd be exposed, enough to get her mouth on.
Two weeks ago, when running through her end of day checklist, Pomni had made the—in hindsight, horrible and inappropriate—decision to cut through one of the men's locker rooms. There were a countless number of hidden tunnels and secret passageways meant specifically for staff to navigate from one place to another, out of sight of the guests, and the easiest underground access to manuever from where she'd been to where she'd been going had been, at the time, the locker room.
In her defense, people rarely lingered there long, and most of the staff aside from her and janitorial had scattered for the night. By all accounts, there should've been no one in there.
She's had to remind herself of those facts several times over when, like now, her mind decides, unprompted, to run back in glorious high definition what she had seen, instead.
The halogen lights overhead had been reflecting off the tile, painting the whole scene in a milky teal. Kaufmo, on one of the benches in the center of the room, his legs spread, his head tipped back. And Jax, kneeled between them, one hand on Kaufmo's knee and the other somewhere in front of himself—with his back to the entrance, to Pomni, she couldn't exactly see what he'd been doing, but it wasn't hard to guess. The slick sounds that'd filled the room where only offset by the quiet plink, plink, plink of a dripping faucet, the muffled moans that Jax had been letting loose, the breathy, contented sighs spilling out of Kaufmo's mouth.
She hadn't meant to linger. It was a complete and total invasion of privacy on her part, even if they were in a semi-public space. But her feet had stuck to the floor, and she'd been unable to move for one minute, two, her eyes glued to the bob of Jax's head.
Then Kaufmo had opened his eyes, and caught sight of her there—deer in headlights, butterfly pinned to a board. And he'd. Smiled, in that easy way he often did. And Pomni had bolted, then, right back the way she'd came.
The memory of it has been singed at the back of her eyes since, casting the both of them in a horribly new light. She'd already felt guilty enough letting the thought of Jax buzz through her when she was alone, hand between her thighs, but now it was worse—now she knew what he sounded like when he was jerking off, knew what he'd look like on his knees—and Kaufmo had become a victim of her perverse thoughts, too. A better person than her would probably apologize. Would swear to have wiped it clean from her mind, gone forever entirely.
Instead she was here, remembering it now, crouched in front of Kaufmo with his body radiating warmth against hers, while she tries desperately to finish this ridiculous—
A bonus to her internal spiral, at the very least, is that her hands hadn't stopped moving. And without the added pressure of her annoyance, the screw has found its home easily, and twisted into place in no time at all. She only realizes it when she blinks out of her haze enough to notice that she's just been rubbing over the cap end for God knows how long, unable to turn it any further.
"You, uh. You got it, or…?" The question jolts Pomni into motion. She skitters back, far enough that she can pop back up onto her feet.
"Y-Yeah, sorry. Felt like it was taking foreveeer…" Stretching the last syllable out, she puts a bit more distance between them. Tries to brush away the phantom sensation of his warmth against her face by scrubbing a hand through her bangs, then busies herself with collecting some of the packing detritus littered across the carpet of her bedroom. "That was it though, right?"
When Kaufmo releases the bedframe, it settles with a light thunk. "Yup, should be." He gives the whole thing a little wiggle. The creak of the metal isn't exactly inspirational, but it does look solid, and none of the pieces seem loose, so she supposes she'll just have to grab a can of WD40 on her next errand run.
Swapping his drink from one hand to the other, he turns to face her. The light cast into the room through her blinds is sherbert—creamsicle orange and rosebud pink, just beginning to melt into the quiet blue of evening. The plastic in Pomni's hand crinkles, and that seems to prompt the next words out of him.
"Guess all that's left is giving it a whirl, huh?"
Pomni feels her heartbeat thud, just once, between her legs. She thinks, distantly, that she's just washed her sheets, that it'll be a pain to redo them all after he's left.
It's a blip against the onset of her arousal, though. A speck of sand under the rolling tide, dust swept away by a broom.
"Yeah," she says, dropping everything in her hold right back down onto the floor, "Help me get the mattresses in place?"