What's the part that comes after "knock knock"?

As I've documented (extensively), my roommate has many weird, quirky habits. Some are frustrating (leaving the doors to our house open, waking me up at 5am....I could go on) and some are just kind of strange and confusing (eating 6-8 hotdogs in one sitting, being able to divide very large numbers in his head but consistently forgetting where we keep the toilet paper). One quirk of his is that he doesn’t respond when I knock on the bathroom door.

Since we keep the door closed most of the time there's no way to tell if someone is in there. In an effort to avoid making our relationship more tense than it already is, I always knock just to be sure, even if I don’t think he’s home.

[As an aside, once he walked in on me when I had just gotten out of the shower. He had come very close to walking in on me many times before that, and I was getting a little sick of it. I knew if I didn’t make a loud noise as he got close to the bathroom that he was going to walk in on me (my standard practice is to slam something or turn on the water as I hear him getting close because I know he’s totally oblivious and would probably just open the door). I decided not to make a noise and let him walk in on me so he would be so embarrassed he would never not knock on the door again. Apparently he has a very low learning curve because it's happened three times since then].

For some reason, if he's in there when I knock on the door he doesn't answer. I’ll knock, wait a second for a response, and then try to turn the doorknob. Then I’ll feel him pull on the door to keep it closed, or hold the doorknob to keep it from turning so I can’t come in.

“Ohh – sorry.” I’ll say through the door. “I didn’t realize you were in there” because you didn’t say anything when I knocked you dumb shit!

One morning I was walking to the bathroom, knocked, didn’t hear anything, as always, and turned the handle to open the door to see my roommate standing there, masturbating (clearly, he couldn’t hold the door shut because his hands were busy). Now, if there’s a person in this world who can accidentally walk in on you masturbating and then not act awkward about it, it’s probably me.

“Ohh – shit. I’m sorry. Sorry – continue.”
“Ohh god”
“No, it’s ok. No worries. I’m all for masturbation. I’m a sex educator – please. I mean, I masturbate all the time.”


*Cricket*


“Ooookay….” I said to myself and promptly left the room to hide-out in my bedroom for the next week.

I was really coming from a good place though – the place of wanting to make someone who was so clearly mortified feel a little bit better by making a joke out of the situation. In hindsight, I realize, a very bad idea. But at least my internal filter caught the other thing I was thinking, which was “Dude, do you want to borrow some lube?”