How I Discovered I Was Bisexual at Forty

Until I was forty-three, I never doubted my orientation. I’d been divorced for two years, living alone in an apartment downtown, and my sex life revolved around a couple of trusted female friends and the occasional date. Women, always women. That certainty was part of how I presented myself to the world and, above all, to myself.

The crack appeared last summer, at a couple of friends’ house. Lucía and Ramiro had been in an open relationship long before they met me, and one night, after a little too much wine, they proposed I be the third. I said yes. I thought it would be an experience to keep quiet about, an adult curiosity indulged once.

We started in the living room, with the lights low and some blues playing softly. Lucía settled herself over me in a classic sixty-nine, her cunt open above my face and her mouth swallowing my cock to the root. I licked her from top to bottom, burying my tongue in her soaked slit, sucking her swollen clit while she moaned with my dick inside her. Her hips moved slowly, rubbing her cunt against my mouth, and a meter away Ramiro watched us from the sofa, smoking, his hand wrapped around the hard cock that poked out through his open fly. That was the arrangement: he watched. That was what they’d told me.

At some point I stopped hearing the lighter, and when I opened my eyes, Ramiro was already on his knees behind her. He was fucking her calmly, without talking, without asking permission. I felt the contact first: the thick shaft of his cock sliding in and out of Lucía’s cunt two inches from my mouth. An instant later, a different taste on my tongue: thick, salty, the taste of another man coming out of her, mixed with her juices. I stayed still. I didn’t pull away. I was surprised I didn’t pull away.

When Ramiro’s cock came out again, shiny and veined, I licked it. I licked the whole shaft from balls to head before he plunged it back into Lucía’s cunt. I repeated the motion every time it came out, sucking up the mixed juices, letting my tongue get slick with the cum he was leaving inside her. They both came almost at the same time, Lucía clamping my face between her thighs as she came in my mouth in spurts, and Ramiro unloading inside her with a groan, then firing the last jet onto my open tongue. I stayed underneath, mouth open, swallowing what fell, my throat burning hot from two other people’s orgasms. Nobody said anything after that. Lucía kissed my forehead, Ramiro handed me a towel, and the conversation drifted to the weather, as if what had just happened were no big deal.

For them, maybe it was. For me, it wasn’t.

***

I spent the following months turning over a single question: why hadn’t I felt the rejection I’d expected to feel? My mind, trained over four decades, assumed I’d react with disgust. What showed up instead was a sustained, quiet curiosity, returning every time I jerked off before bed, my hand wrapped around my cock and the memory of Ramiro’s taste lodged on my tongue.

I didn’t want to repeat the episode with Lucía and Ramiro. It had been a useful accident, but an accident all the same. What intrigued me was figuring out what would happen if I sought it out on purpose, away from a woman’s body between us.

One dawn I ended up on a classifieds page. In the men-seeking-men section I found an ad that stayed with me: “Young, inexperienced guy looking for mature gentleman for mutual masturbation. Nothing else. Discretion and patience.” I wrote from a new account.

His name was Dante. Twenty-two years old. He studied something related to design and, as he told me over WhatsApp for a full week, it was his first time too. He’d been watching gay porn since high school, but he’d never touched another man. He didn’t want penetration either. He wanted to start with something simple: two men, two hands, a discovery.

We met first at the mall. Coffee, forty minutes, no sexual talk. He was short, dark, skinny, with that narrow waist and lifted ass that a friend of mine, without any subtlety, would have called tender grass for an old bull. Inside, I thought that if I was going to get into this, I was going to do it properly. I asked for his hand under the table, held it for ten seconds, and told him my apartment was four blocks away.

He agreed without hesitation.

***

Downtown has that advantage: at seven in the evening you walk among hundreds of people and nobody looks at anybody. We went up the building without talking. In the lobby we waited for the elevator, looking at the mailboxes, with two steps between us, as if we were just two neighbors crossing paths for the first time.

When the doors closed, I looked at him in the mirror. He had his backpack in front of him to cover up, and his breathing was shallow.

—It shows —I said quietly.

—I know.

—It shows on me too, if you stay calm. It’s the first time for both of us.

I put my hand over his jeans, without pressing. I felt him harden under the fabric, his cock shifting to the side, throbbing against my palm. I squeezed it once, long, tracing the shape with two fingers. He closed his eyes for a second and breathed through his mouth.

—Take it slow —I said—. There’s nothing to prove.

The elevator opened on the fifth floor and we walked down the hallway in silence.

***

Inside, I offered him a drink. Whiskey with ice. I put on the TV a video I’d saved: two guys, neither over thirty, fucking on a bed, one of them sucking the other’s cock while he was on all fours. I sat on the sofa a respectful distance away, handed him the remote, and spoke without looking at him.

—You posted the ad —I said—. So you take the lead.

—I’m nervous.

—Me too. More than I thought.

It was true. I’d spent twenty-five years used to leading, deciding the pace with the women I fucked. That night I felt like I was inside territory where my experience was useless.

I put my hand on his crotch again, higher than in the elevator. The bulge under his jeans was hard and hot, the tip pushing up, making a wet spot in the fabric. I squeezed him with my open palm, ran my thumb along the length, and felt his cock contract against my hand.

—Shall we go to the bedroom? —I asked.

He nodded. I stood up first, slid a hand over his back, and guided him down the hall. Fifteen meters we walked slowly. Halfway there I lowered my hand, touched his ass over his pants, dug my fingers between his tight cheeks, and squeezed hard. He didn’t pull away. He rested his forehead on my shoulder for a second and kept walking with my hand wedged in the crack of his ass.

***

—Lie down —I told him—. I’m going to put on music.

I pulled his pants down before leaving the room. His T-shirt was bunched up to his chest and he still had his briefs on, his cock angled to the side, wetting the pale fabric with a spreading stain of pre-cum. I left him like that, my hand over the fabric, giving it one last squeeze along the hard shaft, and went back to the living room to get the speaker. It was an old tactic of mine: stepping out for a moment so the other person would work themselves up alone, so desire could take hold without an audience.

When I came back, I stripped in the hallway. I went into the bedroom already hard, pointing forward, under the lamp’s side light. Dante had his eyes closed and his hand inside his briefs, moving slowly, his wrist going up and down beneath the fabric. His T-shirt was rolled up. He was breathing hard.

—Don’t open them —I said—. Not yet.

I lay on my side, facing the opposite direction from him, with my cock at the level of his face and his cock at the level of mine. I took the hand he had on my chest and brought it to my penis. I closed his fingers around it. I felt them hesitate for a second and then settle, without urgency, around the shaft.

—Feel how I am too —I said.

I pulled his briefs down to his thighs. His cock sprang out, hard, pointing at the ceiling, a thread of liquid shining on the tip. I took it in my hand and looked at it for a moment: long, slender, a vein standing out on top, the head purple and swollen, the balls tight against the base. It was the first time in my life I’d held another man’s cock. I ran my thumb over the crown, gathered the pre-cum, and spread it over the whole head, feeling the entire thing tense up. I didn’t know what he was thinking. I only knew that the curiosity of the last few months finally had a texture: hot, hard, throbbing in my palm.

—What I’m feeling is so good —he murmured—. It’s my first time. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to control myself.

—Don’t control it. I don’t want you to control it. When you’re about to come, tell me, and I’ll come with you.

***

I jerked him off slowly for a long time. More than half an hour, I checked the time afterward. I wet my fingers with saliva and slid them along the entire shaft, squeezing on the way down, loosening on the way up. I stroked the head with my thumb pad, circling the sensitive crown, and when I felt him getting close I pinched the base with two fingers, cutting off the orgasm dead. Then I pressed his testicles gently to ease the urgency, rolling them between my fingers, weighing them in my palm. I wanted to stretch that first time as much as possible. I knew, from the women I’d been with, that a body held back learns to feel differently.

During one of those pauses I lowered my head and ran my tongue over the head, one long, flat lick, sucking the drop dangling from the tip. I heard him groan deeply. I took his whole cock into my mouth, until the tip touched my soft palate, and stayed there for a few seconds, swallowing his cock, feeling it pulse against my tongue. Then I pulled it out and went back to my hand.

He was jerking me off too, with more enthusiasm than technique, closing his hand around the base too tightly and letting up too much higher up, but I didn’t care. Pre-cum dripped onto my fingers and he used it as lubricant, spreading it all over my shaft. My head was working at a different speed. I wasn’t thinking “this is a man.” I was thinking “this is me, with another guy’s cock in my hand, with my mouth still tasting like his dick.” Those were two different conclusions, and both surprised me.

When I understood he couldn’t hold back any longer, I sped up. I squeezed the base with two fingers, worked the length with the other hand, faster, harder, feeling the head swell against my palm. I breathed with him.

—I want us to finish together —he said, almost voiceless.

—Tell me.

—I’m coming.

I went with him. I gripped his cock with all my fingers closed and sped up my wrist, and he did the same to mine. I felt the first warm jet hit my knuckles, thick, long, and a tenth of a second later I let go in Dante’s palm, feeling the first burst rise up from my balls and paint his hand white. He trembled three times. Three times I felt his hand tighten around mine and squeeze out another spurt. When we were done, my fingers were soaked in his semen and my belly was painted with mine. I thought that was the end of the date.

—Keep going —I told him—. I want to give you a surprise.

***

I slid down, settled over his pelvis, and took him all the way into my mouth before he could react. His cock was still hard, still dripping the last of his orgasm, and went in all at once to the back of my throat. I did it the way I do with the women I’m comfortable with: tongue pressed against my molars, leaving the throat entrance free, swallowing every time the tip hit the back. I could taste the last warm remnant of the orgasm that had come into my hand in my windpipe, and I swallowed it without thinking.

—What are you doing —he said, his voice barely there, not really a question.

I didn’t answer. I took his hips and started moving, sliding my mouth up and down the whole shaft, sucking hard on the way up, loosening my lips on the way down. I squeezed his balls with one hand while I stroked the inside of his thigh with the other. The second and third load, in any ejaculation, are less intense than the first; what you need is patience and persistence. I licked the line between his testicles, went down to take them one by one into my mouth, sucking them, while my hand kept working his cock at a slow rhythm. Then I returned to the shaft, took him to the hilt, and let him out slowly, marking each centimeter with tight lips. I heard him pant, mutter “fuck” between his teeth, arch his pelvis toward my mouth.

I ran my tongue under the head, over that sensitive fold every circumcised cock has, and felt him shake all over. I took him all the way in again, let the tip force my throat open, and swallowed with him inside, squeezing him with the muscles of my mouth. He came a second time with a long spasm, three spurts that hit the back of my throat and that I swallowed without taking my mouth off him. It tasted strong, denser than the first, with a salty edge that stayed on my palate.

I didn’t let him go. I kept sucking, slower now, letting him drop and rise again. His cock went semi-soft and then, with persistence, hardened again. The third was short, barely a tremor, two drops filling my tongue. He grabbed my hair with a force that didn’t fit a shy boy and made me finish swallowing, pressing my head against his pelvis until I licked the last drop from the tip.

When I let him go, he opened his eyes for the first time in hours. He looked down at me in silence. His mouth was open, his pupils still dilated, his chest rising and falling. Traces of my saliva were left on his slack cock, shining over his belly. He didn’t say thank you. There was no need.

***

Afterward we smoked a cigarette in bed, barefoot, without touching each other again. I told him that next time I wanted to finish in his mouth, if he wanted. He nodded with a new smile, a smile he hadn’t had at the coffee shop or in the elevator.

While he got dressed, I thought something I had never thought before. Until that night, I had believed people were divided into closed categories: men, women, gay, straight, bisexual. After Lucía and Ramiro, I had suspected the boundary might move. With Dante, for the first time, with the taste of his semen still on my tongue, I understood that the boundary had never been where I thought it was.

I went downstairs to see him off. On the downtown street, at eleven at night, we were still invisible. I shook his hand like any friend and went back to the apartment unhurried.

If anyone asked me today how I define myself, I’d still hesitate. But I discovered that doubt is not the opposite of certainty. Sometimes it’s just the place where what you still haven’t dared to say begins.