I Charged for Sex During the Months That Hurt Me the Most

I had just finished my second year of college when I met Rocío. We studied at the same university, though she was in a different program, and we crossed paths in the cafeteria almost every day. For two years, she was the most important thing in my life. She was the kind of person who filled a room: she had opinions on everything, laughed loudly, and didn’t ask permission for anything.

In bed, she was exactly the same. She’d climb on top without warning, shove my dick into her mouth all the way while looking down at me, come noisily, and apologize for nothing. I was twenty-two and thought it would last forever.

It didn’t.

When we broke up in January, I lived it in a strange way. I kept going to class, kept seeing my friends, kept functioning. But there was something broken inside me that I didn’t know how to name or repair. The emotional ultrasound showed everything in order; I knew nothing was.

Three months later I saw her in the bar where we used to meet. She was with a guy I didn’t know, his hand on the back of her neck and her head tilted toward him. She laughed the same as before. With that same laugh I had believed was only for me.

I froze in the doorway for a few very long seconds. Then I went in, ordered a beer, then another, and then lost count of how many I’d had.

***

I don’t know exactly why I ended up in that gay bar. It was one of those dark, unpretentious places you find in every city center, with music nobody really listened to and lighting designed to make sure nothing was too clear. I was drunk enough not to care where I was going, so I walked in.

There was a man at the bar who kept staring at me. In his forties, a beginning belly under his shirt, a wedding band on his finger that he didn’t bother hiding. He wasn’t attractive, at least not to me. But he was looking at me, and at that moment I needed someone to look at me that way.

He came over, bought me another drink, and put his hand on my thigh over my pants. He noticed right away that I was hard, more because of the alcohol than because of him, and smiled as if he’d won something. He whispered in my ear that his apartment was two streets away. I nodded without speaking.

I ended up in his apartment without really knowing how it happened.

As soon as he shut the door, he shoved me against the hallway wall and stuck his tongue in my mouth, tasting of whiskey and cold tobacco. He unzipped me right there, pulled out my dick, and dropped to his knees without a word. He sucked it all the way, hungrily, eyes closed, while he stroked himself over his trousers. I stared at the ceiling, at the white textured plaster, and thought about Rocío. About Rocío’s laugh. About the other guy’s hand on the back of her neck.

Then he took me to the bedroom, finished undressing me, and undressed himself. He had a chest covered in gray hair and a thick, curved dick. He put it in my hand, ran it along my lips, and asked me to suck it. I sucked it. I sucked it because I was drunk and because I didn’t know what else to do with my mouth at that moment. He shoved it down my throat a couple of times, made me gag, came with a rough groan directly onto my tongue without warning me, and made me swallow his semen by gripping the back of my neck. It tasted bitter, dense, and stayed stuck to my palate for hours.

Then he laid me face down and opened my ass with his hands. He worked two fingers in with saliva, whispered for me to relax, and pushed into me slowly but without much tenderness. It hurt more than I expected. I pressed my face into the pillow and held on. He fucked me for what felt like twenty minutes, breathing into the back of my neck, pressing my hips into the mattress. He came again inside the condom with a short grunt. I didn’t come. I didn’t even try.

When he was done, I dressed in silence, went down the stairs, and as soon as I stepped onto the sidewalk, I threw up against the wall.

It wasn’t just the alcohol.

The days that followed were gray and strange. I felt like I had crossed some kind of border without fully deciding to, and that I now lived in a territory whose rules I didn’t quite understand. I didn’t feel worse or better. Just different, as if something inside me had been shifted around without my permission.

It was in that state that I made the decision that would change the following months.

***

I started slowly, almost like it was an intellectual exercise. First I looked into it in a more or less abstract way. Then I opened a profile on one of those sites where supply and demand meet without needing introductions. The first message took three days to arrive, and when I replied it took me an hour to write two lines.

The first client was a man of about fifty: overly polite, nervous, with a prearranged story about why he was there. He paid well. He arrived at the hotel room smelling of expensive cologne, asked me to undress slowly, looked at me as if I were something he’d wanted to see for years. He knelt and sucked my dick awkwardly and with real desire, eyes lifted in search of approval. Then he got on all fours on the bed and asked me to fuck him. I put on a condom, used plenty of lube, and pushed into him slowly. He came onto the bedspread with a single stroke of his hand, moaning softly, almost apologetically. Red marks were left on his hips where my fingers had pressed. I finished outside, over his back, without saying a word. The encounter was brief. I went out into the street feeling something that wasn’t exactly shame, but wasn’t anything else either.

The second was similar. He asked me to talk dirty while I fucked him. I told him what he wanted to hear: that he had a tight ass, that I was going to fuck him until he was mine, that he should take it. Mechanical things, said without believing them. He came sooner than he’d paid for and left almost running.

And the third.

What I discovered very quickly is that the reality of that world doesn’t much resemble what people imagine from the outside. Most of the clients were middle-aged men, many married, some clearly with no prior experience of that kind of encounter. They arrived with very specific expectations and very limited time. They didn’t want conversation. They wanted me to suck them without a condom, to fuck them in the ass, to cum on their faces, to hold them naked three minutes later. Concrete things. Almost shopping lists.

There were men who arrived trembling. Men who apologized before taking off their coats. Men who paid and then couldn’t look me in the eye on the way out. There was something sad about all of it, though I found it hard to pin down exactly what.

I didn’t enjoy it. That needs to be said clearly. I got hard by reflex when it was time, I came when the script called for it, but it wasn’t real pleasure. It was work. Sometimes easy, sometimes uncomfortable, almost always mechanical. I learned to separate my body from my head with an efficiency that I later spent quite a while unlearning. I could be fucking someone while inside I was thinking about my shopping list or the last pending exam.

Many of the men who came were looking for things they didn’t dare ask for anywhere else. Men who wanted to be passive and had never tried it, who asked me to go slow and then begged me to shove it in all the way. Men who needed someone to listen to them for ten minutes before anything happened. Bisexual men who’d spent years keeping their desire hidden and had a family at home who knew nothing, who came in my mouth in two minutes and then cried at the edge of the bed. I learned more about human desire in those weeks than in any honest conversation I’d had before.

***

I’d been at it for about three months when I got a different message.

There was nothing salacious in it, no request phrased in that clumsy way people usually use to describe what they want. It just said she wanted to have her first experience with someone who knew what he was doing. That she was twenty-one. That she was shy. That she was afraid of making a mistake with someone from her own circle.

I replied. We met in a café first, something I hadn’t done with any client. Her name was Andrea, or at least that’s what she told me, and she was exactly like her messages: cautious, thoughtful, with a calm intelligence behind her eyes. She was pretty in a discreet way that didn’t ask for attention. The kind of person who goes unnoticed without meaning to.

“Why this way?” I asked her at one point in the conversation.

“Because with someone I know, there’d be too much at stake,” she replied. “And I don’t want my first time to be an accident.”

I understood perfectly.

***

We went to my place that same afternoon. There was that late-day light that comes in horizontally and tints everything with a color that isn’t quite real. She came in looking around without trying to hide it, as if she were trying to reconstruct who I was from the objects in the living room.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. And then, after a second: “Pretty nervous.”

“That’s completely normal.”

I didn’t rush anything. We sat on the sofa and talked for a while about unimportant things, until I noticed her shoulders relaxing. There’s a moment when the body stops being on guard; it’s visible if you know what to look for. When I noticed it in her, I leaned toward her.

The first kiss was brief, almost like an introduction. She didn’t pull away. The second was longer, with her tongue already searching for mine, and I felt her breathing speed up against my cheek. I put my hand on her thigh, over her skirt, and slid it up very slowly to her hip. I left it there. She closed her eyes.

I took her to the bedroom with the same calm with which we’d gotten there. I stopped several times just to look at her, to read her face. In that kind of situation, knowing when to stop is just as important as knowing when to continue. Maybe more.

“How are you?” I asked quietly.

“Good,” she said, and this time she said it with more conviction.

I took off her clothes slowly, one piece at a time, and each time I waited for her reaction before going on. I unbuttoned her blouse button by button, slid it off her shoulders. She had small breasts, pale, with her nipples already hard under her bra. I unclasped it from behind and took it off with an almost ceremonial slowness. I ran my tongue around her right nipple before taking the whole thing into my mouth. She let out her breath sharply and grabbed the back of my neck.

I pulled down her skirt and stockings. I left her panties on for a while, stroking her through the fabric, feeling her grow wetter with every touch of my fingers. Her body was tense, not exactly from fear, but from that specific anticipation that comes before the unknown. Her hands were cold, her breathing a little short.

“Tell me if you want me to stop at any point,” I said.

She nodded.

***

I started with long strokes down her back, kisses on her neck, her shoulders, the curve of her chest. I bit the skin under her ear gently and felt her whole body bristle. I could feel the tension easing centimeter by centimeter, like when you squeeze a clenched hand and feel the knuckles begin to loosen.

When I went down along her belly with my mouth and looked at her from there, she held my gaze for a moment and then looked away to the ceiling.

“Can I?” I asked, with my fingers on the waistband of her panties.

She took a moment. She flushed slightly red. Then she said yes in a very low voice.

I pulled down her panties and slid them off her feet. Her pussy was almost completely shaved, with a little dark hair at the top, and she was already visibly wet. I parted her legs with my hands, unhurriedly, and ran my tongue over her from bottom to top in one long stroke. She reflexively closed her legs against my ears and opened them again immediately, apologizing with a nervous laugh.

It was her first time and I could tell in her whole body: her hands looking for something to hold onto, her fingers tangling in the sheets, her breathing turning irregular all at once. I took real time with her, not rushing, reading each reaction as if it were text in a language I was learning to decipher in that very moment. I sucked her clit with the tip of my tongue, in slow circles, alternating with broader laps. When I noticed her breathing becoming broken in a particular way, I slid one finger in slowly. She was very tight and very hot inside. I moved it slowly, curling it upward, while I kept sucking her. Then I added a second finger.

“Oh… ” she whispered. “Oh, don’t stop…”

I didn’t stop. I sped up the rhythm of my tongue a little, kept my fingers moving inside her, felt her whole inner body tightening around my fingers. She had a long, deep orgasm that made her arch her back, clamp her thighs against my face, and let out a sharp cry that burst from her chest before she could control it. I left her with her eyes closed and her expression completely undone.

When she caught her breath, she smiled without looking at me. It was a smile for herself.

Then she took my hand and moved it to my own, to the dick that had been hard against my leg for a while already.

“Teach me,” she said.

I guided her fingers gently, without hurry. I showed her how to grip it at the base, how to move her hand up and down firmly but without squeezing too hard, how to run her thumb over the glans each time she came up. Her hands learned quickly, with that capacity the body has to memorize what gives it pleasure. Her face took on a focused, almost student-like expression that I found disarming.

After a while she lowered her head and took me in her mouth with a clumsiness that was completely honest. Her teeth grazed my glans and she apologized with her eyes. I gave her quiet instructions, without pressuring her, and she followed them with a concentration I found touching.

“Cover your teeth with your lips,” I whispered. “Like that. Good. Now use your tongue underneath as you move up.”

She did it. She did it slowly and carefully, looking up at me for confirmation. She sucked me like that for several minutes, alternating with her hand when she got tired, until I put my hand on her cheek to stop her before it went too far.

“Good,” I told her. “That’s very good.”

***

Before continuing, I stopped completely for a moment.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” she said. This time without hesitation.

I took a condom from the drawer and put it on in front of her. I explained what I was going to do before I did it, every step. I used plenty of lubricant, first with my fingers, spreading it all over her pussy and inside with a couple of gentle thrusts of two fingers. She was breathing hard, eyes half-closed, holding on to my shoulders.

I opened her legs with my knees, positioned myself between them, and rested the head of my dick at the entrance to her cunt. I paid attention to her face at all times. I pushed in a centimeter and stopped. Another centimeter and stopped. There was a moment when she held her breath and squeezed her eyes shut, and I stopped moving until she signaled that I could continue. When I was all the way in, a small moan escaped her that was neither pain nor pleasure, but something in between, almost astonishment.

“You’re inside,” she whispered, as if checking.

“I’m inside,” I confirmed.

I started moving very slowly, with short thrusts, letting her get used to the sensation. After a while she wrapped her thighs around my hips and asked me to go a little faster. I did, without overdoing it. I grabbed one breast with my left hand and brushed her nipple with my thumb while I kept fucking her with measured thrusts. I slid my other hand under the back of her neck and kissed her while I moved inside her.

We changed positions only once, when I asked if she wanted to try being on top. She nodded. I lay on my back and helped her climb on. She sat down slowly on my dick, her hands on my chest, and lowered herself centimeter by centimeter until she had me all the way inside again. She stayed still for a few seconds, eyes closed, feeling it. Then she started moving on her own, with a slow sway of the hips that was pure instinct. I grabbed her ass with both hands and helped her set the rhythm. Her cheeks turned red, her hair fell forward, and a moan escaped her that she no longer tried to hold back.

When I noticed her thighs beginning to tremble, I laid her back down and finished fucking her like that, with her legs over my shoulders, going deep but not rough. I rubbed my thumb over her clit as I moved. She came a second time, this one less explosively but with an intensity that shot through her whole body. I pulled out, took off the condom, and came over her belly with two strokes of my hand. She watched me come with silent fascination, as if memorizing the moment.

It was gradual, careful, nothing like most of the encounters I’d had in those months.

When we were done, she stayed quiet for a good while looking at the ceiling, with my semen still warm on her skin before I wiped her clean with a damp towel. I didn’t say anything either. Sometimes silence is the only answer that fits what just happened.

“Thank you,” she said finally. “Really.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Not just for what you think,” she clarified. “For how you did it. For how you treated me.”

I didn’t know what to say. So I said nothing. But I kept it with me.

***

That afternoon was a pause inside something that, in general, wasn’t worth salvaging much of.

I kept at it for a few more months. More encounters with men who arrived in a hurry and left in even more of a hurry. Hotel rooms too hot, sheets that smelled of cheap bleach, guys who came in my mouth and wiped their lips with the back of their hand before dressing without looking back. Dawn hours in apartments that smelled of cold tobacco. Requests that began and ended without anyone looking anyone else too much in the eye. I learned to read people in a matter of seconds, to know what they wanted before they finished asking. I don’t know whether that’s a skill or a loss.

What I do know is that eventually I stopped. It wasn’t a dramatic decision, there wasn’t a specific moment that triggered it. One day I simply decided not to answer any more messages, and that day became a week, and that week became a month, and after that there was no going back.

Rocío got married two years later to the guy from the bar. A mutual acquaintance told me. I didn’t feel anything special when I heard it, which in itself was a kind of relief.

Of everything I went through in that period, what I still find hardest to understand is the order in which things happened. The breakup, the gay bar, the work, Andrea. Each step seemed like the almost inevitable consequence of the one before it, like dominoes falling in a direction no one had planned.

I don’t regret anything, or not exactly. I regret having done it from such a broken place, which is something completely different. If it had been a choice made from somewhere more whole, maybe it would have been a different story.

But decisions made from pain almost never are.