I Met Him on a Corner and Lost Him for Being Impatient

Iván was twenty-two when it all began, and I was him. I’m making that clear from the outset, because I don’t want to hide behind some invented narrator: what follows is mine, it happened like this or almost like this, and even today I still think about it when I pass that corner in the neighborhood where I left half of something important.

I was studying engineering at a public university in the south of the city. Classes started at three in the afternoon and ended at nine. At ten sharp, religiously, I’d leave my backpack on the dining room chair, ignore the plate my mother left for me in the microwave, and head out with any excuse: a walk, a cigarette, clearing my head before bed. The truth is I was going to look for him.

I’d met him at the corner stationery shop a week earlier. Damián worked the afternoon shift there. Skinny, almost frail, with narrow shoulders and eyes too big for his face. He had the crooked smile of boys who don’t know they’re pretty. I went in to buy a ream of paper and came out with his number written on the receipt, not because anything weird had happened, but because at some point, while he was counting my change, he held my gaze a second too long and we both knew it.

Or at least I thought we both knew it. Damián always made it clear to me, in every message, in every conversation: “I’m not gay, okay? I’m just curious.” He said it with that anxious cadence of someone repeating something to convince himself. I played along. I learned quickly that with him you had to move sideways, never head-on.

The first time we saw each other was in the back yard of my house. My parents were asleep upstairs and my sister was at a sleepover. I turned off the porch light and told Damián to watch some videos with me on my phone, just like that, as if it were nothing. I handed him the phone. He laughed quietly when he saw what was on the screen, but he didn’t look away. It was two guys fucking without ceremony, one of them on his knees sucking the other’s cock, with close-ups of the dick going in and out of a wet, open mouth.

“Do you like it?” I asked, with the neutral voice I’d practiced in the mirror.

“It’s weird,” he said.

“But you like it.”

“It’s weird,” he repeated, and shifted in the chair, crossing and uncrossing his legs to hide what was already showing in his crotch.

I moved close enough for him to feel my breath on the side of his neck. I lowered my hand to his thigh, slowly, giving him time to pull away. He didn’t pull away. When I brushed the bulge in his pants, he stopped looking at the screen and started looking at his knees. He was hard. Hard as I was. I felt him over the fabric, squeezing the full length of his cock against the jeans, and he let out the smallest gasp, from deep in his chest.

“Want to try?” I asked.

He nodded without saying anything. I led him by the hand to the back of the yard, where a construction staircase went up to the second floor, still unfinished. Up there there was rubble, dust, a wall without plaster, and the moon coming through the opening where one day a window would go. Nobody saw us. Nobody would ever see us.

“Turn around,” I told him.

I pulled his pants down to his calves. His skin was pale, almost blue under the outside light, and his ass was firm, small, the ass of a boy who still hadn’t quite finished growing. I spread his cheeks with both hands and ran my thumb along the seam, barely brushing his hole, tight and closed, and I felt him tremble all over. I didn’t penetrate him that night. I spat into my hand, grabbed my cock, and slid it between his ass cheeks, moving it up and down without putting it in, just rubbing against that warm flesh while he held back a sigh that couldn’t quite decide whether to come out. The wet head of my dick sank into the crease and rose back up again, and he arched his back slightly, pushing his ass back without realizing it, offering himself. I coated his cheeks with spit and pre-cum until they were shining.

Then we turned around and jerked off facing each other, in silence, looking at each other with a shame that only made us hotter. Damián was gripping his cock with his whole hand, pulling his foreskin up and down, never taking his eyes off me. He was the one who got on his knees first. He did it on instinct, as if he’d been thinking about it for months. He closed his eyes, opened his mouth, and took my dick inside with the honest clumsiness of someone who had never done it before. His teeth scraped the head at first, and he corrected himself, loosening his jaw, sucking me slowly, his tongue coiled under the glans. I stayed still, barely holding his hair, because I understood that any extra movement would break the spell. I nudged his head just a little, and he went with it, swallowing what he could, choking and trying again. A string of saliva hung from his chin to the tip of my cock every time he pulled back to breathe. I came in his mouth without warning him, squeezing his neck at the last second, and I felt him jerk when the hot spurts started hitting the back of his palate. He coughed, spat some of it onto the rubble, laughed awkwardly with semen at the corner of his mouth. Then he jerked himself off, leaning against the unplastered wall, stroking his cock quickly and clumsily with his hand, and his whole body shook when he finished, splattering his stomach and his lowered pants.

We went down the stairs without speaking. At the door, before he crossed the street, he asked me:

“Tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow,” I said.

***

And tomorrow was every day for the next six months.

I waited for him on the same corner, under the old sign of a bakery that no longer existed. Damián came walking with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched, as if he were cold even in summer. We went up to the unfinished second floor, or some nights we drove around in my car, or we slipped into the bathroom of a bar far from the neighborhood. We learned to read each other in silence. I knew when he was in the mood just by seeing him cross the street. He knew when I’d had a shit day, and then he said nothing and let me kiss him harder than usual.

We sucked each other off in every dirty corner of the city. In the back seat of the car, with the back of my neck against the door and my knees against the roof, blowing each other in sixty-nine while the headlights of strangers’ cars swept over us. In the stall of that bar bathroom, him sitting on the toilet lid and me standing up, fucking his mouth with my hands braced against the stall wall, then sucking him after with one knee on the wet tiles. I learned the taste of his cum — a little bitter, thicker than mine — and he learned to swallow mine without coughing. On the unfinished second floor we’d both get on all fours, side by side, and jerk each other off with our left hands while with our right we’d slide a wet finger into our assholes, gauging how much each of us could take, how much would open, how much would ask for more. One night I put two fingers in him, up to the knuckles, and Damián came against the cement floor without anyone touching his cock. Just with my fingers inside, working his prostate, he unloaded in two minutes and stayed there panting, his forehead pressed to the brick.

We never touched in the street. We walked a meter apart, like two acquaintances who happen to cross paths. Damián insisted on that a lot. “If anyone sees me, I’ll die,” he said. I followed the rule. But sometimes, when we said goodbye, I’d touch his hand for a second and feel his pulse race. Those seconds were mine.

It was all we had, and it was enough for me. Until it stopped being enough.

I started obsessing over the idea of fucking him. Really. Of getting inside him, of driving it in all the way, of feeling his ass close around my cock. I thought about it in class, I thought about it on the bus, I thought about it when I jerked off alone before bed, imagining his cheeks spread and the tip of my cock forcing its way through the ring. Damián let me do everything except that. He let me lick his ass until he trembled, lick his hole, finger him, but when I pressed the head of my cock against his opening, he clenched his ass cheeks and said, “Not yet.” “I’m scared,” he’d say. “Another day.” “When we have a place.” I nodded and kept it to myself, and I jerked off in my bed that night thinking about the day when it would happen.

The place came in September. My parents were going away for a weekend to my uncle’s place in the country. My sister was sleeping over at a friend’s house. Three days, the house all to myself. I told Damián on Tuesday and watched the smile drain from his face. He didn’t tell me no. He didn’t tell me yes, either.

“Come on Friday,” I asked him. “Just to hang out.”

“Just to hang out,” he repeated, looking down at his shoes.

***

He came on Friday. I opened the door with my heart pounding. My house smelled like the dinner my mother had left ready before leaving, and Damián walked down the hallway as if he were stepping on ice, looking at everything, touching the back of the couch, the molding around my bedroom doorframe, with the tips of his fingers. It was the first time he’d been inside.

“Do you like it?” I asked, like an idiot.

“It’s nice,” he said, and sat on the edge of the bed.

I kissed him slowly. He was tense. I could feel it, but I didn’t want to feel it. I took his T-shirt off, kissed his neck, his shoulders, that collarbone sticking out. I ran my tongue over his left nipple and he shivered, but not the way he had on other nights. When I pulled down his pants, he gave a little laugh, as if apologizing for something. His cock was only half hard, not like always. I grabbed it, stroked it, took it into my mouth and sucked the head until it got rock hard, but as soon as I let go it started softening again. I didn’t want him laughing. I didn’t want to see that cock hesitating. I wanted him to give in. I came too soon.

“Wait,” he said, with his hand on my chest. “Wait a little.”

I waited three seconds. No more. I turned him over on the bed, put him on all fours, with his knees apart and his ass raised, and spread his cheeks with both hands. I spat in his hole, rubbed my thumb over it, and watched his asshole clamp shut by reflex. I grabbed the cream from the nightstand and smeared my cock and fingers with it. I put one finger in, then two, rushing, without the patience I’d had other times. Damián was breathing hard, not from pleasure, from nerves, and his ass was closing against my knuckles instead of opening. I confused him on purpose. I wanted to confuse him.

“Relax,” I told him, not relaxed myself. “You’ll like it.”

I knelt behind him, pressed the wet head of my cock against his hole, and pushed. At first it wouldn’t go in, it slid upward, toward the seam, and I adjusted and pressed it there again, pushing harder. When the glans finally sank in, forcing the ring open, Damián made a noise that wasn’t pleasure. It was the noise of someone who realized something too late. A short, dull groan, his throat closed up. I told him to hold on, to relax, it would be over in a second. I pushed more, got half of it in, felt the tight heat, the muscle trembling around me. I should have stopped. I should have pulled out, hugged him, told him it didn’t matter, that I’d keep waiting for as long as it took. I didn’t stop. I grabbed his hips with both hands, held them firm against the sheet, and pushed the rest in all at once, all the way, until my pelvis slammed against his ass.

Damián went rigid. He didn’t say no. He didn’t say yes either. He pressed his face into the pillow and stayed still, letting me do it. I started moving, in and out, with the selfish rhythm of someone collecting on a made-up debt. The bed creaked. I could hear my breathing, the wet noise of the cream, and underneath it, barely, a sob smothered in the pillow that I pretended wasn’t a sob. I grabbed his hair, yanked his head back, and kept fucking him. His cock wouldn’t get hard. It lay dead against the mattress, and still I kept going. I sped up. I felt it building. I dug my fingers into his hips and came inside him, fast, with that kind of dirty victory I’ll never be able to explain to anyone, unloading my semen against the walls of his ass in three or four hard shudders. When I pulled out, my cock came out coated in cream and shit and a little blood, and I realized I hadn’t looked at his face once the whole time.

He got up as soon as I came out of him. He went to the bathroom slowly, walking funny, and I heard him washing for a long time with the water running at full blast. He got dressed in silence. I offered him a glass of water. He didn’t want it. I asked if he was okay. He didn’t answer. I walked him to the door and wanted to kiss his forehead. He turned his face away.

“Tomorrow,” I said.

“Tomorrow,” he repeated, but this time the word came out hollow.

***

He didn’t come tomorrow. Or the day after. I waited on the corner like an idiot for three straight weeks, under the sign of the bakery that no longer existed. I texted him. I called him. I went by the stationery shop. His boss told me he’d quit, that he’d moved to his cousin’s neighborhood, that no, he couldn’t give me the address.

The fourth week I understood. He hadn’t blocked me, he hadn’t yelled at me, he hadn’t made a scene. He had simply stopped existing for me, which was exactly what I had done to him that night in my room.

I think about it almost every day. I think about how many times he’d warned me, without warning me, that he wasn’t ready. I think about those three seconds I didn’t wait. I think about his face in the pillow and my head somewhere else. I think about how cheap it all was, when it could have been so expensive, so mine, so his.

Sometimes, even now, I pass by the bakery corner before bed. It’s dark, there’s nobody there. I look up at the second floor of my parents’ house, which they finished building years ago, and I imagine the two boys we were, going up the stairs in silence, not knowing how little it would take for everything to break.

If Damián ever reads this: it was me. You were right to leave. I’m sorry.