I Waited for Him Naked After His Longest Shift

I knew from the morning that he was going to come home shattered. He’d told me the night before, half asleep, with that hoarse voice he gets when he doesn’t even have the strength to complain anymore: double shift, his coworker off sick, the boss on his case all day. Hugo hardly ever complains, and that’s why, when he does, I know it’s serious.

I spent the afternoon pacing around the apartment without finishing anything. I started ironing and left it half done. I put on a load of laundry that wasn’t needed. I sat down to read and reread the same paragraph three times without taking in a single word. I wasn’t reading. I was waiting.

There’s a huge difference between waiting for someone and wanting someone, and that afternoon the two things blurred together until I could no longer tell them apart. I kept thinking about how he’d come through the door, the exhaustion written on his face, and at the same time I kept thinking about his hands. About how he grabs me when he’s no longer thinking, when the day has fallen off his shoulders and all that’s left is instinct.

I had a clear, almost physical hunch: that night he was going to come looking for me. I know him. The worse the day, the more he needs me afterward. As if the only thing capable of erasing twelve hours of shit were getting inside me and forgetting his own name.

At quarter to nine I looked at the clock one last time and made my decision.

I turned off almost all the lights and left only the kitchen one on, the one that barely reaches the entryway. I stood in the hallway, attentive to the elevator shaft wall that shares a wall with our living room. It’s an old building and sound travels: I hear when it starts up, when it stops, what floor it pauses on. I’ve spent years learning that sound without even realizing it.

And then I heard it. The low hum, the metallic clack, the elevator going up.

I yanked down my stockings and underwear and dropped them behind the sofa, where they couldn’t be seen. I was left in just one of his oversized T-shirts, one that smells like his cologne even when it’s freshly washed. He loves finding me like this. He’s told me a thousand times: there’s nothing that disarms him more than opening the door and discovering I was waiting for him with my body, not with words.

The elevator stopped on our floor. Slow, dragging footsteps. The jingle of keys searching for the lock in the dark.

My heart was already beating too fast for a woman who was only standing in her own hallway.

The key turned and the door opened. And there he was, framed against the light from the landing, still in his uniform pants and a gray sweatshirt he wears on the way home. He smelled like the street, like cold, like the end of a shift. He looked at me for a full second without saying anything, and I watched the exhaustion fall off his face and be replaced by something else.

—I knew you’d be like this, —he said softly, kicking the door shut behind him.

—You had a hard day, —I answered. —I thought it might help.

He didn’t let me add anything else.

He crossed the entryway in two strides and grabbed me by the waist, not roughly but without asking permission, like someone taking back what’s his. He turned me toward the living room and led me to the wall, the one beside the bookshelf he knows better than I do. He made me put both hands against the wallpaper, cold under my palms, and positioned himself behind me.

I felt his whole body pressing against mine. The rough brush of the sweatshirt on my back, the buckle of his pants against the small of my spine. He wrapped one arm around me and pulled me tight against him so I would feel, unmistakably, what was already between his legs.

So fast. Always so fast with me.

He lowered his mouth to my neck and inhaled deeply, as if he were smelling me to recognize me. Then came the first kiss, just below my ear, slow, wet, and a shiver ran all the way down my back to the backs of my knees. His hand slid up under the T-shirt and found my breast. My nipples were so hard that the brush of his palm against them tore a sound out of me I hadn’t meant to let out.

—You’ve been waiting for me all day, —he murmured against my skin. It wasn’t a question.

—More than you think, —I admitted.

He pinched one nipple between two fingers, slowly, testing, and it hurt in that way I like, right on the edge. I pushed my hips back to seek him out and he retreated a couple of centimeters, teasing, stretching it out. He does it on purpose. He knows waiting drives me crazier than anything else.

His other hand started roaming over me. Down my side, over my hip, along my thigh, unhurried, as if he had all night ahead of him and hadn’t just come home after twelve hours of work. When it reached between my legs and checked that I wasn’t wearing anything underneath, I heard him let out his breath sharply.

—You’re soaking wet, —he said, and there was something almost disbelieving in his voice.

I was burning. I’d been burning since before the elevator even started moving. His fingers parted me slowly and slid through my slit, slippery, and I had to press my forehead against the wall so I wouldn’t lose my balance.

—Take me off, —I asked him, my voice broken. —I want to feel you for real.

I heard the sound of his belt, the rustle of fabric falling. He pushed my T-shirt up, bunching it around my arms, and pressed himself against me again, now skin to skin, nothing between us. His erection was trapped between my lower back and his stomach, hard, hot, beating in a way I felt through my whole body.

I started moving my hips, slowly, rubbing myself against him, offering myself. I wanted him to feel it. I wanted him to lose patience. But Hugo, even dead tired, has more stamina than I do, and he loves making me suffer a little before giving me what I ask for.

He brought one hand down to his cock and started sliding it between my legs, from front to back, brushing everything in its path without going in. Each pass cut my breathing a little more. My heart was beating at a ridiculous pace, my legs were shaking, and he kept up that slow, cruel rocking motion, getting himself wet on me without quite deciding to give in.

—Stop already, —I begged. —Put it in me. Please.

—Say it again, —he answered against the back of my neck.

—Fuck me, Hugo.

No more was needed. He set the tip where I needed him and drove in all at once, all the way to the hilt, without stopping. I let out a cry that probably half the building heard and I didn’t care in the slightest. I felt him all the way, rock hard, filling me in a way that left me breathless for one long second.

He held still for an instant, buried to the hilt, his forehead resting on my shoulder and his breath ragged. This is what I needed all day. Me too. I’d needed it all afternoon.

Then he started moving. He pulled almost all the way out and thrust back in hard, each stroke wrenching a different sound from me. He held my hip with one hand and had the other around my chest, and all I could do was cling to the wall and take the pounding.

But I didn’t just want to take it. I started pushing back, meeting him, setting the rhythm myself. I wanted to fuck him as much as he fucked me. Every time he drove in, I slammed myself against his body, and the collision of the two of us sounded in the dark living room like a confession no one should hear.

—Like that, —I panted. —Don’t stop.

He didn’t stop. He sped up. I felt it in the change in his breathing, in the way his fingers dug deeper into my flesh. He was close, I know him too well, and knowing it pushed me too toward the edge. Heat climbed up from my belly, thick, impossible to hold back, and I knew I wasn’t going to last much longer.

—Come, —I whispered, turning my face just slightly toward him. —I want to feel it.

Two more thrusts, deep, almost savage, and I felt him explode inside me. A low groan against my neck, his hips tightening against mine to the limit, and the heat of his cum spilling deep inside. That was enough to drag me down with him. I came apart against the wall, trembling from head to toe, my legs turning into something that no longer held me up.

We stayed like that for a long while, him still inside me, both of us bent against the wall, gasping as if we’d been running. I could feel his cum slowly sliding down the inside of my thigh and I didn’t even bother to move. I didn’t want to move. I wanted to stay exactly there, numbed by pleasure, listening to him breathe against my back.

—Fuck, —he said at last, with a tired laugh. —What a way to take the day off my shoulders.

I turned around slowly and let myself fall against his chest. He smelled like sweat, worn cologne, like himself. He wrapped both arms around me and kissed the top of my head, and for the first time all day he truly seemed relaxed.

—That’s what I wait for you for, —I told him.

We didn’t speak again. I led him by the hand to the shower, we left his uniform on the living room floor, and the rest of the night was only ours. But that image, of him walking through the door and finding me waiting for him, is the one I replay in my head every time I hear the elevator going up.

Lucía