My First Date with Another Man Didn’t Go as I Expected

My name is Damián, and I always considered myself a heterosexual man. I’m in my mid-thirties, I’ve had a partner for years, I have a stable job, and a routine anyone would sign up for without thinking twice. And even so, for quite some time I’d been carrying around a curiosity I couldn’t quite admit, even in front of the mirror.

It wasn’t attraction, or at least that’s what I told myself. It was something else. A recurring fantasy of another man sucking my cock all the way down, or me jerking off someone well endowed, feeling his dick swell in my palm until he came all over me. Loose thoughts that would show up in long showers, in sleepless early mornings, on plane rides. I’d shut them off, go on with my life, and two weeks later they’d come back as if they’d never left.

One day, out of curiosity, I downloaded one of those apps. I tried it without a photo, with a blank profile, just to see. What I found surprised me: the demand for hookups in that world is huge. Men of every age, every look, writing at any hour, offering anything. The number of messages I got on a blank profile made me question the story I’d been telling myself about how many people dare to do what they don’t dare to say.

Even so, it took me months to actually do anything. Setting up a meet-up seemed like a terrible idea. I thought about scams, public humiliation, someone recognizing my face or filming me without my noticing. I thought about my partner, my friends, my job. I chatted with guys, got turned on writing to them, and when it came time to set an hour and a place, I always found an excuse to bail.

Until the trip came along.

***

I flew to another city for work, almost five hundred kilometers from home. The hotel was big, anonymous, with that expensive air freshener smell international chains always have. I went up to the room, dropped off my suitcase, took a quick shower, and sat on the bed to check my email. Dinner with the guys from work had been early, the meeting the next day was at nine, and suddenly I found myself with five empty hours and no one nearby who could recognize me.

I opened the app. Changed the radius to the minimum distance. What appeared was a grid of profiles arranged by proximity, and at the very top, marked with a blunt zero, was one with the word “moreno” as the username.

One meter away.

That’s impossible, I thought. I’m on the seventh floor, in a room at the end of the corridor. Nobody can be one meter from me.

I wrote to him without thinking too much, before I could back out.

“Hi. Is the app showing distances correctly?”

He answered right away.

“Yeah. What floor are you on?”

“Seventh. End room.”

“I’m in the room below you. Same number, sixth floor.”

We both laughed over chat. Vertical neighbors, separated by a concrete slab and a couple of meters of air. I told him I just wanted to talk, that I had doubts, that I’d never done anything with a man and that I was very far from having anything figured out. I laid down ground rules: no penetration, condoms if we did anything at all, and above all, nothing he could record or save.

“Relax, brother,” he wrote. “I’ll come up, we’ll talk. If something happens, it happens. If not, no big deal.”

I left the door unlocked, as he asked. I sent him the room number and sat on the bed waiting, my heart making a racket in my chest.

***

He knocked twice and pushed the door open. He was shorter than me, broad-shouldered, with tousled dark hair and an easy smile. He looked to be in his early twenties. He wore a gray hoodie and shorts, as if he had indeed come straight from his own room and nothing more.

“I’m Mateo,” he said, and held out his hand as if we were closing a deal.

I shook it. It seemed absurd to shake hands with a stranger who had come up to my room in the middle of the night, but the gesture put me at ease. I offered him water. He accepted. He sat down in the armchair, facing the bed.

We started by talking about stupid things, almost like we were travel companions in an airport. I asked what he was doing in the city. He told me he studied something related to tourism and that the hotel was two blocks from the university, so he stayed there some nights when his parents were traveling. I asked if this was usual for him. He laughed.

“Not that usual. But I use the app a lot.”

“And what’s it like?” I said. “Tell me the truth. Are people like they sell themselves?”

“Some are. Others promise a thousand things and, when you’ve got them in front of you, they get scared. Like you,” he added, looking at me without malice.

“I don’t get scared. I just don’t know what I want.”

“Same thing.”

He got up from the armchair and sat next to me on the bed. He didn’t touch me. He just sat there, hands on his knees, and stayed quiet for a couple of seconds. I could feel his leg brushing mine through the fabric of our pants. It was a tiny contact, almost polite, but it was enough for my body to decide on its own what was happening. My cock started swelling on its own, tight against the fabric, without my doing anything to stop it.

“Want me to suck your cock?” he asked, bluntly. “That’s not penetration. It’s not any of the things you said.”

It took me a while to answer. I thought about my partner, about going home, about whether this wasn’t a monumental idiocy. I also thought about how for years I’d been imagining this and that I was one yes away from finding out.

“First, shower,” I said. “Both of us.”

“Exactly what I was going to suggest.”

***

The hotel bathroom had a glass partition and a big showerhead that fell like rain. We undressed without looking too much at each other, each folding our clothes in a different corner, as if we were still pretending this was something formal. Mateo went in first. I followed.

The hot water changed everything. The first hesitations went down the drain. We started washing ourselves separately, but after a while his hands came toward mine and in the end we were soaping each other up, laughing a little at how absurd the moment was, while the steam made the glass partition and the whole room disappear.

I looked at his body. Firm, but not gym-built. I looked at his dick. Bigger than mine, thick, hanging heavy between his legs even half-hard, with full balls resting against his thigh. I was surprised not to feel rejection, or shame, or the revulsion I had expected to feel and for which I had partly agreed to the meet-up. I felt curiosity. Pure, simple, almost childish.

He touched me first. One hand on my chest, then slowly down, without hurry, without the urgency women I’d been with always had. He ran his fingers over my stomach, my hip, and without warning closed his fist around my cock. I was rock hard before he even touched me. When he did, I held my breath and a low, rough groan escaped me, one I didn’t recognize as my own. He started jerking me off slowly, with the soap and water acting as lube, sliding up to the head, twisting his wrist at the tip, then down again to the base and squeezing my balls with his other hand.

“Easy,” he said, his mouth against my ear. “Enjoy it. It’s going to get even better.”

With his other hand he went for my ass, squeezed it, dug his fingers into the flesh, and pressed me against his body. I felt his hard dick against my hip, thick, hot, and something inside me that had been shut for years clicked open. He knelt under the water. He looked up at me with his hair stuck to his forehead, smiled, and took my entire cock into his mouth in one smooth motion, until his nose brushed my pubes.

My knees went weak. I grabbed at the tiles to keep from falling.

He sucked my cock like no one had ever sucked it in my life. That’s not an exaggeration. I mean it. There was something in the way he combined tongue, lips, and hand, in the rhythm that kept changing as if he were listening to music only he could hear, that didn’t resemble anything I knew. He pulled my cock out to the tip, held it carefully between his teeth, tickled the slit with his pointed tongue, and then swallowed it all over again, squeezing his throat around the head until I saw stars. With his free hand he stroked my balls, rolled them between his fingers, pulled them down just when I was about to come to cut off my climax.

I closed my eyes. I leaned against the tiles. I let myself go. Without meaning to, I started pushing his head with both hands, fucking his mouth slowly, and he let me do it, opening his throat wider, letting spit and water run down his chin and pecs. Every time I shoved my cock down to the hilt, he swallowed, and that clamp of muscles around the head almost knocked me over.

“I’m going to cum,” I warned him, my voice breaking. “I’m going to cum in your mouth.”

He eased off. Took my cock out of his mouth, held it pointed at his face, and with the flat of his tongue licked me from my balls to the tip, very slowly, looking me in the eyes.

“Not yet,” he said. “Hold on.”

I was about to finish several times. Every time he noticed, he backed off, let me rest for three seconds, and started again. He sucked each ball one by one, licked my perineum with the tip of his tongue, jerked me off slowly while talking right against my cock, telling me, “What a tasty cock, brother, I’d eat it all night long.” He made me breathe, feel, stay there. It was almost pedagogical. And while he was down there, I kept telling myself that after this I’d return the favor, that it would be fair, that it was only right, that I was going to suck his dick with all the hunger he was using to suck mine.

***

When I couldn’t take it anymore and asked to switch, we both got out of the shower with hard, dripping cocks. We dried off halfway and went back to the room, towels around our waists and our hair still wet. I wanted to do it right. I wanted to measure up. I asked him to sit on the edge of the bed. I spread his legs with my hands and knelt between them.

There it was in front of me. Thick, hard, with the purple head peeking out from under the foreskin, a marked vein running along the shaft, the balls tight and heavy against the edge of the mattress. I rested my hand at the base and brought it to my mouth. I gave the tip a short lick, almost shy, to test it. Then another, longer one, running the whole shaft from bottom to top.

And then something broke.

It wasn’t an idea, or a thought, or a moral check-in. It was something in my body. The position had bothered me from the first second. The smell, which wasn’t bad, didn’t do anything for me. The taste, when I opened my mouth and took the head in, told me nothing. It didn’t disgust me, it didn’t pleasure me, it didn’t do anything. It was like chewing unsalted bread. I tried to push on, tried to take more of him in, help myself with my hand, squeeze my lips like he had done with me. I tried hard. I sucked the tip for a long minute, licking the head, playing with my tongue under the frenulum, swallowing the spit he was leaving in my mouth.

I tried to focus. I closed my eyes. I thought about the fantasy, about the images that had accompanied me so many times. Nothing. The room was still a hotel room, my right knee was starting to ache against the carpet, and worse than all of that, I felt my arousal draining away little by little, like a bathtub emptying without you noticing. My cock, which three minutes earlier had been hurting from how hard it was, softened between my legs without my being able to do anything to keep it up.

I lifted my head. I let his cock go. It stayed there, pointing at my face, glossy with spit.

“Mateo. Forgive me.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I can’t keep going. It just shut off. It’s not because of you.”

I expected some grimace, some complaint, some expression hard to read. None of that happened. He put a hand on my shoulder, helped me stand, and sat me beside him on the bed, both of us naked, shoulder to shoulder, like two friends in a locker room after a soccer game.

“It happens. It happens more than you think.”

“I was sure I’d be able to do it.”

“Wanting it isn’t the same as enjoying it. I’m telling you, I’ve been with a lot of guys who wanted it and couldn’t. And some who could and didn’t want to. Both suffer.”

He tried something else with his hand, gently, without pressing. He found my cock, grabbed it, jerked me off slowly, his mouth against my neck. I stayed soft. Not even a twitch. He laughed softly, not mockingly, and understood before I did that it was all over. Then he grabbed his own cock, still hard, and jerked himself off there, sitting next to me, breathing hard, until he came with two dry groans and a thick rope of semen that landed on his stomach and thigh. He glanced at me sideways, as if belatedly asking permission. I handed him a towel. He wiped himself off unhurriedly. Got dressed, unhurriedly. A little later he was at the door.

“If you ever get clear about it, write me,” he said. “And if not, no big deal. What happened today wasn’t a failure. It was an answer.”

He closed the door behind him.

***

I sat on the bed for a long time, staring at the ceiling, not moving. Then I took another shower, longer, hotter. Then I fell asleep, worse than I expected.

That night was months ago now. There were other jobs, other trips, other hotels. I never opened the app again. I deleted it before heading to the airport, my hair still wet. I thought that would end it.

It didn’t. I still keep turning it over in my head. Not the fact that I didn’t finish, but the question it left behind. Whether what stopped me was Mateo, or that Mateo in particular, or the moment, or my body, or me. Whether what I felt was genuine curiosity or just a kink that evaporates the second you touch it. Whether I’m heterosexual with a repeated fantasy or something more complicated that I still don’t know how to name.

I don’t have an answer. Maybe I never will. Maybe that night in that hotel was exactly what it had to be: an open question that only I, in my own early-morning hours, get to keep answering.