My Secret Date in the Mall Bathrooms

Online, he went by Bizcocho, and the name suited him perfectly. He wasn’t a gym body: he had narrow shoulders, a soft belly that showed under his T-shirt, and arms without the hardness so many people chase. That was exactly what I liked about him. I was drawn to his curves, the folds his skin made when he sat down, that way he had of surrendering to pleasure without fighting the mirror. We’d spent weeks in front of the webcam, the two of us alone in our rooms, and it was no longer enough.

I’m an older man, married, past fifty, and that forced me into a logistics his didn’t fully understand. I had to fit the meeting into a window when the car was free and my wife wouldn’t ask too many questions. Bizcocho had it easier. He was around thirty, shared a flat or still lived with his parents—I never got that straight—and for him slipping away one morning wasn’t a problem.

After several failed attempts, we finally managed to line up a day. He suggested the place and the strategy: the restrooms of a big shopping center on the outskirts, first thing in the morning, when the stores have only just started to open.

—There are several bathrooms scattered around the place —he wrote me—. I’ll tell you which one as soon as you get there. You just walk around and act normal.

Act normal. As if I knew how to do anything else at this point in my life.

I arrived with my stomach knotted tight. I walked around the half-awake arcades, with employees pulling up metal shutters and the smell of fresh coffee drifting from the café by the entrance. I passed a couple of elderly women and a delivery man pushing a cart. Everyone who walked past me felt like a threat, even though nobody so much as looked at me. When the message came through with the exact bathroom, I took a deep breath and headed there, trying to make my steps look like anyone else’s.

***

I pushed the door open and my heart lurched. There was almost no one there, which made sense at that hour. Just one guy, almost at the back, washing his hands with a calm I couldn’t quite believe. I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye while pretending to search my pocket. Could it be him?

He looked at me in the mirror’s reflection. And in that look, in the way he stayed still just a second too long, I knew it. He was asking himself exactly the same thing I was.

He was shorter than I’d imagined from the photos, and also a little less broad, as though the camera had given him a body that was more modest in real life. But it was him. It had to be. I moved toward the stall right behind him and went in, leaving the door ajar, a silent invitation. He was still with his hands under the tap, watching me through the mirror, weighing the decision.

For a moment I hesitated. What if I’d made a mistake? The guy from the webcam could be anyone, could have changed his mind at the last minute and sent someone else, or not shown up at all. My mind started inventing disasters. But the man in front of me fit the profile and, above all, he wasn’t leaving. He was still there, water running, waiting for a clearer signal.

I gave him one. I slowly unbuckled my belt, without taking my eyes off him, and lowered my fly a little.

His eyes went wide. Then he turned his head toward the bathroom entrance, nervous, like an animal sniffing danger before feeding. I heard it too: footsteps, a zipper, at least two other men coming into the urinals on the other side. Bizcocho didn’t hesitate. He crossed the few meters between us, slipped into the stall with me, and locked the latch behind him.

***

I never know what the other person expects in these furtive meetings. There’s no time to ask, and asking would ruin everything. So I let myself go and put my hands on his chest. It was soft, warm, exactly as I’d imagined on the nights in front of the screen. I knew right away I was going to carry that feeling with me: one of those sensations you keep to remember alone, much later.

He, on the other hand, didn’t want to be touched. Or he was in too much of a hurry, or too tense to give himself over to caresses. He took a step back, gently moved my hands away, and grabbed me with his, still wet from the tap. The cold brush of his fingers made me clench my teeth so as not to make a sound. And then, without wasting a second, he unfastened his own trousers and knelt in front of me on the tiled floor.

He knew what he was doing. He used the wetness of his mouth with a skill that undid me. I had imagined that moment a thousand times, and reality outdid it: the heat, the exact pressure, the rough scrape of his stubble against my skin every time he moved. That last part lit me up in a way I hadn’t expected. One hand stayed on my stomach, holding me steady; the other was between his own legs, taking care of himself with the same urgency.

He was moving fast. Too fast, almost. He wasn’t looking to stretch it out or enjoy the game: he was looking for one specific reward and heading straight for it. Then I understood what he wanted, what he’d been hinting at for weeks without ever quite saying it. He wanted to finish like that, in his mouth, and that meant there would be nothing else, that I wouldn’t get to taste anything else of his that morning. I was fine with that. I also prefer a mouth or a hand in these in-between places, where any noise on the other side of the door reminds you where you are.

On the other side, in fact, someone flushed. Bizcocho didn’t even flinch. I closed my eyes and focused on him, on the hand holding me and the mouth that never let up. I imagined scenes we weren’t going to live: him from behind, holding onto the sink, and me behind him, kneading his belly and his sides until he moaned. The fantasy pushed me to the edge faster than I wanted.

I stroked his cheek to warn him. He nodded without breaking away, ready, and let me take control while he kept helping himself with his hand. I held his head carefully, moved my hips slowly at first and then without restraint, overcoming the warm resistance of his tongue. He responded by pressing his lips together, closing the circle, taking me right where we both wanted to go. When I let myself go, it was long, intense, with that mix of relief and vertigo that comes from knowing you’re doing something forbidden three meters from a shopping arcade full of ordinary people.

***

I didn’t want to overdo it. I made as if to pull away, but he held me with his hand, squeezing the moment dry in his own way, without wasting anything. I let him go on until there was nothing left to give.

Then he stood up, and I saw it: he was at the limit too. He’d been touching himself the whole time, and now it was my turn to return the favor. I wanted to. I really did. I lowered his hand and took hold of him, ready to give back what he’d given me. I found him so wet that I immediately understood this wasn’t the beginning of anything: it was the end of his own run, his second climb in a matter of minutes. Knowing that made me even hotter, though I no longer had the energy.

But he pulled away. He shook his head, almost apologizing with his eyes. Bizcocho had come for one specific thing, and for some reason he didn’t explain, the rest wasn’t part of his plans. I didn’t insist. In encounters like these, the other person’s boundaries are respected without argument.

We opened the latch. The restrooms were empty again. I went over to the sink and straightened my clothes with hands that were still trembling a little. If someone had walked in at that moment, they would have seen me, but I accepted the risk with a calmness that surprised me. He, on the other hand, didn’t wash up. He left before I did, quickly, without looking at me.

***

I understood everything a few seconds later, out in the arcade.

A girl was waiting for him, leaning against a column, looking at her phone. She had to be just over twenty, plumper than him, in tight clothes and with too much makeup for that hour of the morning. Bizcocho went up to her, said something, and they walked off hand in hand toward the exit. He looked younger than he was, but nowhere near enough to make that seem like anything other than what it was.

As they walked away, she turned back a couple of times to look at me properly, with a curiosity I couldn’t quite decipher. I’d frozen in place, watching them, with that strange feeling of having shared a huge secret with a stranger who, two minutes later, was walking hand in hand with someone else.

Bizcocho avoided speaking to me for a couple of weeks. Not a message, not a connection. I thought that was it, one morning and nothing more. Until one day, without warning, he wrote to me again. He wanted another meeting, he said, and he underlined the word: bigger.

I played hard to get. I left him on read, answered with monosyllables, made him believe I wasn’t interested anymore. And when I had him properly eager, I set one condition. Just one, but a clear one. I knew perfectly well he was going to accept it, because the two of us knew exactly who was in charge now.