Nadia, the Stranger Who Returns Every Summer

My story with Nadia begins in that strange winter, the kind that was a context in itself. I had been out of work for far too long, and I suppose I was idle in many other senses too. I had just come out of a relationship I’d rather not talk about, I had left half-finished a degree I had barely started, and I had thrown myself into another one from which I didn’t expect to make a single euro.

I was lurching from one thing to another. I was an assistant at a building’s front desk, I wrote copy for websites I didn’t understand, I sent out résumés that never went anywhere, and on top of all that I signed up for a digital illustration course. That’s where Nadia appeared.

But is that the whole truth?

It was also true that I had gone years without a partner lasting more than six months. It was true that the people I knew were drifting away in search of their own projects and being replaced by others, more superficial, less harmful to my life. And in some hidden corner was what I was then unaware of: I was becoming less and less happy.

Not because of those months shut in, nor because of unemployment, not even because of heartbreak. It was something more like a non-life, the feeling of a slow deterioration of everything good, gradually replaced by ever more bland pastimes. What at twenty was filled with unexpected conversations with friends who were comrades became, in your mid-twenties, chatter about salary, work, looking at your phone, and complaining about this or that.

At that point, as I said, I met Nadia in that course where we rarely even saw each other’s faces. And the truth is that I didn’t care, and I don’t think she cared either.

***

More than that, I think that when we slept together for the first time, it didn’t matter much either. It was a year or two later. I remember you, Nadia, waiting for me at the subway exit, on a sunny day, looking left and right before crossing, giving me two kisses on the cheeks like we do here.

We turned out to be two good dancers. Neither you nor I knew each other all that well and yet we danced perfectly in sync, as if we’d rehearsed that dance a thousand times already. We ate, we talked, we liked each other because we wanted to like each other. We stretched lunch into an after-meal coffee and walked for a while in front of my place.

What did I say to kiss you? You were so rational it seemed you were only choosing the most convenient thing. You explained to me why you were accepting the kiss, as if you had to justify yourself to yourself.

You hesitated about coming up to my apartment. “It’s not the best day,” you said. Because you hadn’t shaved, because you were on your period. You came up anyway. I laid you on my bed and you looked at me very little in the eyes. Was something making you ashamed? I undressed you. I stroked you as if I had to prove I knew how to do it.

You were down to your underwear in no time. I grabbed you and pulled you close until I crushed you against me. I looked at your chest, immense, abyssal. I turned you around and shoved in from behind. Back then I thought all women went crazy for that: dominance, power, force. What you liked was the forbidden.

You climbed on top with no panties on and rubbed yourself, throwing yourself over my face while I held you by the hips. And you played dumb, as if my cock were in the wrong place, so you could take it in with nothing in between. “Wait, wait, better if...,” and you let yourself fall onto me. “Hold on, like this...,” and with your own hands you guided me inside you, coming in through ellipses.

When you were on top, you sped up in a way I’ve never seen in anyone. You pinned me to the mattress with your hands on my shoulders, looked down or up and let your hips hammer me. Your breasts bounced in concentric jolts that hypnotized me, and I could feel you stealing my strength, driving me to the limit without my having to do anything.

I turned you over. I positioned myself behind you and put you facing the mirror. I looked at you sprawled out, with your cheek against the sheets. I went in and held you: by the hip, by the shoulder, by the neck, by the hair. I watched you and pushed deeper just to see your expression change, as if I could force pleasure out of you. Now you know that is my deepest desire, even if it isn’t the most original one.

I sped up to hear you moan. I went too far and came. And then? Then I did something ugly, because something inside me was broken. I lost interest like a bad lover. I gained a false clarity that made me believe it didn’t matter to me, that it was already over after you climaxed too, or told me that it was fine on your end.

***

I remember going into the shower with you, both of us sweaty on that young summer day. Now, in fact, I remember your black dress with white polka dots and your long bare legs. At that moment, though, you were naked, and I took you to the bathroom as if I were incapable of realizing anything.

I bathed your pale skin with hot water. I guided the streams with my hands, tracing your geography of peaks and thresholds. I spread the creams that perfumed your body and didn’t let you do the same with mine. I didn’t want to anymore. I still wanted to touch you, and I looked at you the way one looks at what one is searching for, the way teenagers look at their phones, the way adults look at their pay slips. You kissed me and I let you, but I let you only that, scarcely.

You turned around to take a towel. And you looked at me over your shoulder, which is perhaps the most sensual look of all. With your silent lust you lifted one heel for an instant to arch your curves toward me, to offer yourself, for me to take you.

Maybe for me to kneel —as I now think I should have done— and bury my face between your legs to drink you and take your fruit again with my hands and my tongue. Maybe for me to look at you in silence too and anchor you to my body with my hands. To have slammed you against the bathroom wall and emptied myself inside you.

Maybe to have given you pleasure until you were sweating again, for you to stop and let me clean you, for you to guide the warm water with your hands and then pause at my sex to caress it, to kneel and worship it, kiss it, put it in your mouth, work it with your fingers while your tongue barely brushed the tip, and let me finish between your lips.

And yet none of that happened. I saw you and I remember you, but I took a towel and went another way. After that you helped me put the stained sheets in the washing machine and suddenly we were two acquaintances again. Two people who would greet each other in the street, surely, but who wouldn’t stop to talk because they’d have nothing to say to each other.

And although we met again, it was sex between acquaintances. I never hid it, I never pretended, and in vulgar terms, I never promised more than I gave.

***

That, without either of us suspecting it, allowed us to see each other again a year later with no strings attached. Yes, I was writing to you again because I had broken up with my girlfriend. You told me that if it was only for a quick fuck, you didn’t want to see me, and I understood. I didn’t invent anything I wouldn’t be able to stand behind.

You said that when men sleep with you, you don’t like to feel used. Curiously, I share that with you, but I never told you and I never will, I don’t want to make you laugh. And even so, something in you persisted. Our conversation had been sincere, at least. I think that saved us.

That’s why you came back. That’s why you told me that in fact you did want to see me again. Because you don’t want to feel used and because you desire me too. You want love and sex. You want secrecy and glory, beauty and power. You want to touch and be touched, to eat and be eaten, you want to climb back on top of me and hypnotize me until I melt. And even if you don’t want it, you want it.

I sent you videos and photos, and you picked up the torch I handed you. You came to me, and this time we were no longer acquaintances, but old acquaintances. People who can ask each other for whatever they want and don’t have to respect anything about the other. You sucked me off on your knees, you had me humiliated at your feet until I finished between your lips.

We talked about everything, about those comrades’ conversations I told you about. And although neither of us fully trusted the other, we were no longer chained by the fear of having to see each other again. I fucked you on the sofa and against the window. I accepted the image you had of me, I was a pig for you and walked around my house naked the whole time you were in it, ready to give myself to you again as soon as you asked.

And in the end, when you crossed the frame of my door to leave, I said: “See you next year.”

***

A phrase that would summon you the following summer, when the heat returned and you would once again need me to undress you. A phrase to repeat again at the end and summon you a year later, when you or I had a partner and we fucked again as if nobody else existed.

Another year, and even another ten. Even after having children, houses, living in different cities, coming back only one day a year so I could stroke your neck, kiss it and bite it, so you would hike up your skirts in some hotel for meaningless affairs. So you’d let me fuck you in exchange for doing the same to me, whether because I can only make love to my partner now or because we can’t even do that anymore.

What did you think then? I don’t dare invent it. I know you thought several things, and I knew then that the following year we could see each other again and it would be better. But I don’t know if it outraged you, if you accepted it willingly, if you understood it as a strange and fleeting intimacy that would let us remain strangers forever.

I’ll tell you something that fits with what you think I am: I’d love to read your account, and all of yours, much more than I like writing my own. Because I have a lot of ego, or because I have very little, my deepest fantasy is knowing what I do inside you.