That Night in the Tent, I Never Told Anyone About It

It’s been almost fifteen years since that night, and I still haven’t told anyone about it. I’m writing it now because the memory comes back to me every time I close my eyes for a little too long.

Damián and I had known each other since we were twelve. We’d grown up next door to each other, played soccer on the same neighborhood team, and at seventeen we went on vacation together for the first time without our parents. A municipal campground near the sea, two weeks paid for with what we’d saved washing cars. It was our first real taste of freedom.

That afternoon we were walking back from the beach to the campground. Four kilometers along a pine-lined road, the sun still beating down, our shoulders burned, our flip-flops rubbing against the sand that had gotten between our toes. We were tired and quiet, with that drowsiness the sea gives you.

Halfway there, after a bend in the road, we saw a girl with her thumb out. Short, fair-haired, with a small backpack and shorts so short they could barely be seen beneath her T-shirt. She looked at us without smiling. We asked where she was going, and she said into town, but she didn’t have much money left and would rather walk with someone than by herself.

—We’re going to the campground —I said—. If you want, come with us and have something to eat. There’s room.

I said it casually, with no ulterior motive. Damián glanced at me from the corner of his eye. She shrugged and joined us. Her name was Camila, she told us she was twenty-two, from a small town inland, had left home three days earlier, and didn’t offer many details. As we walked, Damián cracked a couple of jokes and she laughed for the first time. Something changed then, in the way her face lit up.

The three of us had dinner at the table outside our tent. Rice with tuna, hard bread, red wine in plastic cups. She drank as much as we did and laughed louder and louder. Damián told stories from school while I listened more than I talked. The night grew long without us realizing it, and when it started to get chilly, all three of us went inside the tent, still dressed, and kept drinking.

I don’t really know who started it. I only know that suddenly Camila was sitting in my lap, without her shirt, and Damián was watching her from the other side of the tent, his back against the plastic. I kissed her neck and pulled down her shorts. Her skin was still hot from the sun, salty. I grabbed her tits with both hands, small, firm tits with nipples standing hard from the cold or from being turned on—I don’t know—and sucked them one by one while she arched her back. Damián remained still, watching, and I could see the bulge under his shorts.

—What are you doing? —she said to him, without malice, almost playfully—. Aren’t you going to join in or what?

He laughed nervously. He took off his shirt. And there, in the yellow light of the lantern hanging from the tent ceiling, I saw him as I had never seen him before. I’d known him since we were twelve, slept at his house a hundred times, seen him in his swimsuit at the club pool. But that night, naked from the waist up, with the shadow cutting diagonally across his chest, he was something else.

Camila guided my hand back to her waist, as if asking me to return to her. I did, but my eyes kept drifting toward him. I finished taking off her panties, a white thong already soaked through, and opened her legs right there on the sleeping bag. Her pussy was shaved, pink, gleaming with wetness. I ran my tongue all the way up it and she jerked with a moan that must have carried to the tents beside us. I stayed there, sucking her clit, sliding in one finger first, then two, feeling her pussy tighten around them. She pulled my hair and moved her hips against my face, searching for more.

—That’s it, that’s it, don’t stop —she panted—, keep sucking me, fuck.

Every time I lifted my head to breathe, I looked at Damián. He had taken off his pants. He was sitting against the tent wall, his cock out of his boxers, hard, thick, bigger than I could ever have imagined. He held it in his right hand and stroked it slowly, without taking his eyes off me. He had an expression I can’t describe, as if he didn’t understand what he was doing there and at the same time didn’t want to be anywhere else.

I’d been with men before, but always with strangers, always far from the neighborhood. A couple of times in nightclub bathrooms, once with a guy I met at the bus station. Never with someone who knew my name, never with someone who would look me in the eyes at the breakfast table the next day.

Damián wasn’t an option I had allowed myself to consider. Until that night.

I moved slowly across the tent, bringing Camila with me. She let me move her, laughing, biting my shoulder, grabbing my cock through my shorts. When I was beside Damián, I hesitated for a second. I looked at him. He didn’t look away. I placed my open hand on his chest, felt his heartbeat pounding against my palm, and lowered my head.

I put him in my mouth without thinking. All the way in, as far as I could, and when I couldn’t take any more, I pulled him out and ran my tongue over his balls, along his entire shaft, over the tip, which already had a clear drop hanging from it. Damián let out a sound I had never heard from him before, a mixture of surprise and surrender.

—Fuck, man —he murmured—, you suck dick so good.

He grabbed my hair, but not to push me or pull me away—just to touch me, to confirm that it was really me there. I kept sucking him eagerly, gagging whenever the tip touched my throat, swallowing the spit and the fluid he released, feeling him swell even more inside my mouth.

Camila settled in behind me. Her tongue traveled down my spine, her hands moved over my buttocks, and she spread me open. She revealed a place I had never shared with anyone. I felt her warm tongue moving in and out, a finger wet with saliva pressing slowly inside, and I tensed at first, but let her do it, slowly, patiently, while I kept my mouth busy with Damián. She ate my ass patiently, slicking it all over, and when she had two fingers inside me, moving them in circles, I was trembling with his cock filling my mouth.

—Let me open you up, my love —she whispered—, I’ve got you, let me.

***

On my knees, with Damián behind me and Camila beside us letting herself be caressed, I lost all sense of who I had been until that afternoon. Camila handed me a little jar of cream from her backpack and told Damián to spread it on me properly, so he wouldn’t hurt me. I felt his thick fingers sliding between my buttocks, sinking one in first, then two, opening me little by little, and every thrust drew a longer moan from me. When he entered me with his cock for the first time, he did it slowly, one hand on my waist and the other on the back of my neck. The head forced my ring open and burned, hurt for an instant, and then the pain stopped. I felt him entering inch by inch, felt my ass forced open to let him through, felt him fully inside me, pressed between my buttocks, breathing against the back of my neck.

—You’re so fucking tight, damn it —he panted—, I can’t hold back like this.

—Fuck me —I said, not recognizing my own voice—, fuck me hard, don’t hold anything back.

What came next was something I had never experienced: a kind of pleasure with nothing to do with anything I had known before that day. It was something else, deeper, farther inside, more mine. Damián began to move with short thrusts, then longer and longer ones, pulling almost all the way out and plunging back in to the hilt. Every blow of his hips tore a sound from my throat I hadn’t even known was inside me. I felt his balls hitting my perineum, his hands squeezing my hips, his fingers digging in as if he were afraid I might get away from him.

Camila positioned herself in front of me, legs spread, and grabbed my head to push my face between her thighs. She kissed my face, ran her fingers over my lips, let me taste her. I licked her pussy while Damián fucked me from behind, and the rhythm fell into place on its own: every time he thrust into me, my face sank deeper into her pussy. Camila moaned louder and louder, squeezing the back of my neck with her thighs and moving against my tongue.

—I’m going to come, man, I’m going to come in your mouth —she warned, and a few seconds later her legs began to shake and she squeezed me so hard with her thighs that I could barely breathe. I sucked her clit slowly until the tremors passed, swallowing everything she released.

Damián didn’t let up behind me. He had one hand in my hair, and with the other he reached around to find my cock. He began stroking it in time with his thrusts, his palm rough and clumsy but precise. I was riding two pleasures that came together in the middle of my body. I couldn’t hold out long. I came over the sleeping bags with a spasm that made me clench my ass around his cock, and I felt that finish Damián too.

—I’m coming inside, I’m coming inside, you fucking bastard —he growled, and slammed his hips against my ass. I felt hot jets release inside me, one after another, while he held me against his chest as if he never wanted to let me go.

When he came, he did it almost silently on the final thrust, squeezing me against him. He pulled out slowly, and I felt his semen running down my thigh, warm and thick. I collapsed onto the sleeping bags, trembling, laughing, and crying a little too, without really understanding why.

Camila fell asleep first, curled up against the side of the tent, with a half-asleep smile. Damián and I stayed awake a little longer, shoulder to shoulder, staring at the plastic ceiling, sticky and with no desire to clean ourselves up. Neither of us said anything. There was no need.

***

That night was the beginning. Damián and I were lovers for almost a year, without ever saying so in words, without labels, without promises. Then life separated us the way life separates friends from the neighborhood: he got a girlfriend, and I left to study far away. The last time I saw him was at a classmate’s wedding, five years ago. He hugged me for a long time and didn’t say anything.

***

But before Damián, even before the campground, there was something else I never told anyone either.

When I was eighteen, I ran away from home. There’s no point in saying why. Damián came with me; we were going to stay with one of his uncles in the capital, and that was the whole plan. His uncle wasn’t where he said he’d be, he didn’t answer the phone, and the two of us ended up at a bus station with a few lousy pesos and a backpack each.

Damián managed to sleep at a boardinghouse for a few nights with money a cousin lent him. I didn’t want to ask him for more. I ended up sleeping in a parking lot, inside a car the night watchman let me use in exchange for not causing him any trouble. It was fucking freezing. I ate whatever Damián could steal from bakeries in the morning.

The watchman’s name was Tito, and one day he told me he knew a guy, a single man, who was looking for someone to do chores around the house in exchange for a roof and food. If I was interested, he could put me in touch. I didn’t think twice.

The guy’s name was Esteban. He was in his fifties, big, bearded, hairy. He lived in a one-room apartment downtown, with a tiny kitchen and a double bed that took up half the room. He opened the door wearing slippers, looked me up and down, and I noticed his gaze linger for a second too long between my legs. He told me to come in, eat whatever I wanted, take a shower, and that we’d talk the next day.

I ate like I hadn’t eaten in days. Then I grabbed a towel and went into the bathroom. I turned the water as hot as it would go, took off my clothes, and started touching myself without thinking too much: I’d gone two weeks without doing it and needed to get something out of me. I wrapped my soapy hand around my cock and started stroking it against the tiles, eyes closed, moaning softly. The bathroom door didn’t have a lock.

Esteban came in carrying a change of clothes. He stood there and watched me with my hard cock in my hand beneath the stream of water. He didn’t laugh or leave. He wet his lips with his tongue and lowered his eyes until they were fixed on my cock.

I was already awake to what was happening. I wasn’t stupid: the terms of the arrangement changed in that second. I looked at him without covering myself or letting go, and kept stroking slowly, exaggerating the movement, showing it to him properly.

—You like what you see, big guy? —I asked.

He knelt on the ceramic floor beside the bathtub and told me he could touch me if I let him. I said yes, but with conditions.

—I’ll fuck you, as many times as you want —I told him—. But nobody fucks me, and the mouth is off-limits too. That’s the deal.

Esteban accepted without arguing. He climbed into the bathtub fully dressed, pants and all, knelt in front of me, and grabbed my cock with both hands. He began looking at it as if he had never seen one before, weighed it in his hands, and ran his thumbs over the head. He pulled back the foreskin and gave the tip a long kiss, sucking the drop that hung there. I leaned against the tiles and let him do it, looking down at him while the water fell over both of us.

He sucked me with genuine hunger, like someone who had been waiting years for something like this. He took me all the way to the back of his throat, gagged, and kept going; his eyes filled with tears, and he kept going. He sucked my balls one at a time, ran his rough tongue along my shaft, and took the tip so deep his neck arched. I grabbed his head with both hands and began fucking his mouth without mercy, driving him against the tiles while he moaned with his mouth full and dug his nails into my buttocks.

That same night, after the shower, on the double bed that took up half the room, I turned him onto his stomach and spread his hairy buttocks with both hands. I ran my tongue between them, up and down, and he buried his face in the pillow so he wouldn’t scream. I slipped in one finger first, then two, then three, until his legs went slack and his ass opened, begging for more. I spat on him, spat on my cock, and slowly began pushing it in for the first time. It was difficult; he was big and broad, but his ass was tight, and he sucked me little by little until he had me all the way inside.

—Fuck me, boy, fuck me however you want —he begged into the pillow—, don’t hold anything back, break me if you want.

And I did. I fucked him with all the desire built up over those hungry days, grabbing him by the hair, pushing his face into the mattress, driving into his ass with all the anger and heat I had kept inside. It was the first time I had penetrated a man, and Esteban didn’t care that I was clumsy: he moaned softly, repeated my name, and dug his nails into my buttocks every time I buried myself inside him. I grabbed his cock in front and stroked it in time with my thrusts, feeling it pulse in my hand. He came before I did, shooting thick jets over the sheet, and his ass tightened so hard around my cock that I came inside him three thrusts later. I emptied myself completely inside him, pressing him against the mattress and biting the nape of his neck.

I lived with him for six months. I ate hot meals every day, slept in a bed, and got a job as a delivery boy at a print shop through one of his contacts. In return, I kept my end of the bargain, almost always before bed, sometimes in the morning: I’d turn him over, eat his ass for a while, and fuck him until I emptied myself. I learned to last longer, to make him wait, to leave him begging. He never kissed me on the mouth after that first night. He knew that wasn’t part of the deal.

When I’d saved enough to rent a room I shared with two guys from the print shop, I told him I was leaving. Esteban didn’t ask me to stay. He prepared me a mate, gave me a brief hug, and said that if I ever needed anything, I knew where to find him. I never did.

***

Fifteen years passed. I have a family now, an orderly life, children who will one day read things I write—but not this. Damián lives far away and we hardly speak. Esteban must be dead by now, or old and alone in that same downtown apartment.

But every so often, when I drive at night and the road grows long, I return to that tent and that bathroom with the faucet running, and I understand that what I am now was decided in those two places, even if I never tell anyone.