The Afternoon I Let Him In for the First Time

I was twenty-seven when I walked into that place downtown for the second or third time. One of those businesses that exist but nobody admits to knowing: discreet storefront, dull sign, a row of dark booths in the back where you pay to watch adult films in private. It wasn’t an elegant place. It didn’t try to be.

I was — am — bisexual. I didn’t advertise it then, nor did I need to. It was enough for me to know it, and to live accordingly when the situation allowed it. I had had experiences with men before, few of them, always in more controlled settings than that one. That afternoon I walked into the place with no concrete expectations. Just wanting to rest from the world for a while, and maybe, if it happened, to get my dick sucked or suck someone else’s. Not much more.

It was a Wednesday afternoon, close to two. The clerk barely looked up when I paid. I remember the place smelled of pine air freshener and something older underneath. In the hallway there were six booths and only one of them had the light on.

I picked the one next to it.

***

The booth was small: a plastic chair, a screen built into the wall, a coin panel. The side walls had sliding little windows, about the size of a brick, that let you look into the neighboring booths. I knew them from the previous time. I knew what they were for.

I put in some coins, chose something at random from the menu, and sat down. On the screen two guys were taking turns fucking a woman who kept moaning nonstop. I heard her say, “Put it all the way in, you fucking asshole,” while one of them fucked her from behind and the other shoved his cock into her mouth. For the first few minutes I did nothing but watch without paying much attention, with my cock starting to harden against the fabric of my pants. Then, after a while, I heard something from the other side of the wall. It wasn’t the audio from the neighbor’s film.

It was breathing. Held back. Rhythmic. And underneath it, just barely, the wet, unmistakable sound of a hand moving over a hard cock.

I slid open the little window.

On the other side was a guy about twenty-five. Dark hair, broad jaw, narrowed eyes. He had his pants halfway down and was jerking off with his right hand, slow, almost absent-minded, like someone thinking about something else while doing something mechanical. He wasn’t a big man: lean, rather. But what he had between his fingers was beautiful. A well-proportioned cock, with a slight upward curve that gave it character, the head swollen and shiny with his own spit, and a thick string of pre-cum hanging from the glans to his thumb.

He looked at me.

He didn’t stop. He didn’t cover himself. He just looked at me, and kept jerking off, this time more slowly, displaying every inch so I could see it well.

That was already an answer in itself.

I stood there a few seconds watching without doing anything, my mouth starting to fill with saliva. I watched the foreskin slide up and down over the glans, the thick vein running along the side, the balls tight underneath. My dick got rock hard inside my pants. Then, because there’s no more direct way than direct, I spoke to him in a low voice:

—Can I touch it?

The guy didn’t answer with words. He pulled his pants up halfway, with the hard cock still outlined beneath the fabric, stood up, and three seconds later knocked on my door with his knuckles.

***

I opened it.

He came in without hurry. He was my height, maybe an inch shorter. He wore a gray T-shirt and black joggers that he yanked down in one go before sitting in the chair as if the booth were his. I liked that: the calm. He wasn’t nervous. I was, a little. His cock was fully hard as soon as he sat down, thick, pointing at the ceiling, his balls hanging heavy over the edge of the chair.

I knelt in front of him.

I took it with both hands first. It was hard as stone, hot, throbbing against my fingers. I worked it slowly, just testing the weight and temperature, while he leaned his head back against the wall and looked at the ceiling. I pulled the foreskin down and saw the glans shine, wet. I leaned in and ran my tongue from the base to the tip, slowly, following the vein, and he let out his first breath through his nose. He didn’t speak. Neither did I.

Then I filled my mouth with saliva and took him in. The first time only halfway, to get used to the thickness. Then deeper, until I felt the glans press against the back of my palate and I had to breathe through my nose so I wouldn’t gag. I felt his breathing change. Small details: the tension climbing his thighs, the way his fingers gripped the edges of the chair, the involuntary tug of his hips each time I brushed his balls with the tip of my tongue.

I sucked him well. With both hands and my mouth at the same time, going up and down, letting strands of spit fall onto his balls so they’d slide, sucking the glans with my lips tight just under the crown until he started moaning softly. I ran my tongue underneath, over his balls, sucked them one by one, took them out of my mouth slowly, and swallowed his whole cock again in one thrust. I gagged a little and liked gagging. He put a hand on the back of my neck, not to force me, just to feel the rhythm.

He wanted more than that.

—Do you have a condom? —I asked him, with his spit-slick cock still resting against my cheek.

He stood up without saying a word, went back to his booth for a moment, and returned with one. He held it out to me. I put it on him myself, slowly, first breaking the packet with my teeth and then rolling the latex over the glans with my lips, taking all the time I wanted. Then I took it back into my mouth until it hit my throat.

It was my first time with a condom on. The sensation is different: less direct contact, less taste, less heat, but there’s something that doesn’t change, which is the movement, the filling and the emptying, the way a man breathes when he’s letting himself go. I worked with my mouth and one hand at the same time, setting the pace myself, pulling the skin on his balls with two fingers while I sucked him deep. He put his fingers on the top of my head, not squeezing, just to know where I was, and from time to time he pushed his hips up to shove it a little deeper down my throat.

We stayed like that for several minutes. Me with my cock swollen and dripping inside my own pants, my jaw starting to ache, spit running down my chin.

Then he spoke for the first time, his voice hoarse:

—Do you want me to fuck you?

***

I hadn’t thought about it. Or maybe I had, but not consciously, not as a real possibility for that afternoon. It was something I had fantasized about once, in the abstract comfort of imagination, where everything is easy and without consequences. But there, in that small booth, with that hard cock in front of my face, the question was concrete.

And I wanted it. I wanted him to shove it in already.

—Yes —I said—. But I need something for lube.

The guy nodded. Went out again. This time he took longer. When he came back he was carrying a jar of cream. Hand cream, the cheap kind, from the pharmacy. It wasn’t ideal, but it was what there was.

I took off my shoes. The pants. The briefs. I kept my shirt on and my cock standing, red at the tip, throbbing against my stomach.

I stood up and braced myself against the wall, facing the screen, with my palms flat on the cold surface, ass out, legs spread. He got behind me. I heard him squeeze the jar. I felt his fingers first, slow, applying the cream to my crack, sliding his thumb up and down before he started to push. One finger. Then two. It wasn’t something he was doing for the first time: that was clear immediately. He knew what to do. He knew how to open a guy up. He wasn’t rough or in a hurry. He worked his fingers inside patiently, curling them, finding a spot in me I didn’t even know I had, until a moan slipped out of me and my knees went weak.

—There you go —he murmured.

When I started feeling the pressure of his cock against my ass, I held my breath.

He went in slowly. Very slowly. I felt the head make its way in first, tight, and then the rest sliding inside centimeter by centimeter, filling me. An initial discomfort that wasn’t exactly pain, but strangeness: the sensation of something your body still doesn’t recognize, doesn’t know how to categorize. I endured it. I breathed through my mouth. I felt his hips press against my ass and knew he had all of it inside me. And at some point —I don’t know exactly when— the discomfort dissolved into something else.

Pressure. Heat. A hard cock moving inside me. Something that reached my center and from there spread in waves through my legs and my belly.

I didn’t have a name for that then. Now I do: I was being fucked, and I was loving it.

***

He started moving. Slow at first, pulling almost all the way out of me and then shoving back in to the hilt, with a rhythm he set himself, without asking me, because there was no need to ask. My body gave him all the information he needed: my ass clenched when he pulled out, opened when he came back in. That’s what happens when it fits right: the body learns on its own, without anyone having to teach it.

Then he picked up the pace. He grabbed my hips with both hands and started fucking me harder, giving me dry, sharp blows with his pelvis against my ass. The sound of flesh slapping flesh filled the booth, mixed with the moans from the film. He whispered in my ear, his breath hot:

—What a tight ass you’ve got, you bastard.

And he kept fucking me without slowing down. I took my own cock in my hand —the one that was leaking pre-cum all over— and started jerking off while he was buried in me. It was the only way for my head not to get lost in too many things at once. The movement of my hand anchored me to the present, to the booth, to that cock opening me up from the inside on a Wednesday afternoon that wouldn’t resemble any other.

We stayed like that a few minutes in that position until I asked him to stop.

—Let’s change —I said, panting—. I want to see your face.

I sat on the chair with my legs open and my knees up against my chest. He stood in front of me, between my knees, his hard, red cock pointing at me. I lifted my hips a little, grabbed his cock with my hand and guided it into my ass myself. He went back in, this time from a different angle, and I felt the tip hit me inside in a place that made me clench my teeth. Deeper. Different. Better. A “fuck, ow” slipped out of me that I couldn’t hold back.

He brought his face closer.

I don’t know why I kissed him. It wasn’t part of the plan for that afternoon, if there even was one. But I bit his lip first and then shoved my tongue in, and he answered without hesitation, and for a long while we stayed like that: his mouth on mine, his cock moving inside my ass with short, deep thrusts, my hands gripping his shoulders so I wouldn’t lose my balance, his fingers pressing my thighs upward. It was a strange and perfect scene at the same time. Two strangers who didn’t know each other’s names, fucking in a shitty booth, kissing like the world was ending outside.

I kept jerking off. The rhythm of my hand followed the rhythm of his hips. Every time he rammed it into me to the hilt, I clenched my fist around the glans, and my cock leaked pre-cum all over my knuckles.

When he felt he was close, his movements changed. Shorter. Rougher. His breathing against my cheek turned irregular, broken. He squeezed my sides hard and whispered:

—I’m gonna come, fuck, I’m gonna come.

One second of complete tension. All the muscles hard at once. Then he let it all go inside, trembling, his cock throbbing against the walls of my ass as he emptied into the condom. I felt every pulse. Every spurt. A long, guttural moan slipped out of him, bitten off against my shoulder.

***

He stayed still for a moment, the weight of his body lightly resting against mine, his cock still inside, slowly softening. Then he withdrew carefully. I felt empty all at once, hollow, my ass still open and throbbing. He took off the condom, tied off and full of semen, and threw it into the trash can in the corner. He wiped himself with a tissue he took from his pocket. He looked at me once, with nothing particular to say, with a tiny half-smile, and left the booth tugging his joggers back up.

I stayed.

I kept jerking off, alone, with the screen in front of me showing something I no longer saw. With my free hand I shoved two fingers into my ass, still slippery with cream, finding for myself the spot he had found in me. I came a few minutes later, standing up with one knee resting on the chair to keep my balance. I came with a grunt clenched between my teeth, a thick stream that splashed my hand and the chair and a few more drops that fell onto my thigh. I cleaned myself up as best I could, with paper and saliva. I got dressed.

When I went out into the hallway, the guy was already gone. The neighboring booth had its door open and the light off. The clerk still hadn’t looked up from his magazine. The street received me with an afternoon light that seemed more intense than usual, and with my ass still reminding me of itself, wet, at every step.

***

That was a long time ago. Several years already. I never saw that guy again. I never learned his name, nor he mine. That too can be a form of relationship: brief, wordless, with no visible consequences on the outside.

What did remain was the experience itself. The tactile memory of a hard cock moving inside me, of a condom full of another man’s semen tied off in a trash can, of my own ass learning something new that afternoon. I didn’t know I wanted that until I had it. That afternoon I learned something about myself that I wasn’t looking to learn, and that has its own value, one that doesn’t depend on whether the setting was pretty or elegant or the situation the most romantic in the world.

It wasn’t. It was a small booth smelling of pine air freshener and old plastic. A stranger with pharmacy hand cream. A condom from the cheapest brand. And yet, when I think of that afternoon, I don’t think about what was missing. I think about what was there: a cock, a mouth, an ass, and what the two of us wanted.

I’m telling it now because I can. Because there was a time when this part of me lived in silence, sorted into compartments with no exit. Telling it is also a way of letting go. A way of saying: this happened to me, I got fucked, I liked it, it was mine, and I don’t regret a thing.

If you’ve recognized yourself in anything I wrote, then you already know you’re not alone.