The First Time I Desired Another Man

Sunday dawned calm and quiet. Marcela left at midmorning to visit a friend and said she’d be back in the afternoon. The door closed with a soft thud and the whole apartment fell silent.

Esteban was on the couch with his phone. Daniel was washing the dishes unhurriedly, with his back turned, in that way of his of keeping busy with something when he doesn’t know what to do with what he’s carrying inside. They stayed like that for a long while without either of them saying a word, the sound of the water filling the space between them.

It was Esteban who spoke first.

—How are you?

Daniel turned off the tap. He dried his hands slowly, drawing out the gesture more than necessary.

—I don’t know —he said. He didn’t try to fix it with a polite “fine.”

Esteban put the phone down on the cushion and looked at him.

—Last night —he said.

—Last night —Daniel repeated.

He leaned against the counter, arms crossed, his gaze fixed on the kitchen floor.

—I’d never done that before. With a man. And the strangest thing is it didn’t seem strange to me. That’s what I can’t quite understand.

—Why should it seem strange to you?

—Because for thirty years I believed I knew exactly what I was.

Esteban got up, went to the fridge, poured two glasses of water without asking, and handed him one. They both remained leaning against opposite counters, the narrow space of the kitchen between them like a border neither of them yet knew whether they wanted to cross.

—What do you think? —Daniel asked.

—That you keep finding things about yourself that weren’t on the map. It took me a while to stop calling it curiosity and start calling it by its name.

—And what’s its name?

—That I like women and I also like men. Not always in the same measure. But yes.

Daniel processed that in silence. He turned the glass between his fingers, watching the water rise and fall against the glass walls.

—I don’t know if that’s what’s happening to me —he said at last—. Or if it was the context. The night. The rum. I don’t know if it would have happened under other circumstances.

—It could be all of that together —Esteban said—. You don’t have to figure it out today.

—No. But I can’t pretend it didn’t happen either.

—No one’s asking you to ignore it.

Daniel set the glass down on the counter. He looked at Esteban for a moment, a moment that stretched one second too long, and then he crossed the kitchen toward him.

The kiss was brief at first. Daniel pulled back just a little, as if checking something inside himself, making sure the floor was still solid beneath his feet. Then he came back more decisively, his hand closing on Esteban’s nape. Esteban laid a palm on his neck without guiding anything, just holding him, letting Daniel set the pace.

When Daniel went down, he did it slowly. He unbuttoned his pants, slipped them off, held them in his hand for a moment, feeling the weight, the heat of skin against his palm. The night before he had seen it inches from his face, inside Marcela, and he had run his tongue over the base twice in a moment he could then attribute to the mood, to the alcohol, to anything but himself. Now there was no mood to blame. There was no one else in the apartment. Only this.

He knelt on the cold kitchen floor and took him in his mouth.

The cold of the tiles climbed up his knees, but he barely registered it. His whole body was focused on what was in front of him, on the novelty of an act he had spent his whole life imagining as someone else’s and that was suddenly his, happening in his hands, in his mouth, with no one else to blame.

He was awkward at first, without the rhythm or ease Marcela had, not quite knowing what to do with his hands. Esteban said nothing, corrected nothing; he only rested a hand lightly on his shoulder, as if anchoring him. Little by little Daniel found his own cadence, slow and exploratory, learning the texture of veins against his tongue, the concentrated heat, the taste with no prior reference to compare it to. One hand at the base, moving in time with his mouth; the other resting on Esteban’s thigh. Esteban’s breathing changed, grew deeper, slower.

After a while Esteban asked him to wait. He told him calmly, almost in a whisper, to lie face down on the sofa. Daniel got up from the floor and obeyed without asking, still breathing hard. He felt Esteban’s hands run along his back, slowly down his sides, over the curve of his ass, parting it gently, and he understood where all of it was headed before it got there.

He tensed.

It wasn’t exactly fear. It was more like the anxiety of the utterly unknown, that instant when the body receives new information and still doesn’t know how to process it, how to place it anywhere. He clenched the cushion with both hands and waited.

—Relax —Esteban said, in a very low voice, almost against his skin.

The tongue came slowly, with an initial contact so slight that Daniel received it with his whole body tense. Esteban was in no hurry. He started at the outer edge, a slow, patient circle, without pressure, without demanding anything in return. Daniel had his face buried in the cushion, fists clenched, jaw tight, waiting for something he didn’t know how to anticipate because he had nothing to compare it with.

Little by little the tension began to ease, in layers, as if someone were lifting it off one by one. Esteban’s tongue was warm, steady, with no rush at all. More precise circles now, the tip tracing the contour with a patience Daniel felt rise all the way up his spine.

He breathed through his mouth, deeply, and felt each exhale loosen another muscle. His hips stopped resisting and began, almost on their own, to seek the contact instead of fleeing from it. It was a small change and a huge one at the same time, and Daniel felt it as a surrender he had never known he needed.

God.

He said it out loud without realizing it, the word buried in the cushion. It wasn’t a complaint. It was something else, something that didn’t have a name yet.

Esteban pressed a little more, the tongue barely entering, and Daniel let out a sound he didn’t recognize as his own. What he was feeling wasn’t like anything he had felt before. It was intimate in a different way from anything known, and the anxiety at the beginning had turned into something entirely else without his being able to point to the exact moment the change happened.

He thought of Marcela the week before. Of her face against the pillow. Of what he had seen from the outside, as a spectator, and what he now understood from the inside with a clarity he had never anticipated.

Esteban alternated unhurriedly: the flat tongue pressing, then circles at the edge, then going a little deeper, reading each of Daniel’s reactions with that attentiveness of his that left nothing unnoticed. Daniel had let go of the cushion. His palms were flat against the sofa fabric, his breathing completely broken, and the only thing he knew for certain was that he didn’t want him to stop.

When Esteban pulled himself up, it took Daniel a moment to come back into the room, to remember where he was.

He turned over on the sofa. Esteban knelt in front of him and took him in his mouth with a ease Daniel was not prepared for. It didn’t last long. The intensity hit him from a deeper place than he expected, and he came with a tremor that ran down his legs to his feet.

When it was over he reached for Esteban again, with no pause in between, without giving himself time to think. He took him in his mouth again, now more calmly, learning what pressure made him hold his breath, where to concentrate his tongue, how to read the other man’s body. When Esteban came at the end, the semen filled his mouth, hot, and Daniel swallowed without thinking, holding him until the last shudder passed.

***

They sat on the kitchen floor together, backs against the cabinet, legs stretched out over the tiles. The sound of the water had long since stopped. All that remained was their breathing, still irregular.

Daniel was staring straight ahead. Not with guilt, but with that expression of someone who has just understood something he didn’t expect to understand today, or maybe ever.

—This —he said at last, gesturing vaguely at the space between them. He let the sentence trail off, because he still had nothing with which to finish it.

—It doesn’t have to be anything yet —Esteban said.

—No. But it is something.

—Yes.

—And Marcela?

—What about Marcela?

—She doesn’t know anything about this.

—No.

—And how does that work?

Esteban took his time before answering. He tipped his head back against the cabinet door and looked at the ceiling.

—Everything that’s happened between the three of us has gone slowly. Without anyone planning it all the way through. This can go slowly too.

—How far?

—I don’t know. How far do you want it to go?

Daniel considered the question seriously, without dodging it. Outside, the city afternoon kept up its constant noise, indifferent. Inside there were only the two of them, what had just happened, and what still had no name and maybe would take time to get one.

—I don’t know yet —Daniel said.

—That’s okay —Esteban said—. When you do, let me know.

Daniel nodded slowly. It wasn’t a complete answer, but it was honest, and for now that was enough for both of them.