The First Time I Desired Another Man

Sunday dawned peacefully. Marcela left in the middle of the morning to go to a friend’s house and said she’d be back in the afternoon. The door closed with a soft thud, and the entire apartment fell silent.

Esteban was on the sofa with his phone. Daniel was washing the dishes unhurriedly, his back turned, with that way he had of keeping busy when he didn’t know what to do with what he was 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.

Esteban was the first to speak.

—How are you?

Daniel turned off the faucet. He dried his hands slowly, stretching the gesture out longer than necessary.

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

Esteban set his phone on the cushion and looked at him.

—Last night —he said.

—Last night —Daniel repeated.

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

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

—Why should it seem strange to you?

—Because I’ve spent thirty years believing I knew exactly what I was.

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

—What do you think? —Daniel asked.

—That you find 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 is its name?

—That I like women and I also like men. Not always to the same degree. But I do.

Daniel processed that in silence. He turned the glass between his fingers, watching the water rise and fall along the sides of the glass.

—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 those things 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 on the counter. He looked at Esteban for a moment, a moment that stretched a second too long, and then crossed the kitchen toward him.

The kiss was brief at first. Daniel pulled away slightly, as if checking something inside himself, making sure the ground was still firm beneath his feet. Then he came back with more determination, his hand closing around Esteban’s nape, his tongue pushing against his, biting his lower lip. Esteban placed a palm against his neck without directing anything, simply holding him, letting him set the pace. Daniel lowered his hand along Esteban’s chest, down his belly, and placed it without hesitation over the bulge already pressing against the fabric of his trousers. He squeezed it through the clothing, felt its shape, length, and thickness, and felt the other man’s cock respond, growing even harder beneath his palm.

When Daniel went down, he did it slowly. He undid Esteban’s trousers, took him out, and held him in his hand for a moment, feeling the weight, the warmth of skin against his palm. Esteban’s cock was already hard, thick, its veins standing out and the tip glistening with a thick drop emerging from the slit. The night before, he had seen it inches from his face, inside Marcela, sliding in and out, soaked with her pussy, and he had run his tongue along the base twice at a moment he could then attribute to the atmosphere, the alcohol, anything but himself. Now there was no atmosphere to blame. No one else was in the apartment. There was only this: another man’s cock in his hand, throbbing against his fingers, and the physical, concrete desire to put it in his mouth.

He knelt on the cold kitchen floor and took it into his mouth.

The cold of the tiles rose through his knees, but he barely registered it. His entire body was focused on what he had before him, on the novelty of an act he had spent his whole life imagining as someone else’s and that suddenly belonged to him, was happening in his hands, in his mouth, with no one to blame. He closed his lips around the glans and licked it with the tip of his tongue, gathering up that first salty drop, testing the taste. He was surprised not to feel disgust, or even surprise; he felt hunger.

He was clumsy at first, without Marcela’s rhythm or ease, not really knowing what to do with his hands. He gagged when he tried to take it too far in and had to pull it out for a moment, a strand of saliva hanging from the corner of his mouth. Esteban said nothing, corrected nothing; he simply rested a hand gently on his shoulder, as if anchoring him. Little by little Daniel found his own rhythm, slow and exploratory, learning the texture of the veins against his tongue, the concentrated heat, the taste with no previous point of reference to compare it to. He sucked only the head for long seconds, his tongue working the frenulum, and then lowered himself all the way to where he could, until he felt the pubic hair against his nose. One hand at the base, moving in time with his mouth; the other lowered to the balls, weighing them, caressing them with the pad of his thumb. Esteban’s breathing changed, becoming deeper, slower, and then he began to release short, controlled moans that ran up Daniel’s spine like a reward.

—That’s it, Dani —Esteban murmured—. Suck me like that, slowly, don’t rush.

Daniel obeyed without taking his mouth away. Saliva ran down his chin, wetting his hand, and Esteban’s cock slid in and out between his lips with a wet sound that filled his head. He felt his own cock grow hard inside his trousers, confined, wetting the fabric from within. The mere thought of sucking another guy and getting hard because of it left him dazed and aroused in equal measure.

After a while Esteban asked him to wait. Calmly, almost in a murmur, he indicated that Daniel should lie facedown on the sofa and lower his trousers to his knees. Daniel got up from the floor and obeyed without asking, still breathing hard, his hard cock bouncing against his belly when he took off his underwear. He felt Esteban’s hands travel along his back, moving slowly down his sides, over the curve of his buttocks, gently parting them, and understood where everything was headed before it happened.

He tensed.

It wasn’t exactly fear. It was more like the anxiety of the completely unknown, that moment when the body receives new information and still doesn’t know how to process it, how to put it anywhere. He gripped the cushion with both hands and waited, his ass raised and his hole exposed for the first time in his life before another man’s mouth.

—Easy —Esteban said in a very low voice, almost against his skin—. Relax your ass. Let me handle it.

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

Little by little the tension began to give way, layer by layer, as if someone were removing it one piece at a time. Esteban’s tongue was warm, steady, unhurried, wetting his asshole with abundant saliva, entering and leaving the crease with an insistence that was no longer a question but a promise. More precise circles now, the tip tracing the outline with a patience Daniel felt rising all the way up his spine.

He breathed through his mouth, deeply, and noticed how each exhalation loosened one more muscle. His hips stopped resisting and began, almost of their own accord, to seek the contact instead of fleeing it, pushing against Esteban’s face, offering themselves. It was a small change and an enormous one at once, and Daniel felt it as a surrender he had never known he needed.

God.

He said it aloud 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 harder, his tongue slipping just inside, forcing the ring, coating it with saliva from within, and Daniel let out a sound he didn’t recognize as his own, a hoarse moan torn from the depths of his chest. What he felt resembled nothing he had ever felt before. It was intimate in a way unlike anything he knew, and the anxiety at the beginning had transformed into something else entirely without him being able to identify the exact moment the change occurred. Esteban slid a hand up his hip, brought it underneath him, grabbed his hard cock, and began to jerk him off slowly while continuing to eat his ass. Daniel felt the two sensations merge into a single electric line running from the nape of his neck to his pubis.

—Fuck —Daniel murmured against the cushion—. Fuck, keep going, don’t stop.

He thought of Marcela the week before. Her face against the pillow. What he had seen from the outside, like a spectator, while Esteban fucked her slowly from behind and she moaned uncontrollably; now, from the inside, he understood with a clarity he had never anticipated why his wife had screamed like that.

Esteban alternated without hurry: his flat tongue pressing, then circles around the edge, then slipping a little farther in, pushing with the stiff tip until he opened him by a centimeter, while his hand continued working Daniel’s cock with a tight, steady fist. He read every reaction with that attentiveness of his that left nothing unnoticed. Daniel had let go of the cushion. His palms were open against the sofa fabric, his breathing completely broken, his cock dripping pre-cum onto Esteban’s fingers, and the only thing he knew for certain was that he didn’t want him to stop.

When Esteban sat up, it took Daniel a moment to return to the room, to remember where he was.

He turned over on the sofa. His face was flushed, his hair stuck to his forehead, his cock rigid and pointing toward his navel, wet with saliva and with his own fluids. Esteban knelt in front of him, spread his knees, and took him into his mouth with an ease Daniel wasn’t prepared for. His throat opened without resistance; he swallowed him whole in a single downward motion, burying his nose in Daniel’s balls, and from there began sucking him with a technique Daniel couldn’t even have imagined. It didn’t last long. The intensity came from somewhere deeper than he expected, and when he felt the orgasm climb over him, he couldn’t warn him; he came with a shudder that ran down his legs to his feet, spilling into Esteban’s mouth in several long pulses. Esteban didn’t pull away. He swallowed everything without releasing him, sucking every last drop, milking him with his tongue against the frenulum until Daniel had to push his head away because he couldn’t take any more.

When he finished, he sought Esteban again without a pause, without giving himself time to think. They changed places: Esteban sat on the sofa with his legs spread, and Daniel returned to the floor between his knees and took him into his mouth again, now more calmly, certain that he knew what he was doing. He learned what pressure made him hold his breath, where to focus his tongue, how to read the other man’s body signals: the hand closing into a fist over the armrest, the breath cutting off sharply, the thigh muscle tensing beneath his free hand. He sucked the tip, licked it from base to head with his flat tongue, took his balls into his mouth one at a time, and swallowed him again as far as he could. When Esteban grunted that he was going to come, Daniel didn’t pull away; he tightened his lips around the head and stayed there. The cum filled his mouth in three hot spurts, thick and salty, and Daniel swallowed without thinking, holding him until the last tremor passed and the cock softened between his lips.

He pulled away with a string of semen hanging from his chin. He wiped it off with the back of his hand.

***

They sat together on the kitchen floor, their backs against the cabinet, their legs stretched out over the tiles. The sound of the water had stopped some time ago. Only their breathing remained, still uneven.

Daniel stared ahead. Not guiltily, but with the expression of someone who had just understood something he hadn’t expected to understand today, or perhaps ever.

—This —he said at last, gesturing vaguely toward the space between them. He left the sentence unfinished because he still had no way 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 happened slowly. Without anyone fully planning it. This can happen slowly too.

—How far?

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

Daniel considered the question seriously, without evading it. Outside, the city afternoon continued with its constant, indifferent noise. Inside, there were only the two of them, what had just happened, and what still had no name and might take a while to acquire one.

—I don’t know yet —Daniel said.

—That’s all right —Esteban said—. When you do know, 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.