The Man Who Looked at Me from the Window

I was walking along the main street of an old neighborhood that still resembled what it had once been: cafés with tables out on the sidewalk, bargain bookstores, ancient trees darkening the tiles, and a couple of restaurants where people took all night to ask for the bill. I had hustled around there, more years ago than I care to count, and I still had trouble recognizing some corners. The area was starting to take on a trendy sheen, with colorful murals on the side walls and galleries selling expensive paintings to bored collectors, but it hadn’t yet become the pretentious postcard it eventually did. What I’m about to tell happened just before that, on a March afternoon when the light was slow to leave.

I was walking with my head full of noise. Or maybe it would be more honest to admit I was walking with my body full of need. The kind of need that ambushes you without asking permission, that no cold shower or clever distraction can quiet. I needed to fuck. Fuck without thinking, without brakes, without the politeness one invents to pretend to be civilized. I wanted another body’s skin, another body’s sweat, the weight of someone else on top of mine, a hot mouth looking for mine and the urgency of arms that wouldn’t ask anything. I’d been hard since the previous avenue, and every step was a small, pleasurable torture.

I got to the front of one of those hotels with a respectable façade that in reality served as a neighborhood indiscretion’s obligatory passageway. I thought, almost as a game with myself, that it would be a wonderful miracle to see someone lean out of a window in their underwear and wink at me. And, against all reason, that was exactly what happened.

A man appeared at the second-floor window. He was standing in front of the glass, wrestling with a gray T-shirt that was far too tight on him, fighting with the fabric to get his head through the neck hole. He had a solid torso, not those bloated gym-catalog bodies, but something more natural, with defined arms and broad shoulders. When the fabric finally gave way and his face came into view, I saw a handsome guy, around thirty, with a marked jaw and hair still damp from the shower. He adjusted the shirt over his chest and, in that same movement, his eyes fell on me.

He didn’t look away. Neither did I. I was about twenty meters from the building, right in the median strip of the avenue, and even so I felt his gaze like a hand resting in the center of my chest. I smiled just enough, planted my feet on the pavement, let him decide. He took his time on purpose. He smoothed the T-shirt with calculated slowness, let me see how it draped over his pecs, and only then stepped back and turned off the room light.

I decided to wait for him. I crossed to the iron bench under a ash tree, sat down with my legs apart, and looked at the hotel entrance as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Ten minutes passed. Fifteen. I started to think the guy had gotten cold feet, that it had all been a game, a postcard to hang on the wall of memory. And then he came out.

He crossed the street acting oblivious, as if he were looking for an address. He was wearing dark jeans that hugged his round ass and the gray T-shirt clinging to his body. He stopped a few meters from me and looked to the right, then to the left, in a not very convincing pantomime of being lost. What he was really doing was giving me time to look at him. And I did. I saw his thick thighs under the fabric, the generous bulge in his pants, the forearms with a vein standing out. His eyes were honey-colored, almost golden under the light that was beginning to tilt, and he had a mouth with full lips made for biting.

When he was sure he had shown me enough, he came straight to me.

—Sorry —he said, with an accent I couldn’t quite place—. Do you know if there’s a pharmacy nearby?

The pharmacy had a lit sign the size of a poster and was half a block away, impossible to miss. I played along. I answered with unnecessary details, offered to go with him, and we talked about anything: the weather, a neighborhood café that had closed, the rain that was threatening by late afternoon. What we were really doing was smelling each other out. Every word was a way of measuring the other person’s desire, of confirming that we were both thinking exactly the same thing.

He bought a box of aspirin he probably didn’t need and a bottle of water. Then, once we were back on the hotel sidewalk, he asked the question I had been waiting for.

—Come up with me?

I said yes before he even finished the sentence. I had no interest in hiding how badly I wanted it.

The hotel entrance was what the entrance to any hotel like that is: the receptionist looked us over with that crooked smile of someone pretending not to notice, the bellhop lowered his eyes too late, and a maid folding towels in the hallway followed us with her gaze until we got into the elevator. All of them hypocrites with the look of people there by circumstance. All of them knew perfectly well what we were going upstairs for. As if they hadn’t seen much worse pass through that same hallway in the last week.

But as soon as the room door closed, all of that disappeared. He turned on the TV as if he needed to cover the silence with background noise, and I took the opportunity to come up behind him. I wrapped my arms around him against my chest. He welcomed it with a long sigh, almost one of relief, and pushed his hips back to meet the hardness that no longer fit in my pants. He smelled of hotel soap and cheap cologne mixed with something else, something you can’t buy: the heat of a body that is already asking for it.

I stroked his chest over the T-shirt. His nipples had gone hard beneath the fabric. I kissed the back of his neck, slowly, ran my lips along the line of his throat, and slid one hand down to his crotch. I found a thick, firm cock that responded to my touch through the jeans as if it had been waiting for me for hours. I pulled down the zipper. I slipped my fingers inside his pants. The skin welcomed me warm, and the head was already wet.

He turned around and we kissed for the first time. Big mouth, active tongue, teeth biting without fear. I yanked off his T-shirt with two pulls that nearly ripped a seam. I left his back bare and kissed his chest, his shoulders, the base of his neck. I ran my tongue over his nipples and heard him let out a low moan, almost through clenched teeth, as if he were still trying to keep control.

I wasn’t going to let him keep it.

I knelt down. I pulled his jeans off in one tug. What appeared before my face was a thick, straight cock, slightly curved to the left, with a shiny, slippery head. I looked him in the eye, held his gaze, and took him into my mouth as far as my throat would allow. I heard him give a rough groan. I took his balls in one hand and grabbed one ass cheek with the other, firm, round, a lot prettier than any prize-winning magazine ass. I worked him slowly, with plenty of saliva, alternating my tongue over the frenulum with deep sucks that made him clench his thighs. When I felt him getting too close, I let go of his cock, focused on his balls, on the inside of his thighs, and went back to his cock only when I heard his breathing settle. I wanted it to last.

We made it to the bed in a knot of hands, clothes flying, kisses that never ended. He got up on it first. He went to all fours without being asked, head resting on his forearms and back arched, offering me everything. I found a condom and a tube of lube on the bedside table; I didn’t ask where they had come from. I put the condom on quickly. I wet his entrance well with my fingers, slid one in, then two, feeling the muscles give way slowly. When I saw he was ready, I pushed inside. I entered little by little, stopping each time he held his breath, until my hips slammed into his ass and he let out a long cry, half pain, half relief.

***

What followed was a race. The speed rose on its own. I grabbed his waist with both hands and started thrusting harder, deeper, setting a rhythm that the bed answered with every creak. I kissed his sweat-damp back, bit between his shoulder blades, gave him a couple of slaps on the ass that echoed in the room. He was moaning shamelessly, saying things I couldn’t quite make out, lifting his ass higher and higher. I thought that at any moment someone would knock on the door and tell us to go to hell. I didn’t care.

I came inside him with a growl that rose straight out of my stomach. When I pulled out, there was still more, so I finished by splashing his ass and the base of his back, and spread the cum with the palm of my hand like it was cream. We both collapsed onto our sides on the sheets, laughing softly, breathless, hair stuck to our foreheads.

We didn’t stop. I kissed him until I felt his cock start waking again against my thigh. I climbed on top of him, rode him, let his cock slide between my ass cheeks without going in, playing, teasing him. I took both cocks, mine and his, and jerked them together, looking him in the eyes. He squeezed my waist with a force that was going to leave marks the next day. Then, in one quick movement, he flipped me over, laid me on my back, spread my legs, and pressed his cock against my ass without putting it in yet. I lifted my hips to look for him. He laughed and pretended to play hard to get. I sat up, got on all fours again, and offered him what was obviously what he wanted.

—Fuck me —I said without looking at him.

He didn’t need to be told twice. He put on a new condom, grabbed the lube, and came into me in one slow, firm thrust that made me bite the pillow. What came after doesn’t have much refinement to tell. He fucked me hard, grabbing my hair, saying things in my ear that in another situation would have offended me and here only turned me on more. I asked for more force, I asked for deeper, I asked him not to stop. I felt his cock throbbing as he came, felt his whole body tighten over mine until he emptied himself completely.

We dragged ourselves to the shower because the sheets were a battlefield. Under the stream, he got hard again. I leaned against the tiles to feel it slide between my ass cheeks, no condom this time, not going in, just the burning friction of warm water mixed with his skin. Then I knelt again, in front of him, under the shower, and sucked him all the way down. He grabbed my hair and controlled the pace, made me swallow everything, until I felt his balls tighten between my fingers and my mouth fill with his cum.

When I looked at the clock, it was 2:10 a.m.

I should have stayed. I didn’t. He wrote his number on a piece of hotel paper and tucked it himself into the pocket of my shirt, with a half-comic solemnity. The two of us knew, with that stupid wisdom you have in your early twenties, that I wasn’t going to call him and that he wasn’t expecting me to. I gave him one last long kiss, ran my tongue over his lower lip, sucked his cock one more time, slowly, almost as a farewell, and left the hotel without looking back.

Outside, a downpour was coming down that didn’t seem to have an end. I didn’t care. I had just had one of the best fucks of my life up to that point, and I walked home soaked, still smelling him on my skin, his taste in my mouth, his sweat drying between my shoulder blades. When I got there, I found four messages on the answering machine. All four were from a girlfriend I had at the time. All four angrier than the last.

What happened with that girlfriend is a story I’ll tell another day.