The Night a Stranger Made Me Lose Control

I’m not entirely sure why I’m writing this. I never was one for keeping a diary, and even less for putting down in writing something I wouldn’t even dare tell my best friend. But there are nights that stick to your skin, and if I don’t get them out of me I feel like I’m going to explode. So here I am, sitting on the bed with the lamp low, still with my cunt swollen and my hand not quite answering me.

I’ll start at the beginning, even though the beginning was a stupid thing: an invitation to an opening I didn’t want to go to.

***

My coworker Carla had been insisting all week. A small gallery in the old neighborhood, cheap wine in plastic cups, people pretending to understand art. I said yes just to get her off my back, and at the last minute she canceled because she got a headache. I thought about staying home. I didn’t. I still don’t know what pushed me to go out in that black dress I hadn’t worn in months.

The gallery was exactly as I’d imagined it: noisy, overlit, full of phrases nobody truly believed. I grabbed a glass, planted myself in front of a huge painting of red splotches, and tried to look as if I were deep in thought. The truth is I was thinking about the taxi ride home.

—You’re pretending —said a voice beside me.

I turned. He was looking at the same painting, not at me, with a half smile that didn’t ask permission for anything.

—Excuse me?

—You’re pretending to care. You do it well, but it shows in your shoulders. When we really like something, we let our guard down.

What an insolent bastard, I thought. And at the same time I felt something in my stomach I hadn’t felt in a long time, a low pull between my legs that forced me to clench my thighs.

His name was Adrián. Or so he said, and at this point it doesn’t matter whether it was true. He had dark eyes, the kind that always seem on the verge of asking you something uncomfortable, and a slow, unhurried way of speaking, as if we had the whole night ahead of us. We talked about anything: the lousy wine, the people, why anyone ends up going to places they don’t want to go to. At no point did he ask if I was alone, what I did for a living, or any of the things people usually ask just to fill the silence.

At one point he set his glass on a shelf and looked straight at me.

—Do you want to get out of here?

It wasn’t a crude proposition. It was almost a practical question, like suggesting we change bars. And I, who have spent years calculating every step, measuring the consequences of everything, said yes before thinking. I set my glass beside his and we walked out onto the street without telling anyone, without sending a message, without anything.

***

We walked a few blocks in silence. It wasn’t an uncomfortable silence; it was the kind that tightens the air. I could feel the cold night on my arms and the heat rising through another part of me, something completely different. Every so often our hands brushed and neither of us pulled away. That small shared cowardice turned me on more than anything he might have said. When we crossed a dark corner, he slid his hand around my waist and lowered it just enough to brush my ass over the dress. It wasn’t an accident. And I didn’t move away.

His building was nearby. We went up a narrow stairwell, and on the landing on the second floor, before reaching his door, he stopped and looked at me again with that silent question. I nodded. Nothing more was needed.

As soon as the door shut behind us, he turned me around and pinned me against it. I’m writing it and I still can’t believe it was me. His mouth came down on mine without any delicacy, with an urgency that knocked the air out of my lungs. He shoved his tongue deep into my mouth and I sucked on it like my life depended on it. I grabbed his shirt, not to stop him but to pull him closer. I didn’t want tenderness that night. I wanted exactly that: someone who didn’t treat me like something that could break.

I felt his right hand sliding between us, searching; he yanked my dress up to my hip and ran his fingers over my panties. I was already drenched. He noticed and gave a low laugh against my neck.

—Look at you —he murmured—. We haven’t even done anything yet.

—Shut up and keep going —I told him, and I didn’t recognize my own voice.

He pulled the fabric aside and slipped two fingers inside me at once. I cried out against his mouth, a muffled cry, and he started moving them slowly, searching, curling them, until he found the exact spot and made my knees tremble. With his thumb he pressed my clit in slow circles while he kept fucking me with his fingers, and I opened wider for him, pushing my hips forward, begging without saying a word.

His hands slid down my back and found the zipper of the dress. He opened it slowly, far too slowly for the urgency of the way he was kissing me, and that contradiction drove me wild. I felt the cool air on the bare skin of my back and a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold. The dress fell to the floor. I was left in my bra and panties against the door, and he stepped back to look at me all over, dark eyes and slack mouth.

—Take off your bra —he ordered.

I did. I threw it at his feet. He grabbed my tits with both hands, squeezed them hard, and lowered his mouth to one nipple, sucking it until it hurt and I liked it at the same time. With his other hand he was still between my legs, moving his fingers inside me with a steady rhythm that was taking me fast. Very fast.

—Wait —I said, not really knowing what I was asking him to wait for.

—Do you want me to stop? —he asked, his mouth still on my nipple.

—No.

That was the only thing I said for a long time. No.

***

The apartment was almost dark. Only the streetlight came in through a large curtainless window, a yellowish light that drew long shadows across the wooden floor. He took my hand and led me to the bedroom without turning anything on. I followed him in my panties, barefoot because at some point I’d taken my shoes off without noticing.

I sat on the edge of the bed and he knelt in front of me. He started at my ankles, moving up my legs with his mouth, unhurried, as if he had all the time in the world and I were the only thing that existed in that room. Each kiss was a step. When he reached the insides of my thighs I felt my legs trembling, and not from nerves. He grabbed my panties with his teeth and pulled them down that way, looking up at me from below, and I lifted my hips to help him. He tossed them aside.

—Open up —he said.

I spread my legs. I opened for a stranger, in a bed that wasn’t mine, with a obedience that surprised even me. He looked at my cunt for a few seconds without touching me, and those seconds were worse than any caress. Then he lowered his head.

The first swipe of his tongue tore a long moan out of me. The second made me clutch the sheets. He licked me slowly, from bottom to top, stopping at my clit to suck it with his lips, letting go, going back. He pushed his tongue inside me as far as he could, then went back up to my clit and bit it just a little. I lifted my hips against his mouth without being able to control myself, riding his face, and he held my thighs open with both hands, not letting me close them.

—Look at me —he said, his mouth shining with me.

And I looked at him. That was the most intimate thing about the whole night: holding his gaze while I came apart on his tongue. Not the screams, not what came after. That soft, obscene order, look at me, and the total inability to disobey. He brought his mouth back to my cunt and slipped two fingers inside me again, sucking on my clit at the same time, and I felt the first orgasm rise from my feet, unstoppable. I came in his mouth with a rough cry, squeezing his head between my thighs, and he didn’t stop: he kept licking me while I trembled all over, drawing the climax out until I couldn’t take it anymore and pushed his head back because it was starting to hurt.

He got to his feet, pulled off his shirt, and stripped off his pants and boxers in one motion. He was hard, thick, pointing at me. My mouth actually filled with water; that’s not a figure of speech. I slid to the edge of the bed and knelt on the floor in front of him without being asked.

—You’re a filthy slut —he told me softly, and I liked hearing him say it.

I took him in one hand and put him in my mouth slowly, sucking the head first, teasing it with my tongue, tasting him. Then I took him deeper and deeper, as far as he would go, until I felt the tip at the back of my throat and my eyes filled with tears. He gathered my hair in one fist and started moving my head to his rhythm, fucking my mouth without asking permission. I let him, swallowing saliva, choking a little, and I liked it. I liked hearing him moan over me, I liked feeling him pulse against my tongue.

—Wait, wait —he said after a while, yanking himself out of my mouth—. I’m going to come and I don’t want to come like this.

He lifted me by the arms and threw me face-up on the bed. He climbed on top of me, forced my legs apart with his knee, and took a condom from the nightstand without looking away from me. He put it on with that calm of his that was killing me. Then he settled between my thighs and ran the tip all over my cunt, up and down, without putting it in, until I was so wet that it gleamed.

—Ask me for it —he said.

—Fuck me.

—Harder.

—Fuck me, please. Put it in me now.

He sank into me in one stroke, all the way to the hilt, and I closed my eyes and a sound escaped me that wasn’t a word or a name, something older than that. He filled me completely. I stayed still for a second, adjusting, feeling him pulse inside me, and then he started moving. Slowly at first, measuring me, reading every reaction of my body as if he could read things even I didn’t know. He’d pull most of his cock out and drive it back in to the base, and with each thrust I moaned louder.

Then the rhythm changed. It became deep, demanding, brutal. He grabbed my wrists and pinned them to the mattress above my head, holding them there while he fucked me harder and harder. The sound of our bodies slamming together filled the room, and I heard my own moans as if they belonged to someone else. I freed one hand and dug my nails into his back, dragging them down, marking him.

—Turn over —he said, his voice hoarse.

He pulled out and I rolled over at once, getting onto my knees and elbows, offering him my ass. He gripped my hips and shoved back in, and in that position it was something else, deeper, more animal. He slapped my ass between thrusts, and I pushed my hips back, asking for more. He grabbed my hair, pulling my head back, and whispered things in my ear I won’t repeat even here. Dirty, precise things that made me clamp down on his cock with my cunt until he groaned.

He took me to the edge and held me there, teasing, lowering the pace right when I was about to come, until I begged. Yes, begged. Me, who never begs for anything.

—Please, make me come. Please.

He threw me onto my back again, put my legs over his shoulders, and drove into me until I felt like he was going to split me in half. With his thumb he found my clit and started rubbing it in circles, never stopping fucking me. It took seconds. The orgasm tore through me from feet to head, long, almost unbearable, leaving me empty and full at the same time. I shook beneath him, screaming, with no shame at all, clamping around him in spasms I couldn’t control.

I heard him say my name, voice broken against my shoulder. Then one harder thrust, and another, and another, and I felt him harden inside me and come, groaning long against my neck. Every pulse of his cock spilling inside me jolted the pleasure through me again, like a tremor echoing itself, and I stayed wrapped around him feeling him finish.

***

After that we stayed still for a long time, legs tangled, skin stuck together with sweat. My heart was hammering in my ears. I could feel the warm semen running down my thigh when he finally pulled out and took off the condom. He brushed a lock of hair off my face with a gesture that, for the first time all night, was almost tender. We didn’t say anything. Sometimes words ruin things, and we both knew it.

I got dressed when dawn was already breaking. He offered to call me a taxi and I told him I preferred to walk a bit. The truth is I needed to be alone with what had just happened, chew on it, understand it. At the door he kissed me one last time, not urgently this time, slowly, and told me he hoped we’d see each other again. I didn’t leave him my number. I don’t know why. Maybe because I was afraid of wasting that night by wanting to repeat it.

I walked the blocks home with the first light of day and a smile I couldn’t wipe off my face. Out on the empty street, with my shoes in my hand and my cunt still throbbing between my legs, I felt freer than I had in years.

***

Now, as I write this, I realize something I find hard to confess even in these pages nobody will ever read. It wasn’t the sex that changed me, though it was intense as hell. It was discovering that inside me lived this other woman, one who is capable of saying yes, of leaving a gallery with a stranger, of kneeling on the floor to suck him off without being asked, of asking to be fucked harder without apologizing. I had spent so long being careful, being proper, being what was expected of me, that I had forgotten I have desire too, and desire doesn’t ask permission.

I don’t know if I’m going to see him again. Probably not. But I don’t need to. What stayed with me is not him; it’s the version of myself that showed up that night. And her, now that I know her, I’m not putting her back in a drawer.

Tomorrow is Monday. I’ll go back to the office, to meetings, to being the same old me for everyone else. But I’ll know. Every time I look in the mirror I’ll remember the woman who walked barefoot at dawn, with her cunt still dripping beneath her dress, and that, for now, is enough for me.