The Stranger from the App Showed Me What I’d Been Missing

I turned twenty-three last winter, and a few months earlier I had broken up with the first boy I had ever been in love with. Ours was one of those relationships where we couldn’t stop touching each other. We saw each other almost every day, and it almost always ended with him inside me or, depending on his mood, with his semen going down my throat. We could spend an entire afternoon chaining one orgasm to the next, without much conversation, laughing between rounds.

When he moved to another city to start a second degree, it didn’t take me long to realize that my body had gotten used to a level of pleasure that was hard to come down from.

At first I thought I’d manage. At night I’d slip my fingers under my pajamas and try to imagine him, his voice, his hands. Sometimes I managed something close to an orgasm, but it was a shadow. A muted note of something that had once sounded at full volume.

And then I did what I had promised myself I wouldn’t do: I downloaded a dating app.

I made the profile on a Sunday afternoon, with my hair still wet from the shower and the forced moans from the night before still bouncing around in my head. I didn’t want a relationship. I wanted to feel that again.

Whoever it is, let him be good, I thought as I uploaded two decent-enough photos and two suggestive-enough ones.

My match with him came up that very same night. I’ll admit he wasn’t my type. He was a good handful of years older than my previous partner, not quite fifty but not far off, and for me, who had just barely crossed into my twenties, that was new.

His main photo was one of those that only work if the man knows exactly what he’s worth: half-smile, eyes on the camera, dark blue shirt with two buttons undone.

We started talking and both of us laid our cards on the table before the second message. He was looking for something casual. So was I. He had changing shifts at the hospital, I had finals. Meeting up was going to be complicated, and precisely because of that, the chat started getting dirty faster than either of us expected.

—If we don’t see each other next week, I swear I’m going to break something —he wrote to me on a Friday at three in the morning.

I answered with a video. The camera aimed only from my navel to halfway down my leg, my hand inside my thong, my moans muffled against the pillow so as not to wake my roommate. It took him two minutes to reply. And the reply was a photo.

We kept it up for almost two weeks. Videos, voice notes, detailed descriptions of what we wanted to do to each other. I made myself come alone three times a day to the voice of that stranger in my headphones.

***

On Thursday, he finally had the night off.

I got ready as if I were going to an exam. An hour in front of the mirror. A skirt much shorter than my parents would have tolerated. High boots that came up to my thighs. A black lace thong that was already wet before I left the house, just from thinking about what was going to happen.

I left the shirt open just enough for the matching bra to show. I looked at myself in the mirror and laughed. More than a law student, I looked like someone who got paid by the hour.

I took a taxi. I didn’t have the body for the subway in that skirt.

***

I climbed the stairs to his building with trembling legs. When he opened the door, he was only wearing gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt. He smelled like soap. We didn’t really say hello.

—Come in —he said, and that was enough.

The living room was lit only by a floor lamp. Before I could take off my jacket, he had already pushed me against the back of the sofa. His mouth was different from the guys my age: he knew exactly when to press, when to ease up, when to bite my lower lip and when to let me breathe.

His hand slid up my neck until it settled just under my jaw, not pressing yet, and that made me more nervous than if he had.

He shoved me down until I was lying across the cushions. He climbed on top. His erection, still trapped beneath the fabric of his pants, pressed against my soaked thong. I moaned with my mouth against his neck.

—Easy —he whispered to me—. We have all night.

I had no intention of taking it easy.

***

I slipped down from under him and dropped to my knees on the rug. The gray pants came down with one hand. His cock hit my cheek and I laughed. I had spent two weeks imagining it. Reality was better.

I ran my tongue slowly from the base to the tip, never taking my eyes off him. Then the whole head in my mouth. Then a little more. Each time a little more. He tangled his hand in my hair and began setting the rhythm.

Tears kept escaping me, impossible to stop. I was short of breath, my jaw hurt, and still I didn’t want him to stop. This is what I’ve been looking for for months, I thought. Someone deciding for me.

Suddenly he yanked my hair back and pulled me away. He got me to my feet without much gentleness and stripped my clothes off as he led me down the hallway, toward the bedroom. He only left me my thong.

***

The bedroom smelled like clean laundry. He shoved me backward onto the bed and pulled at my hips until my ass was right at the edge. He knelt down. He ran his tongue over the lace, still not touching my skin. I could hear him breathing.

—Please —I blurted out.

—Please what?

It took me a moment to answer. He brushed me again with the tip of his tongue, the fabric getting wetter and wetter.

—Please —I insisted, pride already gone—, take it off me.

The thong flew somewhere across the room. His tongue was finally where I wanted it, and at the same time two fingers opened their way inside me. I closed my legs around his head without meaning to, and I heard him laugh against my pussy.

I was screaming. The neighbors were probably hearing me. I didn’t care in the slightest.

The first orgasm left my mind blank and my legs useless.

***

He didn’t let me rest. He rearranged me in the middle of the bed, reached for the nightstand, and took out three things: a bottle of lube, a small vibrating egg, and another thicker toy clearly meant for the clit. I was still trying to catch my breath.

—Wait, wait —I murmured—, give me a second.

—Not a second.

He switched on the bigger vibrator and set it on my clit. I jolted so hard I almost came off the bed. I was so sensitive that every vibration hurt and felt good at the same time. He took advantage of that moment of total helplessness to position himself between my legs and drive in with one thrust.

I felt him stretch me wide open.

He started fucking me with a steady, demanding rhythm, with no mercy. He put the vibrator in my hand so I could hold it myself. Then his free hand wrapped around my throat again, this time squeezing. The exact pressure, the kind anyone who doesn’t know what they’re doing never gets right. I tried to moan and only air came out.

I’m going to come again, I thought. Again already, without asking.

But before I could, he pulled out of me.

***

—On your knees —he ordered.

It took me two seconds to get onto all fours. I felt him grab my hips hard, felt him drive back into me in one brutal thrust, and then a cold drop land on my back entrance. The small egg. I understood before I even felt it. With the help of the lube, and a few years’ worth of practice, it went in without complaint.

When he switched it on, I completely lost track of where anything was happening.

He kept fucking me nonstop. One hand yanked my hair. The other set my ass burning with slaps that grew in intensity. I was screaming into the sheets, biting them, not knowing whether the cock, the vibrator, or the sting of the spanks gave me more pleasure.

The second orgasm knocked me flat. I thought it was the best one of my life. I was very wrong.

***

Before I could even breathe, he took the vibrator away. He grabbed the bottle again. I heard it pop open. I felt the tip of his cock slide slowly back.

—Tell me if you want me to stop —he said.

—I don’t want you to stop.

He pushed the tip in. I let out a strange, high-pitched, almost childish moan. He shoved the rest in all at once. The burning was so exact, so clean, that it immediately fused with the pleasure. I felt completely full, as if that night had been designed to leave no space inside me unoccupied.

He started moving slowly. In and out. My body adjusted to him with a ease that even surprised me. And then he took the egg—the same one that had been in my ass two minutes earlier—and slid it into my pussy.

The vibration spread through my whole body. His hips kept driving into me from behind. Another slap on my ass. Another. Another.

—You hold onto it —he told me, and handed me the big clit vibrator.

***

I was propped up on the bed with only one arm. The other, underneath me, held the toy exactly where it needed to be held. I was so saturated with sensation that I was incapable of thinking a full sentence.

I felt his cock in my ass, the egg inside my pussy, the vibrator on my clit, and his hand tangled in my hair. It was too much. It was exactly what I needed.

When I came, I soaked the sheets. An amount I didn’t even know I was capable of letting go. I felt something strange: shame and pride mixed together, for one second. Then nothing.

He came inside me an instant later, groaning against my nape, and the two of us collapsed onto the wet mattress.

***

It took us a good while to talk.

He was the first to move. He helped me to my feet like someone supporting another person after an operation, took me to the bathroom, and got into the shower with me. He washed my hair. He kissed my shoulder. He held me when my legs gave out from the tremors.

—You’re very young —he told me, almost in a whisper.

—And you’re very old —I answered, and we both laughed.

***

We saw each other a couple more times in that apartment. I went over like someone going to a class from which they come out knowing more every day. He always had some new toy, some different idea, some way to throw me off balance.

But then his shifts changed. I went into exams. My ex came back to the city for the summer holidays and, out of pride or nostalgia, I let him back into my bed.

That story with the stranger from the app lasted exactly as long as it was meant to last. Not a day more. Not one less.

Every so often, I still open the app. Just out of curiosity. And still, when I touch myself at night, his voice comes back before anyone else’s.