The stranger in the group invited me to her house that night

I never thought I’d end up accepting an offer like that. I’d been wandering for weeks through a social network a friend had added me to almost as a joke, one of those places where people post what they’d never dare say out loud. The group was called something like “No-Strings Encounters” and, after reading half a dozen posts, it was clear to me that almost every profile was fake. Landscape avatars, generic names, photos stolen from the internet. I was one of the few idiots in there with my real face and my real name.

I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here, I thought as I scrolled with my thumb. And then her post appeared.

It was short, direct, with no emojis or beating around the bush. She was looking for a physical encounter, just once, no prior chat, no promises of anything. She specified that she didn’t want to know the guy, or his story, or exchange numbers beyond what was strictly necessary. Just sex. I read it and thought it was the kind of post anyone could write, but the detail was in the last paragraph: it precisely described the profile she was looking for, and as it happened, that profile was mine. Twenty-eight years old, tall, fit, dominant, no interest in long-term relationships. Too precise to be a coincidence.

I wrote to her.

—Hi, I read your post and I’m interested. Are you the girl in the photos?

—No, the photos are from the internet. Are you the guy in the profile that’s asking?

—Yes, that’s me. My name and my photo are real. I joined the group a few days ago.

She sent me her phone number and I added her. I asked her for something that would make sure it wasn’t a prank by a friend or, worse, a scam. What she sent me left me speechless: a short video of her looking at the camera, saying my name and the date. There was no way that had been doctored. It was her, real, in her room, with a yellow lamp behind her. She had her brown hair loose and full lips, and an accent I couldn’t quite place.

She introduced herself as Mariela. She told me she was thirty-two, that she had just come out of a relationship of nearly a decade in which sex had become a formality, and that she wanted to try, just once, something other than missionary with the lights off. She laid out her conditions from the start: only oral sex and traditional penetration, nothing weird, and I would leave as soon as it was over. I told her that sounded fine. I also told her that when two people undress, rules tend to evaporate, but she didn’t answer that.

We agreed she’d let me know if things progressed.

***

That same night I met up with two friends at a neighborhood bar. We had beer, ate badly, and talked even worse. Around one in the morning, just as we were paying, I felt my phone vibrate inside my pocket.

—I’ve had a few drinks. I’m really horny. Can you come over? I just want you to fuck me and leave.

I read the message twice. My friends looked at me and knew, without asking, that something had happened. I told them I was leaving without giving details. In the taxi to her place, while the city drifted past blurred in the window, I couldn’t stop thinking about one thing: what Mariela didn’t know was that in bed I’m anything but gentle. Her plan of proper missionary and a polite goodbye was going to last exactly as long as it took her knees to open.

I got to her building in less than an hour. It was a complex of old apartments, with a buzzer that rang three times before she answered. Her voice sounded different from the video. Deeper, with her words a little slurred.

—Come up, seventh C.

The elevator smelled of damp. When I reached the seventh floor, her door was already ajar. I peeked in and saw her from behind, walking barefoot toward the living room. She was wearing a very short white summer dress, with nothing underneath that would show when she moved. Her legs were pale, long, and the way she swayed made it obvious she’d had quite a bit to drink.

—Come in —she said without turning around.

I closed the door behind me and locked it.

When she finally turned, the first thing I thought was that the video hadn’t done her justice. She had huge breasts for her size, a couple of cups larger than you’d expect on a woman that thin. She wore only a light touch of makeup, with gloss on her lips that gave her an air of deliberate shamelessness. A face like something that hasn’t quite admitted itself out loud.

—I don’t know what I’m doing —she told me.

—You’re doing exactly what you wanted to do. You just need to stop thinking about it.

I sat down on the sofa. She stayed standing in front of me, toying with the hem of her dress between her fingers. I asked her to bring me a glass of water and watched her walk to the kitchen. When she came back, she handed it to me without sitting down. I grabbed her wrist, pulled her toward me, and set her astride my lap.

I kissed her.

It took her two seconds to respond, and when she did, she opened her mouth with an urgency that had nothing to do with the original plan. While we were kissing, I took her hand and guided it between her own legs, under the dress. She wasn’t wearing underwear.

—I shaved —she murmured against my mouth—. Over chat you said you liked it like this.

—Don’t tell me. Show me.

She stood up, took a step back, and lifted her dress to her waist. The kitchen light fell at an angle and left her exposed from the navel down. She was wet. So wet it showed from that distance.

—Come here —I ordered.

***

I told her I was going to the bathroom. When I came back, she was no longer in the living room. I found her in her bedroom, without her dress, completely naked, lying in the middle of the bed with her legs apart and one arm thrown over her head. A pose that was not spontaneous. She had rehearsed it in her head, probably a hundred times before I rang the bell.

—Take everything off —she told me—. I want to see you.

I undressed without hurry. I wanted her to wait. When I got close to the bed, she reached out to touch me and I told her no, not yet. I told her to move to the edge of the mattress and open her legs wider. Then I put mine on either side of her face.

—Before I fuck you, show me how you suck cock.

She obeyed. She did it well, better than her chatty messages had suggested. She had a technique that isn’t improvised, a way of looking up that said a great deal more about her last decade than any explanation could. I leaned in, spread her legs with both hands, and started going down on her while she kept taking me in her mouth. Every time my tongue touched where it was supposed to touch, she lost the rhythm and let out a muffled moan against my own flesh inside her mouth.

When she was close, I stopped her. I wanted her for me, not for herself alone.

I turned her over. I arranged her face down, with her hips raised and her face buried against the pillow. I slid in slowly, all the way. She let out a stifled cry and had to bite the fabric to avoid waking half the floor of the building. I talked to her ear while I moved. Things you don’t repeat outside a bed. Things she thought she wouldn’t like and ended up asking me to say again. I grabbed her hair with one hand and, with the other, squeezed her throat without cutting off her air, just enough for her to understand who was controlling the pace that night.

—Was this what you wanted? —I asked.

—Yes —she said, her voice broken.

—Ask properly.

She asked properly.

She asked for other things too. She asked me to turn her over, to bite her, to whisper in her ear everything no one had told her in ten years. As the alcohol melted out of her in sweat, the woman who had written me shyly in chat turned into someone else. Someone who knew exactly what she wanted, but needed someone to give her permission to ask for it.

***

I finished on top of her, I finished inside her, and when I pulled out I took a quick shower in her tiny bathroom. I came out with the towel tied around my waist and found her still face down, hugging the pillow, looking at me with a goofy smile I hadn’t seen before.

—I was supposed to leave after this —she said.

—You were. But you’re still looking at me like you want another round.

She bit her lip. I walked to the bed, lowered her arm from the pillow, and turned her face up. I kissed her neck. I kissed her breasts, those absurd breasts that looked designed for sleeping on. I felt her breathing start to hitch again and, in less than a minute, I was hard again, she was wet again, and the two of us were right back in the same place.

—Stay the night —she told me at some point, when the first two times were already history and the clock said four-thirty.

I looked at her for a long time. It wasn’t the plan. Nor was it hers.

—I’ll stay —I answered—. But on one condition.

—Whatever you want.

—Tomorrow, before I leave, I’m fucking you again. And this time you decide everything. Whatever comes to mind, no filters, no shame. Everything you never dared ask for in ten years.

She nodded in silence, as if at last she understood that the script hadn’t belonged to her for a long time.

I’m going to tell that part in another confession. What happened at dawn in Mariela’s kitchen, with the coffee going cold on the counter and her kneeling there with her nightgown half lowered, deserves its own space. What I can say is that I went back home a week after that night, with the feeling that I had crossed a door I no longer know how to return through. And that the social network group, that very same dawn, before falling asleep beside her, I deleted from my phone.

Not out of regret.

Out of survival instinct.