The Stranger Who Wrote to Me at Midnight

I never thought a hobby as solitary as writing would drag me into something like this. A few months ago I discovered the pleasure of reading erotic stories, and from there to trying to write my own there was only one step. I’m a man of orderly habits: work, the gym, a beer on Fridays. The last thing I expected was for a stranger to appear in the comments on one of my stories and turn my world upside down.

She called herself Nadia. She wrote three lines about a story I had published, and in those three lines there was more truth than in whole conversations I’d had with people I saw every day. I replied. She replied. And so, without realizing it, we began building something that lived only on the screen and yet felt more real than anything else.

She wrote too. She confessed that in her texts she could be who she really was, without filters, without the armor we all wear during the day. She could strip naked with words and show herself exactly as she was, without fear of the other person’s gaze. I understood that right away, because the same was true for me. Two people hiding behind fake names, telling each other the things they didn’t even tell themselves.

—I bite my lip every time I see that you’ve written to me —she confessed one afternoon.

She has no idea what image that put in my head. My pulse races as soon as the new-mail symbol appears, but reading her biting her lip was something else. I wanted to cross the distance between us and give her a kiss that would start softly, almost like a whisper, and end up being anything but calm.

—I’m fascinated by the power I have over you —she wrote.

—You do have it —I replied, and I wasn’t lying—. It’s a mutual gift. Few people dare to explore this intensity through words, to let desire travel across the web until it becomes physical.

Physical for real, I thought. Wet, real, impossible to fake.

***

That same afternoon things spiraled out of control. I was in a café, pretending to read something on my phone, when she started telling me what she would do to me if she had me in front of her. I had to press my legs together under the table. The intensity I felt was such that it went right through my clothes and left an obvious mark in my jeans. I paid for the coffee without finishing it and headed home at a fast walk, my phone burning in my pocket.

When I got there, I lay down on the bed. The house was silent, the blinds half-drawn, my only company her messages and that image of her that wouldn’t stop circling in my head.

—If you only knew how I am right now —I wrote to her.

—Tell me —she replied instantly—. Don’t leave anything out.

The calm of the afternoon only made the echo of her last word, “wet,” sound even louder. My hands no longer had to fight with fabric or look for a discreet corner in a public bathroom. Now they had all the time in the world to wander over me, imagining they were hers. They paused where she would pause. They went down where she would want them to go.

—Today, honesty has brought us this far —I told her—. And the honesty of my body right now is absolute.

I wanted to keep playing, feeling, touching myself under her influence, so that when night came the explosion would be real. I promised her I wasn’t going to hold anything back. That I would let myself be carried away by her, by this game of ours, enjoying every minute until we reached the ending both of us knew was already written.

***

Nadia left me breathless with what came next. She wrote that she had become captivated by my mouth, by the idea of my body, by a presence she only knew through letters on a screen. That she couldn’t stop imagining how I would devour her. And with that confession, all the control I was trying to keep fell apart.

I wanted her to know one thing: she wasn’t wrong about me. My mouth is impatient and, when it wants something, it knows no half-measures. It drove me crazy that she had pictured her own pleasure wetting my beard as I tasted her. It’s one of the things I enjoy most in private, one of those things that becomes an obsession when the right woman appears.

I described to her how I would lose myself in that ritual. How I would run my tongue over every inch with deliberate precision, leaving not a single corner unexplored. I told her I imagined the taste of her wetness and the sound of her breathing growing faster, that I would suck slowly before going all the way down, that I would stay there as long as necessary, devouring the fruit of her desire until she had no strength left to keep biting her lip.

—Stop —she wrote—. You’re killing me.

—I’m not stopping —I answered.

We were both breathless, reading each other, imagining each other, feeling each other through the other person. It was a game carried out with a mastery that was a little frightening, where every word and every image worked like fuel that kept feeding the fire without pause. Our minds had taken over and decided our bodies would have no escape.

***

Then she raised the stakes.

—I fantasize about sitting in front of you, completely naked —she wrote—, while you watch me touch myself.

Reading it triggered something in me I hadn’t expected. It wasn’t just desire: it was a current that ran through me completely. I touched myself slowly, there in the dark, while feeling her near despite the kilometers between us. The idea of seeing her get wet live drove me wild, of watching her fingers start searching for her own pleasure while her eyes never left mine. As if we could see each other. As if the screen didn’t exist.

—Talk to me while you do it —I asked—. I don’t want to miss anything.

And she told me everything. Where she touched herself, how, what she was imagining. I kept pace with her from my bed, matching my hand to her words, stopping when she stopped, speeding up when her writing grew broken and the sentences started losing their commas. There was something brutally intimate about it. More than in many encounters I’d had in person, with real bodies and the lights on.

Then I realized something I had been avoiding admitting for weeks. What I felt didn’t come only from knowing she was burning inside. It came from recognizing myself in that same fire. Nadia had entered my world without warning, but it was she who tore down all my defenses with a frankness that disarmed me. It wasn’t that her attention belonged to me: it was that I was completely trapped. There was no noise around us, no other possible faces. Only her, her imagined closeness, that nakedness that asserted itself like a certainty, that tide we had both decided to feed knowingly.

***

—I’m close —she wrote, and I could almost hear her breathing in the line.

—Me too. Finish with me.

There was a silence of a few seconds, long as hours. I imagined her body tensing, her fingers digging in, her lip finally freed from between her teeth. I imagined her name, her real name, the one she had never told me, slipping out of her mouth in a room I had never seen. And with that image I let go, just as the screen filled with her broken words, repeated letters, a message that said nothing and said everything.

We both stayed silent afterward. Me, staring at the ceiling, my chest rising and falling. Her, I suppose, the same, somewhere on the other side of the country. The control had excited her as much as surrendering it had excited me. She liked feeling guided, and I had discovered that I liked letting myself be guided. The closeness was absolute even though we had never once touched. The surrender, voluntary. Total.

—I don’t know if this is the healthiest thing I’ve ever done in my life —she wrote a while later.

—It probably isn’t —I replied—. But it’s the most honest.

And it was true. For years I had been sleeping with women I hid half of myself from. With Nadia, a stranger with a made-up name whose face I had never seen, I had shown myself completely. Every desire, every weakness, every thing I kept quiet by day. Maybe that’s why, when she asked me whether one night we wanted to stop writing to each other and meet for real, I took so little time to answer.

—Tonight —I wrote—. Give me an address.

I wanted to let myself be handled. To be hers in the way I had imagined so many times already. And for the first time in a long while, I wasn’t afraid to say it out loud.