The Week Without Him and What We Didn't Say
On Monday morning, Rodrigo closed the door softly, as if he didn’t want to wake what the three of us had built together. I watched him go downstairs with his canvas bag, give me a quick kiss on the mouth, and disappear down the stairs with that smile of his, the one he saved for the moments when he knew we’d miss him. “A week in Barcelona,” he’d said the night before. “Just work.” Diego and I stood staring at the closed door for a moment too long before either of us said anything.
That night Diego sought me out in bed with the urgency that had been building all weekend. His hands knew me by heart. He tore off my T-shirt and took one nipple into his mouth, sucking hard until a moan slipped out of me, and then the other, biting only lightly, tugging with his teeth until they were hard and throbbing. He moved slowly down my neck, over my breasts, over my belly, and kept going until he buried himself between my legs with that determination of his that always worked. He pried my thighs open with both hands and looked at me for a second before launching himself in. His tongue traced the full length of my cunt, from bottom to top, slowly, and then sealed over my clit, sucking it as if he meant to rip it off me. I hooked him between my thighs and let him do it, closed my eyes, and listened to my own breathing change while his mouth worked me over.
“Like that, fuck, like that,” I told him, gripping his hair with both fists. “Don’t stop, eat it all.”
And he didn’t stop. He pushed two fingers deep inside me, curling them, searching for that spot he knew by heart, while he kept licking my clit with the tip of his tongue. He drew them out of me shining wet and sank them back in again, faster each time, and I started pressing my heels into the mattress. The orgasm surged up my legs, sank into my belly, and shook me hard, with my back arched and a cry I couldn’t hold back. I came in his mouth, soaking his chin, and he kept licking until the last contraction, drinking me down, not letting me get away.
After that I wanted him inside me. I grabbed his cock with my hand, felt it hard, thick, pulsing against my palm, and guided him toward my still-trembling cunt. He drove in with one thrust, all the way, and we both groaned at once. I dug my nails into his shoulder blades and demanded more.
“Fuck me, Diego, fuck me hard, I want to feel you tomorrow.”
He drove forward with all his strength, propped on his arms, jaw clenched. Each thrust lifted me up the mattress, each smack of his hips against mine sounded in the room like a sharp slap. He rolled me onto my side, lifted one leg over his shoulder, and came back in, even deeper, pounding me from that angle until my vision blurred. We moved together in that rhythm we’d spent years building. Diego shoved hard and I clung to his back, and everything was right, familiar, honest. But at some point, without my choosing it, I noticed the empty space beside me in the bed. The place where Rodrigo would have been.
I came hard, squeezing his cock with my cunt until I heard him gasp, and Diego came a little later too, sinking in one last time and emptying himself inside me with a hoarse grunt. I felt the hot stream fill me and then run out between my thighs when he pulled back. We stayed tangled together in silence. He fell asleep with his arm around my waist and his semen still warm between my thighs. I stayed there staring at the ceiling.
It wasn’t that the sex had been bad. It was that I knew how different it would have been with Rodrigo there. The way he brought something that was not just another body, but a specific friction, an attention that changed the whole dynamic. With the three of us, everything we did carried a different charge. Without him, Diego and I were perfectly enough, and yet something was missing.
I touched myself for a while in the dark, careful not to wake Diego, remembering images from the previous weekend. I ran two fingers through my cunt still wet with Diego’s come, slid them up to my clit and started rubbing in slow circles, biting my lip so I wouldn’t make a sound. I remembered Rodrigo’s mouth, his cock, the way he had taken me by the nape the last time to make me swallow him down to the hilt. I slid in two fingers, then three, trying to fill the emptiness. It wasn’t a glorious orgasm. It was more of an attempt to solve something that didn’t have an easy solution. I fell asleep confused, with my fingers still wet and the strange sense that missing someone could also be a way of discovering things you didn’t know you wanted.
The nights after that were variations on the same theme. Diego and I had sex, and it was good. One afternoon he threw himself on top of me on the sofa, yanked off my underwear with two fingers hooked in the waistband, and we ended up on the floor with our knees pressed into the rug. He fucked me face-down, lifted my ass with one hand under my belly, and buried himself in me from behind, pounding me with hard, dry thrusts while I clung to the sofa leg. I came screaming obscenities at him and he came across my back, leaving a thick trail from my shoulder blades to my waist. I laughed while I got myself back together, feeling his semen run down toward the crease of my ass. I wanted him, there was no doubt about that. But something had shifted, like when you move a piece of furniture and the room still works the same, but you notice the space where there used to be nothing.
Sometimes, lying in the dark while Diego slept, I wondered what kind of thing it was I was feeling. I wasn’t sure there was a word for it. It was desire, but not urgent. It was longing, but not painful. It was, maybe, the awareness that something had begun and I still didn’t know where it led.
At work I found myself more than once staring off into nowhere. One time, while I was reviewing some reports, I caught myself thinking about a specific night the previous week, before Rodrigo left, about how the three of us had been together and how I’d watched them both from the edge of the bed, with Rodrigo’s cock buried in Diego’s mouth, and with a strange feeling in my chest that was not just desire but also something like gratitude. I didn’t know why I called it gratitude. But that was what it was.
One morning I found myself calculating how many days were left until Rodrigo came back. I counted twice.
***
The week without Rodrigo was like returning to a house with one room sealed shut. Everything worked, everything was in its place, but there was something behind that door my mind kept visiting.
Elena and I kept up the routine with the silent stubbornness with which you do things when you don’t want to admit that something has changed. Coffee in the morning, kisses before leaving, sex at night that was honest and real but carried a strange weight. On the first morning I dragged her into the shower, shoved her back against the cold tiles, and pried her legs apart with my knee. I grabbed one breast with one hand and with the other guided my cock to her already soaked cunt. I drove in with one thrust, with the hot water running between us, and she let out a moan that tangled with the sound of the shower.
“Hard,” she asked, biting my shoulder. “Break me, Diego.”
I grabbed her ass, lifted her, and held her against the tiles with my own weight, pounding her from low to high with every shove. Her tits bounced against my chest, slick, and I squeezed them, pinched them, while I kept drilling into her. She clung to my shoulders and came before I did, clamping down on my cock with her whole cunt, groaning against my neck. I pulled out of her a second before emptying myself, set her down on the floor, and pushed her head down. She knelt in the shower and took my cock into her mouth in time to swallow the first stream. The next shots landed on her tongue, her lips, her chin, and she looked up at me from below, eyes half-lidded, never stopping sucking me. When I came seconds later, I stayed with my forehead against the tile longer than necessary.
I was thinking about Rodrigo.
I still hadn’t admitted it, not even to myself, but that was what it was. Not in a way I could easily classify: it wasn’t just desire, or maybe it was desire mixed with something more complicated. I kept thinking about the way he had looked at me the previous weekend, that way he had of making you feel seen in a specific manner, without doing anything particular to achieve it. And I thought about what had happened between the two of us, how I had let myself go without resistance when he spread my ass cheeks with both hands and slid his cock into me slowly, inch by inch, all the way in, and what that said about me.
With Elena I always carried the weight. I initiated, set the pace, decided. I liked doing it, it came naturally to me. But Rodrigo had done something different: he had taken control without me having to consciously give it up, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. He had put me on all fours, spat on my ass, shoved his cock into me without asking, and fucked me until I came without ever touching my cock. And I had surrendered without drama, without thinking, and afterward I was left with that strange sensation of having let go of something I’d been carrying without knowing it weighed on me.
One night I took Elena from behind. I put her on all fours at the edge of the bed, spread her ass cheeks with my thumbs, and stood there for a moment looking at her cunt, open and shining, her tight little asshole just above it. I ran my tongue along the whole crease, top to bottom, and she shuddered and pushed her ass toward my face. I ate her for a good while, alternating between cunt and ass, until she was begging. Then I straightened up, shoved myself into her cunt in one thrust, and started fucking her with my hands dug into her hips, moving together hard until we both emptied out. When I pulled out, a white thread of my come hung from her cunt lips and slid down her thigh. It was intense and I liked it, and at the same time I found myself wondering how it would have been if Rodrigo had been there, watching, or taking part, or simply present with his way of occupying space. It wasn’t a comparison. It was more like listening to a song missing an instrument you barely knew existed.
Another afternoon we took a long break at midday, something we hadn’t done in months. Elena and I stayed in bed until three, talking about nothing in particular, and at some point I went down on her slowly, without rushing, simply because I wanted to and time was ours. I opened her legs and settled between them with complete calm. I started with her thighs, biting them softly, moving up with my tongue until I barely brushed her cunt and then back down again. When I finally licked her, I did it with my tongue flat, fully extended, covering her. I sucked her lips, one and then the other, parted them with my fingers and worked her clit with the tip of my tongue in very slow circles. She clutched the sheets and held my head and ground herself against my mouth until she came a first time, long and trembling. I pushed my whole tongue into her cunt to drink her down and kept going. She came twice and then flipped me onto my back, straddled my face so I’d keep eating her, and took my cock in her hands and brought me to the edge with patience, sucking me slowly, pulling it out of her mouth to lick my balls, swallowing me again down to her throat. She made me come in her mouth without stopping her movement against my tongue, and we both moaned at the same time, choking on each other. It was one of the best times of the week. And even so, when it was over, we both stared at the ceiling in silence for too long.
One afternoon I asked her if she was okay. She looked up from her book and at me for a moment before answering:
“Yes. And you?”
“Me too,” I said.
We both knew it was true and not the whole truth at the same time.
I didn’t write to Rodrigo. I didn’t know how to phrase what I wanted to say without it sounding like more than it probably was. Or exactly what it was, which was what scared me most.
The last night before he came back, Elena and I went to bed late after a movie neither of us really followed. We fucked slowly, face to face, with more care than urgency. I entered her very slowly, felt her open around my cock millimeter by millimeter, and stayed still inside her for a moment before starting to move. She wrapped her legs around me and sought my mouth. We moved like that, unhurried, looking at each other, until she came tight against me, and I came inside her a minute later, trembling. When we finished we lay in silence for a while, with my cock still softening inside her and my semen dripping between us.
“He’s coming back tomorrow,” she said, before I had said anything.
I nodded. Neither of us said anything else. There was no need.
***
Barcelona in February has that cold, direct light that makes everything seem more serious than it is. The meetings had gone well, the photo shoots too, and every night I returned to the hotel with tired legs and a head full of images that had nothing to do with work.
On the fourth day, almost without thinking, I opened an app I hadn’t used in a long time. It wasn’t that I was missing anything specific. It was more that the appetite they had awakened in me didn’t go away easily, and hotel rooms have a way of amplifying nighttime restlessness. I found a profile that caught my attention: a couple looking for someone willing to share. The photo was of the two of them, smiling. The message they sent me was more direct than the photo.
I met them two nights later in a bar in the Eixample. His name was Tomás, forty or thereabouts, broad-shouldered and with that calmness people have when they don’t need to prove anything. She was Vera, black hair, a gaze that appraised without hiding it. We had a drink and talked about trivial things for an hour, and at no point did the subject veer directly toward what we all knew we were going to do. I liked that they didn’t rush.
Their hotel room was warm and spacious. Vera was the first to move, without hurry. She came over to me, grabbed the back of my neck, and kissed me with her whole tongue in my mouth, while Tomás’s hand slid up my back under my shirt. They undressed me together, unhurried, and I undressed them. She had small tits with dark, erect nipples; he was already hard, thick, curved. I pushed her onto the bed and knelt between her legs and ate her cunt while Tomás stood behind me and shoved his cock into my mouth from above. I sucked them both at once, alternating, with my tongue inside her cunt and his cock knocking against my palate.
Vera set the pace with the precision of someone who knows exactly what she wants at each moment. She yanked my hair to make me stop eating her, turned around, got on all fours, and offered me her ass.
“Put it in already,” she said. “And you,” she pointed at Tomás, “fuck him while he fucks me.”
Tomás was physical and direct. I gripped Vera’s hips and sank into her soaked cunt all the way while Tomás spread my ass cheeks with his hands, spat on me, and slid into me slowly. I felt his cock fill me and for a second I stopped moving, adjusting to both thrusts. Then we found a rhythm: when he pushed into me, I came out of her; when he pulled back, I sank back into Vera’s cunt. The three of us panted, sweaty, fitted together. We moved like that for a good while in that dynamic that changes every moment, where nobody is only one thing and desire flows without a fixed direction.
I took her while Tomás took me from behind. We found a rhythm that lasted longer than I would have expected. Vera came first, loud and shameless, screaming and clamping down on my cock with her cunt until I saw stars. Tomás came a little later, gripping my hips with both hands, emptying himself inside me with a long moan. I felt them hot, slippery, as he pulled out. I slid out of Vera and crawled forward; she turned, lay on her back, and opened her mouth. I grabbed her head with both hands and shoved myself into her throat, and she took me all the way without gagging, her eyes locked on mine. I came in thick spurts into the back of her mouth, and she never moved away from me for a second, swallowing every shot, her lips sealed around my cock until the last contraction. The three of us collapsed onto the sheets, sweaty and sated.
It was good. Genuinely good.
But at some point, lying between the two of them with my breathing still racing and Tomás’s come sliding down my thigh, I found myself thinking about Diego.
Not about him all at once, at first. I thought about the dynamic I’d just had with Tomás and Vera, and about what had felt good and what had been missing. And only when I reached that question did Diego appear. With Tomás and Vera I’d had a good time, and so had they, and that was all. It was like a well-cooked meal that you finish and that leaves no trace.
With Diego there were layers. That resistance of his that wasn’t rejection but the opposite: a kind of modesty that made every thing matter more than the last. The way the first time I dominated him, nothing needed to be said, just move in a certain way and watch him yield, push him face-down, spit between his ass cheeks and sink my cock into his tight ass until I heard him gasp into the pillow, and in his eyes something that looked like relief. That wasn’t something that happened with just anyone.
I thought about Elena too. About the way she watched everything without missing a detail, that way she had of participating that was also a way of steering without anyone noticing. About how that first night, when the three of us ended up tangled and exhausted, with her cunt full of Diego’s come and her mouth licking the remains of mine from my fingers, she had smiled with something that wasn’t just satisfaction but also something like the curiosity of someone who has just discovered something they want to keep exploring.
I dressed quickly with an excuse Tomás accepted without fuss and Vera with a smile that wasn’t offense but simple understanding. I went out into the street and walked aimlessly through the Born, the cold air slipping in at the neck of my jacket. I didn’t feel empty. I felt located, like when you suddenly know where you left something you’d been looking for without remembering you’d lost it.
Two days remained. I stopped in front of a closed bookstore, hands in my pockets, looking at the spines in the window without seeing any of them. I took out my phone, opened the chat with the two of them, and typed “Are you okay?” I deleted it. I typed “I’m coming back Thursday” and sent it.
Elena’s reply came in a minute: “I know.” Diego’s took a little longer: “Good.”
I put my phone away and kept walking. It wasn’t the conversation I wanted to have, but it was the one I could have through a screen at two in the morning. The other one, the one that mattered, could wait two more days.