The Young Man in the Park Who Was Waiting for Me in the Rain

Aurelio Lobos Park was the green heart of my city, but after nine at night it stopped being a park and turned into something else. By day, families crossed it, old men with bags of bread, runners with headphones. By night the rest of us appeared, the ones looking for what no one would ever tell at home.

The trees were so dense they blocked half the light from the streetlamps. Some avenues sank into a dimness that seemed made to measure for us. There were benches hidden behind the cypresses, paths that bent nowhere, old rotundas where the concrete had been marked by decades of hands resting on it.

One of the first nights I understood how the park worked, I saw a man standing beside a bench, his pants down to his knees, and another kneeling between his legs, sucking his cock with a hunger you only see when someone has spent years pretending to live another life. I got close enough to see the face of the one sucking, and I almost burst out laughing.

It was my high school math teacher. The same one who cracked jokes in class about fags, the one who bragged about having three lovers and a wife, the one who told the boys, “Don’t study like girls.” And there he was, on his knees in the wet gravel, mouth full. He saw me. I know he saw me, because he shut his eyes for a second and kept going, faster, as if swallowing faster could erase the moment. That’s the kind of revenge life hands out without you lifting a finger.

In another part of the park, near the monument to the national poet, there was a circle of benches we called, among ourselves, “the ring.” That was where the secret dressers circulated: men in wigs, heels, fishnet stockings, false lashes, the whole ritual. One night I ran into an office coworker, unrecognizable and at the same time perfectly recognizable. We looked at each other. We greeted each other without speaking. The following Monday, in the elevator, he gave me a pat on the shoulder the way the macho guys in old videos do. The gesture meant: shut up. What he didn’t know was that in the park thirty more people already knew him. He lived with his wife and two daughters, and he liked young guys.

***

All that was the setting. I went to the park almost every night, with my cock already hard before getting off the bus. We thought we were discreet. We thought the darkness protected us. The only thing it protected was arousal, which clouds anything resembling caution.

The night I saw him for the first time, it was raining hard. A thick rain, no wind, the kind that soaks you fast and leaves everything shining. The smell of wet earth rose from the flowerbeds. I walked through the empty avenues thinking I wasn’t going to find anything and that I might as well go home. Twenty meters from the exit that leads to the subway, beside a concrete bench, there was a boy standing in the rain, no umbrella, completely soaked.

He must have been twenty-two, twenty-three. Dark-skinned, not a single hair on his body, full lips, amber eyes that the streetlamp made look almost like honey. The clothes plastered to him outlined a worked torso and legs that looked drawn with ruler and compass. He smiled when I came closer. That was the first thing he gave me: the smile.

The second thing I noticed, almost without meaning to, was the bulge in his jeans. A generous package, firm, which the water and the tight fabric gave away without shame. I don’t remember what we talked about. I remember that by the fifth or sixth exchange of words we were already kissing in the rain, with my umbrella closed and my shirt soaking through at the same pace as his T-shirt.

And then I noticed the third thing, the one I couldn’t get out of my head afterward: he smelled like semen. All of him. The skin, the neck, the mouth. As if he’d had it on him for hours without being able to wash it off. His tongue tasted the same. I ran my hand over his waist, his lower back, his ass, and I asked him softly if he wanted to go somewhere. He told me not tonight, that it was getting late for him. We kept kissing a while longer, until he walked off into the rain and I stood there watching him, soaked from head to toe and with my cock aching inside my pants.

When I got home I jerked off thinking about him, saying out loud a word that wasn’t even his name, because he hadn’t given it to me. Later I learned he had lied to me about many other things. Later I learned the name was something he was never going to give me on purpose.

***

I called him Ezequiel because I had to call him something. For weeks we met in the park at the same hour, almost on the same bench. If it rained, even better: the rain was our pretext and our accomplice. We kissed until we ran out of breath, I slipped my hand into his jeans, he squeezed my balls through my pants, and both of us ended up with dirty hands and ragged breathing, without ever going past heavy petting.

—I don’t want to do it here —he told me one night—. I want to see your face.

I told him there was an old hotel nearby, one of those hourly by-the-hour places, one I’d known for a long time. Rooms with mirrors on the ceiling, sheets that smelled like bleach, a front desk man who never looked up from the crossword. We walked six blocks without speaking, holding pinkies, like two boys leaving school.

***

I don’t remember how we got our clothes off. Does it matter? I remember that as soon as I shut the room door, he was already on his knees in front of me, and I could barely keep myself up against the wall. I remember the smell of semen on his skin, now multiplied by the heat of the closed room. I remember his legs, especially. Those strong, defined legs, with thick thighs and hard calves, knees that made me want to bite them. I ran my lips over his thighs for a long time while he grabbed the back of my neck and whispered for me not to stop.

His ass was full, firm, hot to the touch. I kissed it, bit it, stroked it with my face and my chest, covered it with spit. He had a slightly defined abdomen and nipples that reacted to every lick, as if they were wired straight to his cock. When I went up to kiss his mouth, I did it with a strange concentration, as if I were a genuinely lovestruck boyfriend. Later I learned not to believe in those things.

We tangled into sixty-nine. His cock was long, thick, and went into my mouth with a weight that almost made me lose my balance. He pushed it in with a rhythm that got deeper and deeper, as if the roof of my mouth were a promise. I sucked his while kneading his balls at the same time. He had two fingers inside me, moving them with a patience that didn’t fit his age.

I felt him speeding up, I felt him moan with his mouth full, and before I could brace myself he filled me past the brim. It was a lot. Too much for a mouth. The semen spilled from the corners and ran onto the sheets. He called me a slut several times, and I, with my mouth overflowing, said yes, that I was his slut, without thinking, without any guilt.

***

Hardly had he finished coming when he flipped me over. He spread my legs and shoved it in all at once. I was so hot, so open, that that enormous cock slid in without a fight. He fucked me hard, without permission, gripping my ass with both hands, repeating in my ear that I was his slut, that I should say it, that I should say it again. I did. I said it out loud, I shouted it, I didn’t care about the room next door.

He was sweating buckets. His hair stuck to his forehead. His balls slapped against my ass with a rhythm that had forgotten any delicacy. He gave me a couple of swats on the ass and tore a moan out of me that seemed to come from another body. When he came, he grunted like an animal and collapsed on top of me. I felt his cock swell a little more before letting go.

We didn’t rest much. I put him on all fours and he let me. He let me without argument, with that same smile he’d given me the first night, now slicked with sweat. I grabbed his cock from underneath while I fucked his ass, stroked his balls, pinched his nipples, hugged him tight, and came pressed against his back, covered in sweat and his young-male smell. Then we fell into another sixty-nine. And another. We didn’t let go until the sheets were ruined and the morning light was starting to slip in through the broken blinds.

***

We started seeing each other often. In the park, in the hotel, in old theaters where nobody kept much of an eye on the room. I pulled his cock out in the middle of three different movies; one action flick and two I don’t even remember. I sucked him while the end credits rolled, while the lights came up, while the few spectators slowly left. I swallowed everything. I didn’t want to lose a single drop.

I wrote poems for him. Long, bad poems, full of words I’d be ashamed of now. I described in detail how I sucked his cock, how he filled my mouth, how he fucked me, how he moaned when he came. I never showed them to him. I kept them in a blue-covered notebook that I still have somewhere in a drawer.

Once, in an almost empty theater, a girl who was with her boyfriend in the back row kept watching us without even trying to hide it. Her eyes were shining. Her boyfriend didn’t understand a thing. Another night it was the other way around: a girl picked a fight with the man she was with on purpose and ended up leaving the cinema with us. That night the two of us fucked the girl together, with an intensity that the previous boyfriend had never given her. She kept saying, looking at us, that she couldn’t believe two such handsome men were fucking each other. Maybe I’ll tell that story another day.

***

The end came without warning, as real endings do. One night I was walking along an avenue in the park we didn’t usually use when I saw him. He was with three older men, tired fifty-somethings, potbellied, their faces marked by years of bad wine. In the shadows, one of them was pulling his pants down. Another was bringing a cock up to his mouth. The third was waiting his turn with his wallet still in his hand.

I stayed still behind a tree. Not out of voyeurism. To understand. And I did. I understood why he had never asked me for a cent, why he always smelled like semen, why he had that so precise way of doing everything the other person wanted even before they asked. He had made me believe I was special. Maybe I was for a while, until I wasn’t anymore. Maybe not even that.

I didn’t make myself known. I didn’t confront him either. I went home walking long blocks, getting soaked again by a rain that this time really did bother me. That night I didn’t jerk off thinking about him. Something had closed inside me, and that was that.

***

Ten years passed. More than ten, if I’m honest. One random afternoon, downtown, I crossed paths with him walking along a narrow sidewalk near the old square. He was holding hands with another man, someone like him, a little shorter, a little older, with a face that seemed full of love. They were both laughing at something the other had just said. He had the same legs, the same shoulders, but the eyes were different: calm.

He didn’t see me. Or maybe he did see me and chose not to look. It doesn’t matter. I kept walking toward the other side of the square and thought it was good that life had taken him to that corner and into that hand. I also thought, without meaning to, of the park, the rain, the hotel, the blue notebook. My dark-skinned man with the powerful cock, now with a husband and not charging a cent. I smiled. I quickened my pace so I wouldn’t turn around.