What Happened in the Elevator While My Family Slept

We were walking home from the movies to my parents’ place, where Adrián was staying those days. It was one of those early-winter dawns when the whole neighborhood seems to have given up on staying awake. The streets were empty, and the echo of my heels bounced off the facades with a clarity that made me uneasy. Every step sounded like a confession.

The cold had made us pull the collars of our coats up to our ears, and as we breathed, little clouds of mist escaped from us and dissolved between us. But underneath all that frost, we’d been warming each other from the inside for a while. In the dark movie theater, his hand had rested on my thigh for half the film, still, heavy, promising more than it dared to do in front of other people. I hadn’t followed the plot for a single minute. I’d spent the whole two hours focused on the heat of that hand, on the way his fingers would creep up a couple of centimeters whenever the story let its guard down, and on the growing urge to turn and bite his neck in the middle of the row.

“Are you cold?” he asked me, though he knew perfectly well it wasn’t cold that was making me tremble.

“No,” I replied, and said nothing else.

We stopped in front of the entrance. In the dark and with clumsy fingers, I dug through my bag for the key, praying not to make a sound. We pushed the door open and slipped into the building, leaving behind the muted click of the lock, suddenly wrapped in the warm gloom of the lobby. If there was one good thing about living under my parents’ roof for those months, it was not having to cross half the city alone in the middle of the night. The bad thing was the silence: in that house, nighttime silence was a rule no one questioned.

I called the elevator. The doors opened with a metallic hiss and the yellow light of the cab swallowed us.

We got in. I pressed the button for the third floor, but before the metal panels could close again, Adrián pounced on me. We devoured each other’s mouths with an intensity that skipped any preamble, any polite approach. We both knew that once we crossed the apartment door we’d have to fake a bland “good night” and go to separate rooms, as if nothing existed between us.

He grabbed me by the waist and crushed me against him. Our tongues searched for each other with a nearly savage urgency, and inside that little mirrored box winter vanished in an instant. This is insane, I thought, and did absolutely nothing to stop it.

I felt the unmistakable pressure of his erection rising against my hip, separated from me by only two layers of fabric. I pressed even tighter, trying to soak up his heat while saliva turned our kisses loud, shameless, obscene. And then an electronic beep yanked us out of that interlude all at once.

The elevator stopped. The doors opened on the third floor, revealing the apartment door just a few feet away. We froze there, our ragged breathing colliding in the sliver of air between us. Neither of us moved toward the landing.

I looked at him. He looked at me. That was enough.

Before the metal leaves could start closing on their own, I turned to the panel and, in a burst of pure adrenaline, hit zero. I crashed my lips back onto his while the machine processed the new order and began descending slowly.

“Are you crazy?” he murmured against my mouth, though his smile said exactly the opposite.

“Shut up,” I told him.

Without breaking the kiss, I slid one hand down to the hardened bulge in his pants. With the other I started fumbling blindly with the buttons of his jeans. He spread his legs a little to make it easier for me, and I pulled the fabric down just enough, just enough to get to his underwear. My fingers were still chilled from the street; his were a furnace.

When I wrapped my hand firmly around his erection and my frozen fingers closed over his burning skin, the contrast in temperatures tore a muffled groan from him that he had to swallow halfway. The elevator reached the ground floor. If any sleepless neighbor had been waiting at that hour, they would have come face to face with a scene impossible to explain. Luckily, no one was there. Without letting go of him, I stretched out my arm, pressed the button for the seventh floor, and didn’t wait for the metal to trap us again before pouring all my attention into him.

I took his sex in my hand and squeezed just enough to make him shudder. I began a slow, dense motion, pulling the skin back to reveal the tip, already shining wet with the first drops. I could feel his pulse beating against my palm, and each beat told me exactly how hard he was trying to stay quiet.

“You’re going to wake up the whole building,” I whispered in his ear, with a calm I didn’t feel.

He let out something between a laugh and a complaint and threw his head back against the mirror.

We reached the top floor. I dragged him along without letting go of my grip, forcing him to walk in staggered steps with his pants halfway down, and guided him out of the cab toward the stairwell. We climbed the last concrete steps in the dark until we reached the heavy metal door that led to the rooftop. It was locked. I didn’t care. I shoved him against it.

His back hit the cold metal and at last his jeans and underwear fell around his ankles. Below, the elevator doors closed with a dull thud and left us sunk in a dimness broken only by the pale light of a streetlamp filtering through the stairwell window.

***

I stood two steps below him. Listening for the slightest creak in the stairwell, but with a deliberate, almost cruel slowness, I resumed the torment. Adrián half-closed his eyes, defeated, though he forced them open so he wouldn’t miss a thing I was doing to him. I kept alternating my gaze between his wrecked face and the way he bit his lip to keep from moaning. The sense of risk was driving me just as close to the edge as it was driving him.

I set an irregular rhythm on purpose. Sometimes I went very slowly, savoring the tension of his skin; other times I sped up abruptly, gripping the base firmly so he wouldn’t slip from my hand. I caught a new drop with the pad of my thumb and spread it over the tip, sliding over him with a softness that made him curl inward. I felt his breathing break apart. I was taking him straight, without brakes, toward the edge.

“Not here,” he panted, not very convincingly. “If we get caught...”

“No one’s going to catch us,” I lied, because deep down that possibility was exactly what was turning me on.

I felt the first contraction tighten him under my fingers and increased the friction just a little. I cupped my left hand just below, like a tray, while with my right I sped up one last time, milking his limit. His knees trembled against the edge of the steps.

The orgasm hit him inexorably. He clenched his teeth to keep from crying out and let out only a long, strangled grunt as he emptied himself in hot shudders over my hand. I followed each spasm with my fingers, catching what I could in the hollow of my palm. One surge, another, and another, until he was hanging on me, drained, with his forehead resting on my shoulder and his breathing shattered.

We stayed like that for a moment, in complete silence, hearing only the distant hum of the elevator somewhere in the building and our own racing hearts. The rooftop closed behind us, the city slept beneath the streetlamp, and the two of us were tangled up in something we shouldn’t have done and would do again without thinking.

I cleaned my hand as best I could with a crumpled tissue from my bag. I climbed the two steps separating us and kissed him again, slowly this time, tasting of winter and narrowly escaped danger. He hurriedly pulled himself together, still trembling a little, and brushed a strand of hair from my face with a tenderness that contrasted with everything before.

“You’re nuts,” he said.

“You’re following me,” I replied.

We went down the seven floors together by the stairs, not daring to use the elevator again, holding back laughter on every landing like a pair of teenagers. When we got to the third floor, I opened the apartment door with the same surgical care as always. Inside, the heating and the darkness wrapped everything in their hold. My parents were asleep at the end of the hallway, completely unaware of the dawn we had just stolen from the night.

“Good night,” I said in a very low voice, just like any other night.

“Good night,” he answered, and went into his room.

I stayed there for a moment in the hallway, in the middle of that house’s silence, biting my lip so I wouldn’t smile like an idiot. My hands were still cold. The rest of me was burning. And I was already thinking, I confess, about when we’d take the last elevator of the night again.