What That Stranger Did to Me on the Way Home

There are memories one keeps in a locked drawer and only takes out when alone, with time and without guilt. This is one of them. It happened more than twelve years ago, when I was twenty-three and still didn’t really know what to do with certain parts of myself. I’m telling it now because I think the only way to make sense of something like this is to name it.

It was a Wednesday afternoon, with nothing special about it, nothing to distinguish it from any other. I got off work at six-thirty, took my usual bus, and got off three stops before home, as I used to do when I needed to walk a little and leave the day behind. The neighborhood was quiet at that hour: families heading home, a child running along the sidewalk, the smell of food escaping through the windows of the buildings.

I had perhaps walked two blocks when a man approached from my left.

—Excuse me —he said—, do you know where Hernán Cortés Street intersects with Río Avenue?

I looked at him. He had to be around thirty-five, maybe a little older. He was dressed well for someone who was supposedly lost: dark long-sleeved shirt rolled up to the elbows, dress pants, shoes that weren’t cheap. His hair was short, with a few gray strands at the temples, and there was something about the way he looked at me that wasn’t intimidating, but wasn’t exactly neutral either. There was something deliberate in that calm. My eyes dropped for a second to the bulge outlined in his dress pants, a thick, obvious bulge, and I looked back up before he noticed. Or so I thought.

I pointed him toward the intersection I knew, about six blocks from where we were. He listened carefully, nodded, and then looked in that direction as if weighing the distance.

—I’m headed that way anyway —I said, not really sure why I said it—. I can walk with you halfway. Then I’ll turn off another way.

—I’d appreciate that —he said.

And we started walking.

I don’t know why I did it. I suppose it was one of those afternoons when you’re glad not to be alone, or when the body decides before the mind has given its permission.

***

The first few minutes were the usual kind of conversation between strangers: work, the neighborhood, the distance between places in that city. He spoke calmly, without hurry, like someone used to strangers feeling at ease with him. He asked me what I did for a living, how long I’d lived in the area. I answered without thinking too much, letting myself be carried by the rhythm of the conversation and the noise of the street.

Then there was a brief silence, and he broke it in a way I wasn’t expecting.

—I’m going to tell you something that happened to me a while back —he said—. It has nothing to do with what we were talking about, but it comes to mind a lot.

I nodded without committing myself.

—A friend of mine, someone I’ve known for years, called me aside in the bathroom of a shopping mall one day. He told me he wanted to watch me take my cock out and piss in front of him. Just like that, straight out, no explanation.

I almost imperceptibly stopped. I kept walking, but something in me had suddenly come to a halt.

—And what did you do? —I asked, because I couldn’t think of any other answer.

—I let him —he said, without drama—. It seemed like a weird request, but it didn’t bother me. I opened my fly in front of the urinal, took my whole cock out, and he stood there a step away watching it while the stream fell. I didn’t hide it. Then I shook it off slowly so he could get a good look, and when I finished, I kept touching it for a while there, standing up, in no rush. He got hard while he watched. That was all. We each went on with our day.

I didn’t say anything. The noise of the street filled the space between us.

—What would you have done? —he asked, in the same tone as if he were asking whether I took my coffee with sugar.

What would I have done?

The question was absurd and also completely reasonable. Something in my chest had tightened in a way that still didn’t have a name, or maybe it did have one and I just preferred not to use it. And something lower down, in my pants, had started moving without permission.

—I don’t know —I said at first. Then, because it was true and because there was something about that afternoon that made me want to be honest: —I suppose the same. Between men it wouldn’t have to be a problem. Taking it out and letting someone look at it isn’t a big deal.

He didn’t say anything for a few steps. Then:

—And if I suggested something similar right now? You take your cock out and let me look at it. Or more, if you feel like it.

***

I stopped. This time for real.

I looked at him and he looked back without anxiety, without haste, with that same calm I’d noticed from the start and now understood differently. It wasn’t the calm of someone who wasn’t interested. It was the calm of someone who knows exactly what he wants and is willing to wait for the right answer. He glanced down for a second at my crotch, where my hard cock was already pressing through the fabric, and looked back up without changing expression.

—What kind of suggestion? —I said, even though I already knew.

—Nothing complicated —he replied—. There’s a building under construction two blocks away. We can go in for a minute. You pull your pants down, let me see your cock, and if you let me, I’ll suck it until you come in my mouth. That’s all.

I’ll suck it until you come in my mouth.

I should have said no. I should have turned around and kept walking home like any other Wednesday. I was twenty-three, it was a normal afternoon in a quiet neighborhood, and this was a stranger on the street who had just offered to suck me off in a half-built building.

But something inside me had already made the decision before I’d finished thinking about it. Something that had been still for a long time and that conversation had shaken awake without warning, like someone moving a stone and finding underneath something that had been waiting for the light for months. My cock was throbbing inside my underwear, already wet at the tip, and I knew he could see it.

—All right —I heard my own voice say.

***

The building was a half-finished structure, brick walls not yet plastered and concrete floors not yet polished. At that hour it was empty: no workers, no tool noise, only the particular silence of spaces under construction, like rooms not yet finished being born. We went in through a side opening that still had no door, only the iron frame over the churned-up dirt.

Inside, the light from outside came in at an angle between the columns and made everything seem a little unreal, like a photograph overexposed at the edges. I stopped in the first enclosed space we found, a room without a finished window but with walls on all four sides. The silence in there was different from the street’s. Thicker. More intimate.

He stood in front of me, less than a meter away. He said nothing. There was no need.

—Take it out —he said at last, in a low voice—. I want to see it hard.

My hands went to my belt on their own. I felt clumsy, slower than usual, as if the body were taking precautions the mind had already discarded. I was nervous in a way that wasn’t exactly fear, but something more like the anticipation of jumping from a height you can’t quite see yet but already know you won’t be able to resist.

The belt gave. So did the button on my pants. I unzipped slowly, my fingers trembling, and pulled my pants and underwear down in one motion to mid-thigh. My cock sprang out, hard, thick, with the head swollen and shining with pre-cum. A transparent thread hung from the foreskin to the pubic hair.

The erection was complete. It had been that way since before we entered the building, since we crossed the street together in silence, and seeing him standing there watching it without saying a word only made everything more intense. The tip was throbbing for both of us to see, each pulse visible.

—You have a great cock —he murmured, and he didn’t say it like a cheap compliment, but as a calm statement, almost like an expert making a judgment—. Thick. And already dripping for me.

He reached out with his right hand and gripped my cock shaft firmly, neither gently nor roughly, like someone who knows exactly how much pressure to use. He gave it one shake, then another, pulling the foreskin back all the way to bare the head, and with his thumb he spread the liquid from the tip over the whole glans until it gleamed. I felt my knees give a centimeter.

He crouched down.

He didn’t ask permission, didn’t ask questions. He simply knelt slowly, with that same calm as always, set one knee on the dirty concrete and then the other, as if he knew perfectly well what was about to happen and there was no reason to hurry.

***

He brought his mouth to my cock but didn’t take it in right away. First he stuck out his tongue and licked the head from bottom to top, very slowly, in one long wet pass that made my stomach tighten. Then another. And another, each time circling the ridge with the tip of his tongue, pausing at the frenulum until my leg trembled.

Only then did he open his mouth all the way and take it in whole.

He didn’t take it in bit by bit, the way anyone testing the waters might have. He swallowed it in one go until I felt the back of his throat hit the tip of my cock, and there he stayed for a few seconds, still, breathing through his nose, letting me feel it trapped in that tight heat. When he pulled back, he did it slowly, with his lips pressed around the shaft, sucking with a suction that made me put my palm on the brick wall so I wouldn’t lose my balance.

The difference between someone who knows what he’s doing and someone who doesn’t is so great it completely changes the experience. And he knew. There was no clumsiness. There was a precision that undid me from the very first second, a way of using tongue and pressure and rhythm that left me able to do nothing else but stay still, completely still, and let it happen.

He picked up the pace. His mouth slid up and down the full length of my cock, his tongue working the underside of the head every time he came up, then down again to the back of his throat without gagging, without pausing, swallowing me whole again and again. The sound was obscene in that empty room: wet sucking, heavy breathing, the occasional muffled groan from him when he tightened his lips around the shaft.

With one hand he grabbed my balls, squeezing them carefully, rolling them between his fingers while he kept sucking me off. With the other he held onto my thigh. He wasn’t touching himself. He was entirely focused on my cock.

Sometimes he looked up at me from below, mouth full. That was the hardest thing to hold: that calm, almost clinical gaze, so at odds with what he was doing. There was no urgency or taunting in that look, only a concentration that was more erotic than anything else. I could see his lips stretched around the shaft, saliva running from the corner of his mouth down to his chin, and I knew that he knew I was watching him.

He pulled my cock from his mouth for a moment, panting, and held it against his cheek while he licked my balls one by one, taking each one fully into his mouth, sucking them slowly. His tongue went even lower, to the base of the scrotum and the perineum, and there he stayed for a moment, pressing the tip of his tongue against that spot that made me close my eyes and blow out air as if I’d been struck.

—It’s really hard —he said in a rough voice, still not letting go—. You need to let it go. Come in my mouth whenever you want.

And he took it back in.

I tried to think of something else. I thought about work, the bus route, what I was going to eat when I got home. None of it worked. There was only that: the wet heat of the mouth, the pressure of lips tightening and loosening around the shaft, the tongue sliding underneath, the rough brick wall beneath my palm, and the feeling that something which had been asleep inside me for a very long time was suddenly waking up and had no intention of going back to sleep.

He started sucking me faster, his hand working the base, up and down in the same rhythm as his mouth. My balls had stuck to my body. I felt the tingling begin at the base of my spine and climb inside my cock like something electric and unstoppable.

The limit came sooner than I would have liked. The body has its own deadlines and doesn’t negotiate them.

—Don’t stop —I said, and it was the only time I spoke the whole time—. I’m coming. I’m coming in your mouth.

He didn’t stop. On the contrary: he tightened his lips harder, shoved my cock all the way to the back of his throat, and stayed there, swallowing around the head, sucking with a constant suction that dragged everything out of me.

I came in his mouth in thick spurts, one after another, feeling each contraction run down my shaft and spill against his tongue. There were six, seven shots, I didn’t count them. He didn’t move, didn’t pull back, didn’t make a gesture. He stayed there still, with my cock still throbbing inside his mouth, swallowing my semen as it came, waiting for me to finish completely. When I was done, he kept sucking slowly, drawing out the last drops, cleaning my glans with his tongue until it was dry.

Only then did he pull away. He stood up slowly, wiped the corner of his lip with his thumb, put it in his mouth, and looked at me with exactly the same calm as always.

—Good —he said. Nothing else.

***

I fastened my belt myself, or tried to. My fingers weren’t really obeying. My cock was still half hard, sensitive, and I felt it heavy in my underwear as I pulled my pants back up. The silence of the construction site now felt heavier, as if it had absorbed something that had nowhere to go.

We left by the way we’d come in. The afternoon was exactly the same: the same buildings, the same families going home, the same smell of food from the windows. The world hadn’t noticed anything.

We walked half a block together without speaking. Then he stopped.

—I know some people —he said— who would like to meet you. Discreet men, with good taste. With money. They’d be willing to pay you well to let them suck you off the way I just did. Or for more, if you’re up for it.

I looked at him. There was a moment when I didn’t know what to say.

—No —I answered at last—. Thanks, but no.

He nodded without insisting, as if that were also a completely valid answer. He said goodbye with a brief gesture and turned down a side street. I kept going straight, quickened my pace, and took a different route from my usual one, making an unnecessary detour just to be sure I wouldn’t run into him again.

***

For the rest of that afternoon I carried two things at once: a kind of diffuse shame, the sort that doesn’t quite know what it’s aimed at, and beneath that shame, something I didn’t want to admit but that was there with the same solidity as anything else real: satisfaction. Complete satisfaction, with no residue, the kind you don’t always get even with the person you love most or in the situations you spend weeks planning. I could still feel the echo of that mouth on the tip of my cock, and when I got home and stepped into the shower, I got hard again just from remembering it. I jerked myself off right there thinking of his look from below, and came a second time in less than an hour, braced against the tiles.

Over the years I came to understand some things about myself that that afternoon still hadn’t made clear. Not every path you walk leads where you thought it would, and that isn’t always a bad thing.

But if I had to point to a moment when something changed, a moment when the inner map redrew itself a little and never quite returned to its original shape, I would choose that Wednesday afternoon, that half-built building, and that calm look from below that didn’t ask permission and didn’t need it either.

I don’t know what his name was. We didn’t exchange names. It didn’t matter then and it doesn’t matter now.

What matters is that it happened, that it was real, and that I still remember it with a clarity most memories never have.