You Arrived When I Had Already Decided to Leave

The decision had cost me three weeks of insomnia, two conversations with my sister, and an entire night perched on the windowsill, staring out at the empty street. Rome. Four weeks in Rome, long enough for my brain to forget the patterns and my body to stop looking for him in every room. That was what I told myself. That was what I kept repeating.

The flight was on Saturday. It was Thursday morning.

I had everything ready for days: the suitcase closed in the bedroom, the envelope with the keys for the neighbor, a note with instructions for watering the plants. But I still kept getting up to check drawers, fold clothes that were already folded, invent tasks that didn’t exist. It was easier to keep moving than to sit and think about what I was doing.

My phone vibrated on the nightstand. I saw the name on the screen and let it ring until it stopped. I kept folding a shirt. It rang again. I put the shirt in the drawer and went to the kitchen for some water. It rang a third time while I was filling the glass.

If he calls one more time, I’ll answer. One more time and I’ll pick up, and I’ll tell him I need this trip and that he shouldn’t call while I’m away.

It rang a fourth time.

“Hello,” I said, in the flattest voice I could manage.

“I need to talk to you. Can you talk now?”

“I’m really busy, Rodrigo.”

“Just for a moment. Please.”

Someone knocked at the door.

“Listen, someone’s at the door. I’ll call you back in a while.”

“Don’t hang up. Please. Open the door and keep talking to me.”

I headed toward the entrance with the phone pressed to my ear, thinking of the delivery driver, the neighbor, anyone but him. I turned the knob and opened the door.

And there he was.

His phone was still in his hand, and he wore that half smile I’d spent weeks trying to erase from my memory. I couldn’t find the words. I said nothing.

“Aren’t you going to invite me in?” he asked, with that calm of his that had always driven me crazy. “Or are you with someone?”

“No,” I replied. “I’m not with anyone. Come in.”

He stepped inside, and I backed down the hallway. The suitcase lay open on the bed, visible from the hall. My winter coat hung over the kitchen chair because it was still cold at night in Rome at this time of year. All the evidence of my escape, exposed.

I threw myself at him before I could think about whether I wanted to. I hugged him tightly, burying my face in his neck, breathing in that scent I had missed every day for the past few weeks. I felt him squeeze me too, felt that it wasn’t only my need filling the embrace.

“I missed you,” I whispered in his ear.

“I missed you more,” he replied. And it sounded true.

We stayed like that for a long moment. Then he pulled back just enough to look at me.

“Here I am,” he said. “For whatever you want. But if you want this to end, you have to tell me now, looking me in the face. Not from the airport, not by text.”

I looked at him. He had that serious expression he wore when he was saying something difficult. I kissed one cheek. Then the other. Then he sought my mouth and found it.

“I love you,” he said against my lips. “And I don’t want this to end.”

I picked up his bag from the floor and set it beside the wall. I took his hand.

“Come on.”

***

The courtyard had that golden light of spring mornings, before the sun reached its highest point and turned everything white. In the side area covered by a roof of beams and tiles stood a wrought-iron armchair with thick fabric cushions that I had bought at a flea market two summers earlier. I led him there.

I made him sit. I sat on his lap, facing him, my knees on either side of his, looking him in the face.

“Why do you make this so difficult for me?” I asked.

“I’m not making it difficult. What’s between us isn’t difficult.” He paused. “I know the situation isn’t the simplest. But I can’t let it go. And you don’t want me to let it go either.”

“It isn’t that simple, Rodrigo.”

“I can give you everything you want. Everything you’ll let me give you. I know exactly what you need, and you know it too. You won’t find that anywhere else.”

I looked at him for a moment without answering. He was right, and we both knew it, and that was exactly what made everything more complicated. I kissed his mouth so I wouldn’t have to admit it aloud.

The kiss began slowly and grew charged with something denser. He thrust his tongue deep inside me, sucking on mine, biting my lower lip until I let out a soft moan. His mouth traveled down my neck, licking me, leaving red marks I would have to cover with my sweater’s collar. He ripped open my shirt, leaving my tits bare, my nipples already hard just from imagining his mouth on them. He lunged at one, sucking it hard, tugging with his teeth until I arched my back, then moved to the other. His hands gripped my hips and he began moving me over him, setting the rhythm, rubbing my pussy against the bulge growing inside his trousers.

I stood up.

In front of him, keeping my eyes fixed on his, I lifted my skirt to my waist. I pulled my panties down to my ankles and took them off. I let them fall onto the courtyard’s damp paving stones. He saw the dark wet patch on the fabric and smiled without saying anything. I was already wet, so wet that I could feel the cool morning air clinging to the insides of my thighs.

I sat back down on his lap, this time with my knees spread wide, and began moving over his crotch. I felt him reacting beneath me, the fabric of his trousers growing tighter with every movement, his cock outlined sideways along his thigh, thick, hard, searching for me.

“Is this what you want?” he asked me.

“What I want is to feel you,” I replied. “Get it out. Get that cock out now.”

Without taking his eyes off me, he lifted me just enough to unbutton his trousers and pull it out of his underwear. There it was, hard, swollen, with the pronounced vein underneath that I knew by heart and the tip already shining with the drop of precum that had escaped. I lowered my hand and grasped it, squeezing from the base to the top, feeling the whole thing tense against my palm. I spat a little saliva into my hand and began stroking him slowly, squeezing the head with every upward stroke, watching his mouth fall open.

“Fuck,” he said through his teeth. “Like that, like that.”

I rubbed myself against him without taking him inside yet, sliding his cock between my pussy lips, coating it with my wetness, seeking the friction of his glans against my clitoris, listening as his breathing grew thicker with every passing second. I rubbed the tip up and down, smearing it, feeling the head slip a centimeter inside me and come out again without entering fully.

I liked starting this way, slowly, taking my time, teasing myself with his cock in my hand. He knew it and let me set the pace, his hands on my hips without forcing anything, letting me do the work.

When I couldn’t take it anymore, when my pussy was screaming for me to put him all the way in, I lifted myself slightly, positioned him with my hand where I needed him, and dropped down onto him.

He went in all at once. Balls-deep.

The sound that came out of my throat wasn’t entirely voluntary. I stayed still for a moment, my hands gripping his shoulders, letting my body adjust to having him all the way inside me, feeling him fill me, stretch me, the tip touching exactly where it needed to. Then I began to move. I rose until only the glans remained inside and dropped hard back down to the bottom, again and again, finding the rhythm and speeding it up. My tits had slipped free of my unfastened bra and bounced against his face, and he caught one nipple in his mouth and sucked it without letting go while I rode him.

“You’re so tight,” he murmured against my skin. “Fuck, you’re squeezing me so hard.”

“I haven’t fucked in weeks,” I panted. “Weeks waiting for this cock.”

The morning remained still around us. A sparrow on some nearby rooftop. The muffled murmur of a street waking in the distance. And me on top of him, my skirt hiked up around my waist, my pussy impaled on his cock, completely forgetting Rome, Saturday’s flight, every decision I had worked so hard to make over the past few weeks. Each downward thrust drew a moan from me louder than the last. I felt wetness streaming down the base of his cock, sticking to my thighs, felt the armchair creaking beneath us.

I came on top of him, my face buried in his neck and my legs trembling, squeezing him inside with spasms that tore a growl from him. I kept moving for a few more seconds, wringing my orgasm out to the last wave, my clitoris crushed against his pubic bone.

***

“Wait,” he said when I lifted my head. “Wait, wait. Don’t move yet.”

He looked at me in a way I knew well. His voice low and his hands firm on my hips, he positioned me himself: standing, bent forward, my hands braced on the iron back of the armchair, my legs spread, my skirt raised to my waist and my ass bare. He ran a hand down my back, slowly lowering it, and opened one cheek with his thumb.

“Now I want your little ass,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about it for weeks.”

He knelt behind me. I felt the cool air on my bare skin, followed immediately by the heat of his hands slowly opening me, spreading my ass cheeks wide to expose my asshole. His mouth began working there patiently, without hurry. His tongue licked me first from bottom to top, from pussy to ass, gathering all my wetness and the saliva of his that was already running down me. Then he focused on my asshole, circling the tip over it, soaking it, applying pressure until he slipped it inside. I closed my eyes and rested my forehead on my hands against the cold iron backrest, biting my lips so I wouldn’t scream too loudly.

“Fuck, Rodrigo,” I panted. “Fuck, don’t stop.”

He pushed his tongue in and out several times, eating my ass with an obscenity that made me tighten my fingers around the iron. Then one hand traveled up the inside of my thigh and he pushed two fingers into my pussy, curling them upward, while he kept working my asshole with his mouth.

I was still shaken from the first time, and this took me straight to the edge. It was something that had always been ours, something I’d never had with anyone else and didn’t think I would find again: his ability to know exactly where to touch me and when to change things.

And that was why Rome. To stop comparing everything to this.

He stood up. He spat into his hand and coated his cock with the saliva and what remained stuck to it from my pussy. He pulled his fingers out of me and used them to thoroughly slick my asshole, pushing them in to the second knuckle and slowly opening me.

I felt the pressure of his cock exactly where his mouth had been.

“Put it in,” I begged. “Put the whole thing in my ass.”

He pushed slowly at first, carefully, waiting for my body to open at its own pace. The head forced its way inside, and I felt the familiar burn, that mixture of pain and pleasure that always settled at the base of my spine. He stopped. I breathed deeply. He pushed again, a little farther, gaining another centimeter. And so, little by little, until he was all the way in and I felt his balls pressed against my pussy lips, forcing me to bite my lip so I wouldn’t scream too loudly.

“All the way inside,” he said hoarsely. “I’ve put it all the way in.”

He began to move.

Slowly at first, finding the angle, pulling almost all the way out and carefully sliding back in. Then more confidently, with that firm, steady thrust that made me clutch the backrest until my knuckles turned white. I moaned softly against my hands, unable to stop myself, accompanied by the sound of the armchair scraping over the paving stones every time he thrust and the slap of his hips against my ass. He grabbed my hips with both hands and began fucking me harder, driving all the way in every time, with the restrained violence I knew had built up in him during the days he hadn’t seen me.

“Touch me,” I begged between gasps. “Touch my pussy while you fuck my ass, please.”

He ran one hand over my hip and found the exact spot without needing me to guide him. His fingers sought my clitoris and began rubbing it in circles, with just the right pressure, neither too little nor too much, matching the rhythm of his thrusts. With his other hand he held one of my breasts, squeezing it, pinching my nipple between his forefinger and thumb.

The double stimulation overwhelmed me sooner than I expected. I felt his cock splitting my ass, his fingers pounding my clitoris, his hand on my tit, and all of it at once pushed me back toward the edge.

“I’m going to come again,” I moaned. “Fuck, I’m going to come again.”

“Come,” he panted against my nape. “Come while you squeeze me.”

I heard him moan, his voice already broken and ragged, feeling his cock swell inside my ass a moment before.

“I’m coming,” he said. “I’m coming now, I can’t take it anymore.”

The heat of his orgasm filled me from the inside, jet after jet. I felt him emptying himself completely inside me, felt his cock throb, marking every shot. I felt him keep moving as he came, without stopping, without removing his fingers from where they were, smearing my clitoris with my own juices. I came a second time with a shudder that began in my knees and rose to my throat, squeezing his cock inside with contractions that made him growl against my hair.

We stayed like that, motionless, panting, both leaning over the iron armchair in the courtyard. He slowly pulled out, and I felt his semen begin to run down the inside of my thigh, hot and thick, leaving a sticky trail down to my knee.

***

The sun was already higher. From somewhere in the street came the distant engine of a van. The sparrow on the rooftop had disappeared.

I slowly straightened up, pulled my skirt over my still-stained legs, and looked at him over my shoulder.

“You still haven’t said anything to me about Rome,” I said.

He calmly buttoned his trousers and picked up his bag from the ground.

“The flight is Saturday,” he replied. “Today is Thursday.”

He was right about that too. It was a little after eleven in the morning. Two whole days lay ahead. The suitcase was still open on the bed in the bedroom, waiting.

But Saturday was still a long way off.