The Anonymous Writer Who Kept Me Awake

It all started with a notification. One of those tiny alerts, almost imperceptible, that appear among work messages and the memes in the family group chat. A new follower on Instagram with the username @nocturno_ergo, no real profile photo, no real name. Just an image taken from some corner of Pinterest: a man seen from behind, looking out a rain-streaked window. The kind of photo used by people who prefer to exist without being seen.

I should have ignored him. I had two hundred fake followers and at least half of them were spam accounts. But something made me tap on his profile. Maybe the name, which sounded like a literary pseudonym. Maybe the bio, which simply said: «I write what others think in silence».

And there was his content.

They weren’t photos. They weren’t videos. It was text. Long posts, sometimes on a black background with white letters, sometimes screenshots of phone notes with uneven typography and crooked margins. Short stories. Poems without fixed meter. Fragments of something longer that never fully gave itself away. All with a single theme: desire. Intimacy. Bodies meeting in the dark or in the rain or in hotel rooms where nobody knows your name.

I read three posts in a row and had to go get some water.

This guy writes well, I thought. Too well for eleven in the morning on a Tuesday.

His style was direct without being vulgar when it didn’t suit him to be vulgar, and absolutely vulgar when it did. He described a scene — two strangers in an elevator groping each other until she ends up with her skirt hiked up and her panties shoved to one side, a woman waiting naked in a dark room with two fingers inside her thinking about the man who is about to come in, a guy remembering what it felt like to have someone’s cunt clamping down on his cock until he came — and he did it with the precision of someone who has felt exactly that. He wasn’t inventing. He was remembering. At least that’s how it seemed.

I started following him that very night. He followed me back in less than ten minutes.

I didn’t say anything. Neither did he. But from that day on I noticed that my notifications included, almost every two days, a new post from @nocturno_ergo. I always read them alone. Never at work, never when someone was nearby. There was something in his writing that made me feel watched, as if the texts were aimed at someone in particular and that someone, in some inexplicable way, was me.

That was nonsense, of course. He had more than three thousand followers. Surely many of them felt the same way. Surely many of them also ended up with a hand in their panties after reading him, the way I did almost every time.

But I didn’t think about the others when I read. When I touched myself thinking about him, in the bedroom, in the dark, there was nobody else.

***

The first message was sent by me. It was a decision I disguised as an impulse so I wouldn’t have to take full responsibility for it.

He had posted a fragment that hit me somewhere I didn’t expect. It talked about a woman who woke at three in the morning without knowing why, stared at the ceiling and thought about someone she shouldn’t be thinking about. It described that in-between state between sleep and waking as «the only moment when the body tells the truth.» And it described what that woman did to that body in the dark: how she licked two fingers and ran them over her nipples until they went hard, how she slid her hand down her belly and opened her cunt with her index and middle finger forming a V, how she searched for her clit with the pad of her middle finger and started making tight, slow circles, very slow, as if she had all the time in the world. How she slipped one finger in first, then two, and curved them forward seeking that spot that made her clench her jaw to keep from moaning out loud.

I read that fragment four times. By the third time my hand was already where the woman in the text had hers.

Then I wrote to him: «You wrote exactly what I live but don’t know how to describe».

Three minutes later, he replied: «And what is it you live?»

I took half an hour to answer. I wrote and deleted five different versions. In the end I sent something ambiguous, something like «the feeling that words fill spaces people can’t.» He replied with a new fragment, unpublished, something he hadn’t posted anywhere. It was short, three sentences, but those three sentences described with precision what he would do to a woman who confessed that to him: how he would undress her slowly, how he would spread her legs and put his mouth directly on her cunt without preliminaries, how he would make her come once with his tongue before he even took his own clothes off. No metaphors. No embellishment. Just raw action, written like someone jotting down a recipe.

I didn’t sleep well that night. I touched myself three times before dawn and all three times I was thinking about him.

***

Over the following weeks we wrote to each other with a frequency that neither of us mentioned or questioned. Not every day, but regularly enough that I started checking my phone differently. With a specific purpose. Looking for that conversation at the top of my inbox.

He never sent me a photo of himself. I never asked for one. There was something exciting about not knowing. About building an image from his words: the long sentences but without unnecessary flourishes, the tendency to use ellipses only when the pause meant something, the way he answered direct questions with even more direct questions.

He told me he was a little over thirty. That he lived alone. That he wrote at night because he couldn’t concentrate during the day. That he’d had a long relationship that ended quietly, without drama, and that had left him with more questions than answers about what he wanted from another person.

That was all I knew about him.

And yet I thought about him.

I thought about him at inappropriate moments. On the bus, squeezing my thighs together so I wouldn’t notice how wet I was beneath my work clothes. In the shower, with the hot spray falling between my breasts while I imagined they were his hands. In the five minutes before a meeting started, locked in the office bathroom with one hand in my panties and the other over my mouth. Before sleeping, always before sleeping, on my back, with two fingers moving in circles until my thighs trembled.

I wondered what his voice was like. Whether he wrote the way he spoke, with that same measured cadence, or whether he was different in person, more nervous, lighter. I wondered if he used his hands when he explained something. Whether those same hands would grab my hair when I sucked his cock or whether he’d put them on my tits when he fucked me from behind. I wondered what his cock was like. If it was thick, if it was long, if it had pronounced veins, the kind you feel when a woman runs it over her tongue. I wondered if he came a lot, if he came inside, if he liked watching the other person come before he did.

I wondered other things too. More concrete things. Whether he’d like hearing me ask him to put it deeper. Whether he’d make me spread my ass cheeks with both hands while he rammed into me. Whether he’d make me come three times in a row until I begged him to stop. I had already thought them through in enough detail in my head, and each of those scenes ended with my fingers between my legs, alone, biting the pillow so the neighbors wouldn’t hear me.

***

He was the one who named what the two of us already knew was happening.

One night he wrote: «When I post something new, do you read it before or after going to sleep?»

I told him the truth: «Before. Always before».

«And what happens after?», he asked.

Silence on my end. Not the silence of someone who doesn’t know what to say, but the silence of someone who knows exactly what to say and is weighing whether it’s worth saying.

«Things happen», I finally wrote.

I didn’t need to be more specific. He understood.

«Tell me one», he said.

And what I did next was something I had never done with a stranger. I told him. I told him how I had read his latest text — the one about the man describing the hands of a woman he had never touched but could imagine with terrifying precision, those hands opening his pants, pulling out his cock, wrapping around it and lowering her mouth until she took him all the way in — and how I had read it three times and by the third I was no longer thinking about the characters but about him. About the person who had written that. About how someone could imagine with such detail what a tongue feels like on the tip of a cock, or maybe had lived it and that was why he could describe it that way.

I told him I turned off the bedside lamp and that in the darkness of the room the words from his text were still there, floating, and that my body responded to those words in the most honest way possible. I told him I took off the T-shirt I slept in and stayed naked from the waist up, my nipples already hard against the cool air. That I brought one hand to my mouth and licked my fingers with saliva before rubbing them over my nipples, one and then the other, until I arched on my own against the sheets. That the other hand slid down my belly, slipped beneath the elastic of my panties, and found my cunt already soaked, so much that my fingers slid in without effort.

I told him I took them off. The panties, I threw on the floor. That I spread my legs with my knees bent and my feet planted on the mattress. That I touched myself first on the outside, with my whole palm, pressing the pubic bone, feeling the wetness spread. That then I opened myself with two fingers and found my clit with the middle one, and started making circles, first soft, then firmer, until my hips started moving on their own against my hand.

I told him I thought about him while I slid two fingers inside and curved them upward. About his imagined voice saying filthy things in my ear. About his hands I didn’t know parting my legs. About his mouth traveling down my belly and staying there, between my thighs, unhurried, his tongue working me slowly until he made me beg. I told him I imagined the cock I hadn’t seen sliding in and out of the cunt my fingers were in, that I imagined the weight of his body on mine, his heavy breathing at my neck, his teeth on my shoulder. I told him I ended up biting my lower lip so hard that the next morning I still had the mark, with my fingers inside me and my thumb on my clit, and that I felt the contractions clenching around my fingers, spilling over my hand, over the sheet, over everything.

I told him that afterward I lay still, staring at the ceiling I couldn’t see, with my hand still between my legs and my own smell in the air, and that the only thing I could think about was him reading this before I had even written it to him.

I sent the message and waited with the phone on my chest, feeling my own pulse against the screen, my nipples still hard because I had gotten myself turned on again just by writing it.

The reply took longer than usual. Almost five minutes. Then the blue checkmark appeared, showing he had read it. And then, a single line:

«Thanks for telling me. Now I’m going to write something».

And then, thirty seconds later, another: «Before I write it I need to finish thinking about what you just sent me. I’ve had my cock in my hand since the second paragraph».

I read that line ten times. I put it in my mouth like it was candy. I touched myself again without even thinking about it, with my phone on the pillow beside my face, imagining him, his back against the headboard of his bed, his hand moving up and down his cock, staring at the screen where my words were. I came a second time that night thinking about how he was coming all over his belly while reading how I was coming thinking about him.

***

He posted it two days later. It was longer than his usual texts. It described a woman — no name, no concrete physical description, just «she» — who sent him a message at night and told him, in vivid detail, how she had made herself come thinking about him. It described the exact line he had read when he realized he would no longer be able to hold back from jerking off. It described how he opened his pants with one hand, how he wrapped his palm around his cock, how he ran his thumb over the tip already wet with pre-cum and used it as lube to slide more easily. It described the rhythm, first slow, then faster, mentally matching the rhythm with which he imagined that woman moving her fingers between her own legs on the other side of the city.

It described how he came. No embellishment. In his hand, on his belly, over the phone where the conversation was still open. It described the exact moment of orgasm as «the only way the body signs a message it cannot send.» And it described afterward, with his cock still in his hand and already soft, how he reread for the fourth time what she had written to him and felt for the first time in a long while that desire was not a solitary thing.

Three thousand followers read it that night.

Only I knew what he was really talking about. Only I knew that the hand described in the text was mine. Only I knew that the semen on the phone had fallen while he read words I had written lying on my back, naked, cunt leaking and fingers inside me.

That was the most exciting part of all. More than anything that had happened between us, more than the messages, more than the text that had kept me awake so long: the fact that there was something between two people nobody else could see or name. A private thing in a public place. A secret without prior agreement. Three thousand people reading about how he had gotten himself off thinking about me, and none of them knowing it.

I touched myself again while reading it. That made five times in three days. I was starting to get sensitive, almost sore, but I couldn’t stop.

***

We never met. Not then, not yet. Our connection existed exclusively in that strange space that is a phone screen at midnight: no bodies present, no real voices, no physical weight of another person in the same room.

But it was real. More real than many things that did have bodies and voices and presence.

I kept reading his posts. He kept writing to me. Sometimes we talked about books, about movies, about ordinary things with nothing erotic about them. Sometimes the conversation drifted somewhere else and we stayed there, in that place, for hours. He asked me to tell him how I was touching myself while I wrote to him. I asked him to describe what he would do to my cunt if he had me naked on his bed. We sent each other texts that started with «imagine that» and ended with two people coming in their own rooms, never crossing paths, but at the same time, knowing it. Until one of us said «I’m going to sleep» and the other answered with something that wasn’t a goodbye but the promise of next time.

And I kept building that incomplete image: the imagined voice, the hands I didn’t know, the way he moved I had invented from his words, the taste I imagined he’d have when I ran my tongue along his neck, the shape I supposed his cock had after making me come more times than any real man ever had. It was a fantasy. I knew that. I was desiring a character I had built myself using his texts as raw material, filling in the gaps with what suited me, with what I needed him to be.

But sometimes fantasies are the most honest thing we have.

Sometimes the desire you feel for someone you don’t fully know is clearer and sharper than the desire you feel for someone standing in front of you every day. Because it isn’t contaminated by the everyday, by exhaustion, by the smaller versions of ourselves we all are when we aren’t being watched. It exists in its pure state. Without context. Without history. Just cock, cunt, fingers, mouth, saliva, semen, and the certainty that on the other side of the screen there is someone doing the same thing as you, at the same time, thinking about you.

Only desire. Only words. Only the screen glowing in the dark, the hand inside my panties, and the certainty that on the other side someone was holding his cock thinking the same thing I was.

That’s what I thought when I turned off the light.

That’s what I thought when I opened Instagram and saw that @nocturno_ergo had posted something new.