The Curiosity My Friend Helped Me Satisfy

I’m a pretty ordinary guy. I like women, I’ve always liked women, and I’ve never doubted that. But there are things you keep in a corner of your mind, curiosities that grow in silence for years and only dare to come out when alcohol and trust happen to meet at just the right moment.

This is one of those things. The only time I allowed myself to find out what lay on the other side of a question I had never dared to ask.

His name was Damián, and he was my lifelong friend. The kind you end up spending the night with and not even remember how it started. That Saturday we’d gone out to the bars downtown, with no plan and no destination, just for the pleasure of drinking and talking nonsense until they closed. After a couple of hours and far too many beers, we decided to keep going at his place, like so many other times.

His apartment was small, with an old, comfortable sofa where the two of us flopped down, heavy, laughing at anything. He brought out a bottle of something strong and two glasses, and we kept drinking even though neither of us needed any more.

The conversation drifted to where it always drifted at that hour: women, sex, the experiences each of us carried around. Damián had never hidden the fact that he was bisexual. He said it with the same casualness he used when talking about football, as if it were nothing, and that was why it had never been a strange topic between us.

—And you’ve never been curious? —he asked, giving me a sidelong look with that half-smile he wore when he sensed something.

I shrugged. I lied halfway. I said no, that women were my thing, period.

But I’d been thinking about it for years.

I couldn’t explain where it came from. It was a specific idea, almost stubborn, that appeared from time to time and that I always pushed aside. I wanted to know what it felt like. That was all. The curiosity of touching another man, of finding out whether it was as different as I had been made to believe.

We were half asleep on the sofa, both very drunk, when the words left my mouth before I could stop them.

—Hey —I said, my tongue thick—. Would you let me touch it? Just out of curiosity, that’s all.

There was a silence that lasted an eternal couple of seconds. Damián looked at me, surprised, as if trying to decide whether I was serious. Then he let out a short laugh.

—Sure —he said, shrugging.

I guess he thought I was joking. I thought that would be the end of it too, one of those things people say in the middle of the night and forget the next day.

But something inside me wasn’t willing to let it go.

—Seriously —I insisted—. Take off your clothes from the waist down and lie back.

This time he didn’t laugh. He frowned, sat up a little, and looked at me with a new seriousness.

—Are you really sure you know what you’re asking me?

I wasn’t. My heart was pounding like it wanted to burst out of my chest, and part of me was screaming at me to stop, that this was madness that would ruin years of friendship. But the other part, the one that had stayed silent for too long, knew it was now or never.

—Yes, damn it —I said—. I want to do it.

He held my gaze a moment longer, as if looking for a crack in my resolve. He didn’t find one. Then he stood up, unbuttoned his pants, pulled them down along with his underwear, and dropped everything on the floor. He let himself fall back onto the sofa, with his flaccid cock resting on his thigh, and waited.

***

I froze for a moment, taking in what was in front of me. The light from the corner lamp lit him from the side, and suddenly the room seemed quieter than it was, as if the whole world were holding its breath with me.

For a second I hesitated. I thought about my ordered life, the girlfriends I’d had, the image everyone had of me. None of that fit with what I was about to do. And yet, precisely because of that, I couldn’t stop. I had spent too many years imagining this moment to throw it away out of fear.

Damián said nothing. He watched me with an odd calm, without pressure, letting me set the pace. That patience of his, instead of making me uncomfortable, gave me the final push I needed.

I thought that if I really wanted to experience something, I couldn’t back out now. I slid from the sofa to the floor and sat in front of his waist, with his body at eye level.

I brought my hand slowly closer. I ran my fingers over his navel, feeling the heat of his skin, the slight tremble in his belly when I touched him. Little by little I moved lower, following the line of hair until I reached the base of his sex.

With my index finger I traced the outline of his flaccid cock, from the base to the foreskin, in a movement that was almost clumsy in its slowness. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just letting myself be carried by what I felt in that moment.

His dick jolted beneath my finger, as if responding to something I still didn’t fully understand.

I lowered my hand and stroked his balls. They were warm, the skin soft and taut at the same time. Damián let out his breath slowly through his nose, and I felt his body beginning to give in.

The cock started to grow, to rise little by little, gaining weight and firmness against my palm. I wrapped my hand around it. I could feel it throbbing, each pulse making it a little harder.

I pulled the skin back carefully and the head was revealed, a deep pink, shining under the dim light. I brought my face closer without thinking and caught his scent, intense and close, a mixture that hit me straight in some place I hadn’t known existed.

I started moving my hand up and down, feeling the full erection, the pulsing hardness beneath my fingers. Damián had his eyes closed and his head tipped back against the sofa.

He was turned on. More than I could ever have imagined he’d be in a situation like this. I kept stroking him until his cock was completely hard, and then I saw a drop of clear fluid bead at the tip.

At that point I couldn’t hold back anymore.

***

I knelt fully and brought my mouth to that reddened, throbbing head. I licked it, slowly at first, testing it, and within seconds I had it in my mouth.

I don’t know how to describe what I felt. It wasn’t disgust, or shame, or anything I had feared. It was a kind of vertigo, the confirmation that that curiosity had been right, that I needed to know this before I died.

I sucked him with hunger for several minutes, lost in the rhythm, attentive to every reaction from his body. I enjoyed every lick, every drop I gathered with my tongue, every rough moan that escaped him and every spasm that ran through his legs.

Damián had one hand braced on the edge of the sofa and the other clenched on the cushion. He murmured things I could barely understand, scattered words, my name once, and that drove me on.

—Stop… I’m going to come —he said, his voice breaking.

Far from stopping, his words turned me on even more. That was exactly what I wanted. To go all the way, not leave anything half-finished, to live out that fantasy in full before alcohol and courage faded.

I slowed down, working him with my lips and tongue, while with my other hand I gently massaged his balls. I felt his whole body tighten, his cock harden even more in my mouth, about to explode.

I sealed my lips around him just as he came. His hot semen spilled down my throat in waves, and a long, deep groan rose from his chest as he emptied himself.

I didn’t pull away. I stayed there, licking and swallowing until I left him clean, until I felt the last tremor leave his body.

***

After that we both stayed silent, him reclined and me still on the floor, catching my breath. The loose drunken laughter returned little by little, and with it a kind of complicity that didn’t need words.

—Well —he said at last, running a hand over his face—. Did you satisfy your curiosity?

I laughed. I nodded. I had satisfied it, and how.

We never really talked about that night again. There was no need. We stayed friends, kept going to the same bars, laughing at the same nonsense, as if nothing had changed. And deep down nothing had changed, except that for the first time I knew the answer to a question that had been with me for years.

Sometimes curiosity isn’t looking to be repeated. It just wants to stop being curiosity.