The Discs I Found Awakened a Hidden Fantasy

I had moved into the apartment barely two weeks earlier and was still fighting with the boxes and the dust the previous tenant had left in every corner. That Sunday afternoon I finally decided to tackle the built-in wardrobe in the bedroom, that huge, dark piece of furniture that smelled of old wood and confinement. I was twenty-six, living alone for the first time, and I had promised myself the place would be spotless before I invited anyone over.

Emptying the last shelf, my hand bumped into something hard at the back. A flat plastic case had slid into the corner, half hidden under a cloth someone had forgotten. I pulled it out curiously. It was a DVD case with no cover, no printed title, just a black, anonymous surface that said nothing about what it held inside.

I opened it. Three discs with no labels, handwritten in silver marker that was barely legible: numbers, not words. I stared at them for a while, weighing them in my palm. They’re probably old movies the guy left behind when he moved out, I thought. Reason told me to throw them in the trash with the rest of the junk. Curiosity told me something else.

I knew almost nothing about the previous tenant. The landlord had mentioned him in passing the day we signed the lease: a reserved, single man who had lived there for nearly a decade before leaving without even a forwarding address. Those three forgotten discs at the back of the wardrobe were the only personal thing left of him in the whole apartment, and suddenly holding them felt intimate, almost intrusive, like opening a stranger’s drawer.

I had the player newly connected to the television, the cables still not hidden away along the wall. I sat on the floor, my back against the bed frame, and inserted the first disc. A shiver ran down the back of my neck for no apparent reason, as if I were opening something that did not belong to me. I ignored the feeling.

The menu appeared on screen. It was identical to any ordinary movie menu: black background, a list of numbered chapters, a repetitive little tune playing in the background. Nothing gave the content away. Without even paying attention to the thumbnail playing in one corner, I hit enter on the first title.

It took only a few seconds to understand that this was no ordinary film. It began with kisses, with slow caresses, with two bodies seeking each other in a poorly lit room. It was porn. I had seen things like that before, of course, but something about the atmosphere of that recording, the grain of the image and how homemade the editing felt, gave it a forbidden air that pinned me to the carpet.

I skipped ahead a little, out of curiosity, to see what it was about. And then I began to notice details I had missed at first.

The girls on screen had something different about them. One of them, with her back to the camera, showed between her legs a shape my brain took a moment to accept. It can’t be, I told myself, leaning forward. The actress turned, and the doubt dissolved: she was a trans woman, slim-bodied and sharply curved, with a sex that contradicted everything I thought I knew about what I liked.

I froze. I waited to feel disgust, or shame, or the urge to switch discs. None of that came. What came was a dull heat in my lower belly, a current rising slowly that I made no effort to stop.

All my life I had believed I knew exactly what I liked. I had a clear map of desire, neat borders, marked boxes. And there I was, sitting on the floor of an apartment that still didn’t feel like mine, watching that map vanish in seconds before an image that fit none of my boxes. Far from frightening me, the surprise gripped me even more tightly.

***

The scene moved along unhurriedly. One of the girls came up to the other and began licking her with a slowness that seemed calculated to drive any viewer insane. The camera moved closer. I swallowed. There was something hypnotic about watching two bodies that broke every label I had been taught to respect, and discovering that my desire cared about labels at all.

Without realizing it, my hand had slipped over the top of my pants. I pulled it away for a second, as if asking myself for permission, and then put it back. I was hard. Harder than I remembered being in a long time, and I still hadn’t done anything.

I undid the button on my jeans and let the pressure ease. The room was dim except for the bluish glow of the screen, which licked across my face and hands with every cut. I started slowly, following the rhythm of what I was seeing, just as the images began softly before speeding up.

In the film, the two women changed positions. One ended up on all fours on the bed; the other moved behind her, trailing her mouth down her back before pushing in. I bit my lip. This shouldn’t turn me on so much, I thought, and the very idea of what was forbidden only lit me up more.

The first disc ended before I even noticed the time. I swapped it for the second with clumsy, almost impatient fingers, and sat back down on the floor with my back against the bed frame.

***

The second one was more intense. The main actress had her hair tied up and a gaze that seemed directed straight at the camera, as if she knew someone would be watching her years later from the floor of an empty apartment. She knelt in front of a man and began to suck him with a devotion that left me breathless.

I found it impossible to look away. There was an honest rawness in every movement, none of the forced posing of big productions. The girl was genuinely gasping, choking a little, starting again. I matched my hand to her mouth, squeezing harder when she did, loosening when she pulled back to catch her breath.

The man then laid her down and climbed on top of her. He penetrated her slowly, and the camera caught the actress’s face, her eyes half-closed, her mouth open in a way that did not seem acted. My breathing had become short and noisy. I could feel my heart in my temples.

That was when the tingling started. That unmistakable signal that rises from the base and warns you there’s no turning back. I sped up without meaning to, losing the borrowed rhythm of the screen in order to find my own, more urgent, more selfish one. The tension gathered in one point and stayed there, vibrating, for a few eternal seconds.

When I came, it hit me with a force that nearly bent me forward. I folded in on myself, panting, my mind blank and my body trembling from the release. The screen kept moving, indifferent, spilling blue light all over the room.

***

It took me a long while to collect myself. I cleaned up, pulled my pants back on, and stayed seated, still with my back against the bed, staring at the ceiling while my breathing returned to normal. I didn’t feel guilty. I felt something stranger: the certainty that I had discovered a door that had been closed for years without my even knowing it existed.

And then I saw it. The bedroom curtains were wide open.

The apartment was on the first floor, right across from the building next door, with its windows only a few meters away. I had spent the whole afternoon there sitting in the dark except for the telltale glow of the television, never bothering to close a single curtain. Anyone who had looked at just the right moment would have seen exactly what I was doing.

For a second my blood ran cold. I jumped up and leaned out cautiously. The windows across the way were almost all dark, though one or two had the faint light of a television on. It was impossible to know whether anyone was behind the glass. Impossible to know whether eyes had followed every one of my movements from the shadows.

Let whoever wants to look, look, I thought suddenly, and instead of making me ashamed, the idea sent another surge of heat through my stomach. The possibility of having been seen, of someone having spied on my most private discovery without my knowing it, added an extra layer of arousal to the memory that I had not expected.

I closed the curtains at last. But by then it was too late to undo whatever had happened.

***

That night I barely slept. I tossed and turned in bed, replaying the images, the curve of those bodies, the actress’s look toward the camera, and the tingling sensation of the open curtains behind my back. Something had changed inside me, a switch I would no longer know how to turn off.

The next day I put the discs in the nightstand drawer, not in the trash as I had originally planned. The third one was still untouched. I liked knowing it was there, waiting, like a promise I could fulfill any Sunday afternoon when curiosity outweighed prudence again.

Over the following weeks I found myself looking at things differently. At women in the street, yes, but also at possibilities I had never even considered, at a desire broader and more honest than the one I had carried unquestioned for years. Those forgotten discs from a stranger had taught me something about myself that no mirror had ever been able to tell me.

Sometimes, at night, I leave the curtains a little open. Not all the way. Just enough to imagine that, in some apartment across the way, someone is watching in the dark and discovering, just as I did that afternoon, a fantasy they didn’t know they had.

And that, for now, is all I’m willing to tell.