The Erotic Writer Who Had Me Hypnotized

Almost three years ago, I found Luciano’s profile. It wasn’t something I went looking for, because almost nothing interesting in my life arrives when I look for it: he simply appeared in Instagram suggestions one Sunday afternoon when I had nothing better to do than stay on the sofa with my phone glued to my hand and my head nowhere in particular.

It was an erotic writing profile. Cryptic username, black-and-white cover photo that could have been his or not, and a three-line bio that said something like “words that are not spoken out loud.” He followed very few accounts. Nearly five thousand people followed him.

I read the first text that appeared in his feed and didn’t close the app for two hours.

He wrote well. Not like the texts one finds on forums or on those pages where punctuation is optional and accents are a whim: he wrote with rhythm, with pauses in the right places, with that ability to make an explicit scene sound inevitable instead of mechanical. His characters had a history before they touched each other. His stories always began with a tension that took time to resolve, and that delay was exactly what made them impossible to put down.

I accepted his follow request without thinking too much about it. I suppose I let myself be carried away by the excitement of finding someone who wrote about the same things I was passionate about, but with a skill I felt I lacked. I was genuinely happy to know he existed.

What I didn’t anticipate was what I would become over time.

***

I never gave him a like. That was a deliberate decision from the start, though I’d have had a hard time explaining why. Maybe because it felt to me that liking his posts would leave a trace, and I preferred not to leave any. To read without being seen. To exist in his audience like a shadow among thousands.

I never commented either, though sometimes I drafted the comment in my head while I read. Other girls did: they left fire emojis, short phrases, the occasional direct innuendo that he answered with an ambiguous, elegant line that committed to nothing. I watched him do that dozens of times. He was good at that too, at keeping exactly the right distance.

I don’t know what he looks like. The photos he uses on his profile are of a model from some stock site; I found that out quickly because I did a reverse image search one sleepless night, with a mix of curiosity and something like jealousy. About himself, he had only said, in one of those Q&A rounds they do in stories, that he was tall, that he worked out, that he read a lot, and that he had little interest in revealing anything else. His age was a mystery. He could have been in his twenties or nearing thirty. He never wanted to clarify it, and over time I stopped caring to know.

What mattered was what he wrote.

***

The problem started, I think, around the fourth month of following him. I didn’t see it coming because it was gradual, like all things that later turn out to have changed something in you without your noticing.

Luciano posted three or four times a week. Short stories, most of them, two or three screens long, though sometimes he uploaded something longer in several parts. His themes were varied but always had one thing in common: the tension before contact. The moment when two people who desire each other decide to cross the line. The exact instant when the rules stop applying.

One night I read one of his stories in bed, with the room dark and the glow of the screen as the only light. It was about a woman who read her roommate’s erotic correspondence without her knowing, and who began to fantasize about being the recipient of those letters. It was a first-person story, from the point of view of the clandestine reader, and it was written with such precision in its description of desire that it made me stop halfway through.

The central scene was a letter the roommate had received from a lover who described, in explicit detail, how he planned to fuck her the next time they met. Luciano spared no word: the letter spoke of opening her slowly with his tongue, of sliding two fingers into her until her hand got soaked, of turning her against the wall and taking her from behind while covering her mouth. The protagonist read all of it in secret, with her hand between her legs over her pajamas, and came against her own fingers just as she heard the roommate’s door close in the hallway.

He wrote this thinking about someone, I thought. No one writes like this if they haven’t truly felt it.

I finished the story. Turned off the screen. I lay staring at the ceiling, my heart beating faster than normal and a warm dampness between my thighs that I didn’t want to name. Without fully deciding to, I slid my hand down under the elastic of my panties and touched myself just above the clit, barely moving, only to see how far a simple paragraph written by a stranger had gotten me. I was soaked. I pulled my hand away as if I’d burned myself and fell asleep without fully understanding why I was so embarrassed with myself.

The next day I read it again.

***

I don’t know exactly when I went from reading his stories to imagining he was writing them for me. It was something that happened without my deciding it. One night I was reading and suddenly the protagonist in his text had my hair color. Another night, the apartment where the scene took place resembled mine. Small coincidences I built on my own, things he hadn’t put there, but that I found anyway.

I started waiting for his posts. I checked his profile in the afternoon, before dinner, like someone checking email or the news. If he hadn’t uploaded anything, I felt a small disappointment I was ashamed to admit. If he had uploaded something new, I saved it to read at night, in bed, with time.

For one week he didn’t post anything. Five days in silence. He didn’t put up any stories, gave no sign of life. I checked his profile every morning with an anxiety that seemed ridiculous to me but that I couldn’t control. On the sixth day he uploaded a story saying he’d had a complicated week and would be back soon. I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.

This is going too far, I told myself that night.

And the next day I carried on exactly the same.

***

What I found hard to admit, even to myself, was that his texts had begun to affect me physically. Not in an abstract way, not as something you admire from afar because it’s well written. In a concrete way. Directly. My nipples hardened before I finished the first paragraph. My cunt tightened as if something inside it had taken hold.

I’d read a paragraph of his about a man whispering “open your mouth” in a woman’s ear just before he put it in her, and I’d feel the heat before I finished the sentence. I’d read the description of a hand closing around a nape, of a cock rubbing against an ass over fabric, and I’d have to set the phone on my chest for a moment and breathe with my mouth open.

One night, reading one of his longer stories, I couldn’t help it.

I left the phone propped against the pillow, the text open, and slid my hand under the sheets. I started over my panties, pressing myself slowly with my palm, feeling the fabric stick to me as I read. The story described a woman who finally gave in to something she’d been avoiding for weeks: she let herself be stripped against a door frame, let herself be opened with a knee slipping between her thighs, let herself be fingered to the back while the guy bit her neck and kept repeating in her ear, “like that, that’s how you like it, bitch.”

I moved at the same rhythm as she did. I pushed my hand inside my panties and discovered my cunt was swollen, pulsing, wet all the way to the crease of my thigh. I ran two fingers along my slit from top to bottom, smearing myself, and went back to my clit tracing slow circles that sped up every time he, in the text, changed position. When the protagonist got on all fours on the rug, I spread my legs wider under the sheets. When he grabbed her hair and forced her to arch her back, a gasp slipped out of me in the silence of the room that made me glance at the door for a second, even though I lived alone.

I put two fingers in. Then three. I curved them, searching for that spot I only find when I’m very hot, and I found it right away, because I’d been hot since the first line. With my other hand I kept rubbing my clit, sliding in my own wetness, while I read how he told her to come, to come now, that he wanted to feel her clenching around his cock.

I came before the story ended. It was a long, dirty orgasm that bent my knees under the sheet and made me clench my teeth so I wouldn’t moan out loud. When the trembling eased, I kept my fingers inside for a while longer, feeling my cunt close in spasms around them, and only then did I pull them out. I looked at them in the dim light: they were shining. I wiped them on the edge of the sheet with a mix of relief and that absurd shame afterward.

Then I stayed still for a while, my breathing settling, looking at the last lines of his text on the screen. I felt a mix of satisfaction and something like shame, though I wasn’t sure why. I hadn’t done anything wrong. I had simply responded to something that affected me.

But there was something about the asymmetry that unsettled me: he didn’t know I existed. I knew him, in a certain way, through his writing, better than I know many flesh-and-blood people. I came from his words, with my hand between my legs reading his sentences, and to him I was invisible.

***

I started imagining conversations we’d never had.

I built them in the shower, on the way to work, in those mid-afternoon moments when concentration breaks apart on its own. I imagined he’d send me a private message, that he’d somehow noticed my silent presence and was curious. Or that I’d write to him finally, and that he’d answer with something other than the polite, generic tone he used with everyone else.

I’ve been following your writing for months, I imagined telling him. I write too. About the same things, though not as well.

And he answered, in my versions, with a question. Not with a compliment, because that didn’t fit what I knew of him through his texts. With a real question. What do you find hardest to write? Or something like that.

Other times the conversation got away from me and he asked me outright if I touched myself while reading him. In my head I told him yes, without hesitation, with the same crude words he used. That I fingered myself thinking of his voice. That there was one paragraph of his, the one with the hand on the nape, that always made me come. And he, in the fantasy, made no elegant comments: he asked me to tell him exactly how, how many fingers, whether I sucked my own tits while pinching my nipples, whether I imagined his cock in my mouth while he gave me pleasure. I answered everything. Every detail. In my head those conversations always ended with my hand between my legs and him writing to me, on the other side, how he’d fuck me if he had me in front of him.

Those imagined conversations became more frequent than my thoughts about real people. That did worry me a little.

***

There was one night, about six months ago, when he put up a story asking his followers what kind of story they wanted him to write next. He left a poll with four options. I voted. It was the first time I’d interacted with his content in any way, and I did it with my heart racing as if it were something much more significant than tapping a screen.

The option I chose won. He wrote the story three days later.

I know it wasn’t because of me. That I was one vote among hundreds. But I held on to that small fiction: that somehow I had influenced something he’d created. That there was a connection, however microscopic and invisible to him.

I read it that night with a different attention, looking involuntarily for something I could interpret as a nod to the option that had won, to the person who had voted for it. The story was about a woman who went to bed with a stranger after dinner and let him do whatever he wanted for exactly one hour: sucking him off on her knees at the foot of the bed, letting him fuck her face-down with her face mashed against the mattress, swallowing his cum without complaining. It was written with that surgical coldness he used when the scene was dirtier, without extra adjectives, narrating each movement as if he were dictating it. In the end, the woman wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, got dressed, and left without saying a word.

I touched myself again while reading it. This time without taking my hand away until I finished. I came with two fingers inside and my palm pressing down, biting my lip so I wouldn’t make a sound, imagining that the woman kneeling at the foot of the bed was me and that the voice giving her orders was the one I had built by reading him for three years.

I liked it anyway. Maybe more than any other.

***

I don’t know if this is a fantasy or an obsession or simply one of those strange things that happen to people in the age of social media, where it’s possible to know someone without that person ever knowing you existed.

What I do know is that it’s still the first thing I check every morning. That his stories are still the only ones I read all the way through without skipping a single line. That sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I open his profile and read something old, something I already know, and it still works: my panties still get wet and I end up with my hand between my legs, coming to phrases I almost know by heart.

That I’ve never given him a like. That I’ve never written to him. That I probably never will.

There’s something in that distance that’s part of what makes all this work. If I wrote to him, if he replied, if it somehow became real, maybe it would stop being what it is: a presence that exists only in the words he posts and in what I build around them, in the silent orgasms I wrench from myself reading him in the dark.

Luciano doesn’t know I exist. And I know too much about him through what he writes, which in the end is the only real way of knowing someone.

Tomorrow he’ll post something new. I’ll read it at night, in bed, with the room dark and my hand already ready beneath the sheets.

And we’ll see what happens.