The Night I Wrote to the Anonymous Writer

For three years I had read every word of his without leaving a trace. Not a single like, not a comment, not even the nerve to send him a private message like so many others did beneath his posts. I was his ghost follower, the one who always arrived in the early hours, phone dimmed low and pussy more restless than I was willing to admit.

It all began on an ordinary night, one of those when the algorithm decides it knows you better than you know yourself. He appeared in my suggestions like a silent notification: an anonymous writer of erotic stories, with only a few thousand female followers and a carefully curated feed. He called himself Noctámbulo, with no last name and no picture of his own. Where his face should have been, he posted images stolen from some Pinterest board: masculine hands writing in a leather notebook, a rain-streaked window, a glass of whiskey beside an ashtray. Nothing definite. Nothing recognizable.

In the questions his female followers asked him, he had let a few details slip. He claimed to be somewhere between his twenties and thirty—he was never more specific—that he was tall, that he worked out at home and at the gym, that he wrote at night because it was the only time the world stopped screaming. Nothing else. No real name, no city, no profession. That lack of information, far from bothering me, became what attracted me to him most. He could be anyone. He could be mine.

From the first story I read—something about a married woman letting a stranger photograph her while she spread her legs on top of a hotel bed—I knew I would come back. His writing had a rhythm unlike anything I had read before on social media. It wasn’t clumsy, it wasn’t showy. He wrote like someone who knew exactly where to place the silence. His short sentences hit hard. The long ones left you breathless. And somewhere in every story there was always a tiny detail—a scar, the smell of jasmine, a chain with a key, the thread of semen trailing from the corner of a mouth—that clung to your body for days.

I read a lot. I write too, though I’ve never published anything. That was why, at first, I thought my fascination was literary. That I liked the way he constructed things. A lie. What I liked was imagining the hands typing those things. The voice that read each sentence aloud under its breath before sending it out into the world. The breathing of a man whose cock grew hard while he wrote about other women’s pussies. I imagined him with his dick stiff inside his pants, writing with one hand and gripping himself with the other, coming all over the keyboard before hitting publish.

I never dared to interact. That was my rule. Read, close the app, pretend nothing was happening. If I liked something, he would know. If I commented, I would be signing a confession. And I didn’t want him to know I existed. My fantasy depended on remaining invisible. On being the anonymous reader who appeared in every one of his stories, the one who slipped two fingers into her pussy in bed while reading words someone else had written for no one in particular.

I learned his posting schedule without meaning to. He uploaded stories on Tuesdays and Fridays, close to midnight. The occasional loose story on Sundays. From time to time, when insomnia caught up with him, a brief text at four in the morning that revealed more than he himself intended. Those were my favorites. The ones written half-asleep, with a comma too many, with verbs that repeated themselves. In those, I believed I could really hear him.

I started inventing things about him. I gave him a deep voice, a neutral accent with the occasional drawn-out s. I gave him an apartment with a wooden floor that creaked when he walked. An old dog that slept at the foot of the armchair. A standing lamp beside the window. A leather-bound notebook, even though he no longer wrote by hand. A dark shirt he took off with a tired gesture at the end of the day. I gave him a long, thick cock, veins standing out, which he pulled from his pants to stroke when he was writing a scene that genuinely turned him on. I knew nothing about him, so I built him whole, brick by brick, cock included, so I could inhabit him whenever I read him.

One February night, everything changed. It was raining hard and I couldn’t sleep. My phone rested on the pillow, brightness turned all the way down, and my bedroom door was closed because my roommate had stayed in the living room to watch a movie. He uploaded a new story at two minutes past three in the morning. The title was a short line: “For the One Who Reads and Never Writes.”

I felt a shiver even before I started reading. I thought it was a coincidence, that I was projecting, that he had nothing to do with me because he didn’t even know I existed. I opened the text.

The story was about a writer who had noticed, over the course of months, the presence of a silent reader. She didn’t comment, didn’t react, never left a trace, but he knew she was there. He sensed her in the rhythm of the view counter. In the exact hour when each post gained one more view. In the too-perfect silence surrounding someone who was truly reading you. The writer in the story wondered what that invisible woman was like. Whether she read in bed. Whether she bit her lip when she reached the paragraph where he, the narrator, described plunging his tongue into another woman’s pussy. Whether she fingered herself deep when she turned off the screen, whether she came with his name in her mouth without ever having spoken it.

At some point, I stopped breathing. I read the final lines three times. In the last one, the writer left the invisible reader an invitation: “If you ever exist, write to me. I won’t ask what your name is.”

I closed my phone and let it fall onto the pillow.

It isn’t me. It’s a literary device. He writes for everyone. This is marketing. Don’t be stupid.

But my hands were trembling, and there was something in the pit of my stomach that wasn’t fear. And lower down, between my thighs, my panties were soaked as if I had just stepped out of the sea.

It took me twenty-two minutes to open the chat. I know because I counted them. I wrote something. Deleted it. Wrote something else. Deleted that too. I wanted to be clever, to sound confident, not to seem like just another girl. In the end I gave up and wrote only: “I exist.”

I sent it before I could change my mind.

The three dots appeared almost immediately. They stayed there for an absurdly long time. I watched the screen the way you watch a lit fuse creeping toward a cartridge.

“I was waiting. You took your time.”

Three words after three years. They left me breathless.

“How did you know? —I wrote—. How did you know it was me?”

“I didn’t know it was you. I knew there was someone. I could feel it.”

I put the phone down again. I sat on the bed. The rain had intensified, and against the panes it sounded as if someone were tapping their fingernails. I took a deep breath. I picked up the phone again.

I wrote to tell him I had been reading him for three years. That I knew three of his stories by heart. That sometimes I fell asleep with his roadside-hotel story open in another tab, two fingers still inside my pussy. That I had never liked anything because I was embarrassed. I told him I was shy, that I didn’t know how to flirt online, that I had never sent a picture of myself to anyone I hadn’t met in person.

He cared just as little about everything I didn’t tell him—my age, my name, my city, my face—as I cared about knowing his.

“Do you want to play?” he wrote.

I answered yes before thinking about it.

He asked me to tell him a fantasy. One I had never told anyone. He said it didn’t have to be perfect, that I didn’t have to use the pretty words he used in his stories. That I should write it exactly as it came out. That he would take care of the rest.

I wrote him the only one I had, the one that had been repeating itself for years whenever I turned out the light. I told him I imagined myself entering a house that wasn’t mine at night. There was a man writing at a table beside a window. I made no sound when I came in. The man didn’t turn around, but he knew I was there. He kept writing while I approached from behind, while I placed my hands on his shoulders, while I read over his neck what he was typing. Only when he finished the sentence did he turn, unhurried, and look at me for the first time. I told him that was the part where I always stopped. That I didn’t know what happened afterward because I had never dared to imagine it.

He took a while to answer. When he did, he wrote me the scene. He wrote it out in full, in three-line messages, with that rhythm of his that I already knew by heart.

“The man gets up from the chair,” he wrote. “He says nothing. He takes your wrist without force and sits you on the edge of the table, on top of the written pages. He stands between your legs and makes you open them with his knees. He still hasn’t looked you in the eyes.”

“He pulls the straps of your dress down with his teeth,” he continued. “He bites your shoulder. He sucks your neck just below your ear until he leaves a purple mark. You’re already wet, but he doesn’t know it yet. Or he knows and is going to make you wait.”

“He unfastens your dress in one quick pull. You aren’t wearing a bra. He grabs your tits with both hands, squeezes them hard, pinches your nipples until a moan escapes you. He crouches down and sucks one, then the other, running his tongue in circles, biting just enough so you know he can.”

I read with one hand and had already pulled down my pajama bottoms with the other. I yanked my panties aside. They were soaked, genuinely soaked, the lips of my pussy swollen and hot. I ran two fingers up and down my slit, and my legs trembled. I picked up the phone again.

“He pushes you down until you’re lying on the table,” he was writing. “The papers stick to your sweaty back. He lifts your dress to your waist. He tears off your panties in one pull. He stares at your pussy for one full second without touching you, and you hear the way he breathes. Then he lowers his face and eats you.”

“He licks you slowly at first, from bottom to top, the whole length. He sucks your lips, one and then the other. When he gets to your clit, he presses it with his lips and works it with the tip of his tongue until your back arches. You grab his head with both hands and push his face into your pussy. He slides in two fingers, curled upward, and doesn’t stop licking you. You start moving against the table like a madwoman.”

“When you’re about to come, he stops. He stands up. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and smiles at you for the first time. He opens his belt without taking his eyes off you. He lowers his pants. His cock is hard, ridged, with a clear drop at the tip. He grabs your ankles, spreads your legs, and drives it into you in a single thrust, all the way to the hilt.”

I let out a moan into the pillow. I had three fingers inside my pussy, and with my thumb I was massaging my clit in the rhythm he set. My face was burning. The phone vibrated every two seconds with a new message, and each vibration went through me as if he were the one giving it to me.

“He fucks you slowly at first,” he continued writing. “Every thrust all the way in, pulling his cock almost out to the tip and then driving it back into you until his balls slap your ass. You brace your heels against the edge of the table and move to take him. You dig your nails into his forearms. You ask him to go faster. He tells you to shut up, and grabs you by the neck with one hand, without squeezing, just resting it there, and that hand there drives you crazy.”

“Now he starts fucking you hard. The table creaks. The papers fly. You cry out every time he thrusts into you. He bends down and sucks one of your tits while continuing to drive his cock deep inside you. Then he straightens up and grips your hips to pull you against him. Each blow travels up your spine. You don’t know anymore whether he’s fucking your pussy or your throat, because your moans come out as if you were being choked.”

“He turns you over. He puts you facedown on the table, your tits crushed against his written pages. He lifts your ass with one hand. He pushes his cock into you again from behind. He grabs a lock of your hair and pulls your head back. Now he’s really fucking you. Every thrust makes a filthy sound, skin against wet skin. You hear his ragged breathing, the grunts that escape him every time he buries himself inside you.”

“You come first. You come screaming against the wood, squeezing his cock with your pussy, your whole body trembling. He doesn’t stop. He keeps fucking you while you come, stretching out your orgasm until you can’t breathe anymore. And when he feels himself coming, he pulls out, turns you over again, climbs on top of you, and comes on your tits, your neck, your open mouth. You stick out your tongue and swallow whatever lands on it.”

I read with one hand and touched myself with the other. I had turned the phone’s brightness all the way down, and his words seemed to emerge from the darkness. My breathing was the only thing louder than the rain. At some point I closed my eyes, and his sentences kept arriving inside me, as if someone were dictating them into my ear.

I slipped my hand beneath my T-shirt and grabbed one tit, pinching the nipple until it hurt. My other hand hadn’t stopped working my pussy. I was so wet it ran down my thighs onto the sheet. I caught myself biting the pillow so I wouldn’t make a sound, the screen lighting up my face and every new message making the phone vibrate beside my cheek. He wrote, I read, my hand moved to the rhythm he set. When he described how the man in my fantasy held me by the waist against the table, I opened my legs in my bed as if the real man were there, drove three fingers into myself up to the knuckles, and started fucking myself with my hand, imagining it was his cock.

The orgasm rose inside me like a wave. My whole body tensed, my pussy clenched around my fingers, and I bit my arm so I wouldn’t scream. A warm jet escaped me and soaked my hand and the sheet. I came before his last message arrived. I stayed with my face buried in the pillow, still trembling, fingers inside my throbbing pussy, while the phone vibrated once more beside me. When I looked at it, he had written a single line.

“You came too, didn’t you?”

I didn’t answer. There was no need. He already knew.

He always knew.

Five months have passed since that night. Sometimes we write to each other. Sometimes he disappears for weeks and I become his ghost follower again, the one who reads and doesn’t comment. He still doesn’t know my name. I still don’t know what his face looks like. There are new stories every Tuesday and Friday, as always, and one at four in the morning when insomnia catches up with him. In those, now, I think I can hear my own name between the lines, even though I know it’s impossible, because I never told him my name.

When we play again, he writes about how he would spread my legs on top of his desk, how he would put his cock in my mouth until he made me tear up, how he would make me come with his tongue three times before letting me touch him. I answer that I would suck him on my knees, that I would let him come on my face, that I would swallow every drop. We both come with our phones in our hands, in different cities, without ever having seen each other’s faces. Sometimes I think it’s the best fuck of my life, and it makes me laugh, because technically no one has touched me.

Once I asked him whether we would ever meet in person. He took a while to answer, as he always did when I asked him a question that mattered. In the end he replied with something very much like him.

“If we meet, it’s over. You know that, right?”

I knew. That’s why I still read him in the early hours, with the light low, the door closed, and my hand already slipped beneath my panties before I open his profile. That’s why I still haven’t told him my name. That’s why, when he uploads a new story, I still wait twenty-two minutes before writing to him. Because I know that the day I send him a message without counting the minutes, the day I stop trembling before pressing send, the day I send him a picture of my open pussy instead of a word, this will be over. And I’m not ready. Not yet.