The Night I Wrote to the Anonymous Writer

For three years I had read every word he wrote without leaving a trace. Not one like, not one comment, not even the nerve to send him a private message like so many others did under his posts. I was his ghost follower, the one who always arrived in the small hours, with the phone half-lit and my cunt more worked up 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 showed up in my suggestions like a silent notification: an anonymous writer of erotic stories, with only a few thousand followers and a carefully built feed. He called himself Noctámbulo, with no surname and no face of his own. Where his face should have been, there were stolen images from some Pinterest board: masculine hands writing on a leather notebook, a rain-streaked window, a glass of whiskey beside an ashtray. Nothing concrete. Nothing recognizable.

In the questions his followers asked him, he let slip a few details. He said he was somewhere between his late twenties and his thirties —never exact—, that he was tall, that he trained 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 job. That lack of information, far from putting me off, became what attracted me most about him. He could be anyone. He could be mine.

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

I read a lot. I write too, though I never publish anything. That’s why at first I thought my fascination was literary. That I liked the way he built things. Lies. What I liked was imagining the hands that typed those things. The voice that read each sentence quietly before sending it out into the world. The breath of a man getting hard while he wrote about other women’s cunts. I pictured him with a hard cock inside his pants, typing with one hand and grabbing himself with the other, coming over the keyboard before hitting publish.

I never dared interact. It was my rule. Read, close the app, pretend nothing was happening. If I liked it, he would know. If I commented, I’d be signing a confession. And I didn’t want him to know I existed. My fantasy depended on staying invisible. On being the anonymous reader who appears in each of his stories, the one who slips two fingers into her cunt in bed, reading words another man wrote for no one in particular.

I learned his posting schedule without meaning to. He posted stories on Tuesdays and Fridays, around midnight. The occasional stray story on Sundays. Every so often, when insomnia caught up with him, a short text at four in the morning that showed more than he himself intended. Those were my favorites. The ones written half-asleep, with an extra comma somewhere, with verbs repeated. In those I believed I could really hear him.

I started making things up about him. I gave him a deep voice, a neutral accent with a dragged-out s somewhere. I gave him an apartment with wooden floors that creaked when you walked. An old dog sleeping at the foot of the armchair. A floor lamp by the window. A leather-bound notebook, even though he no longer wrote by hand. A dark shirt he pulled off with a tired gesture at the end of the day. I gave him a long, thick cock with prominent veins, one he’d pull out of his pants to stroke when he was writing a scene that really heated him up. I knew nothing about him, so I built him whole, brick by brick, cock included, so I could inhabit him when I read him.

One February night, everything changed. It was raining hard and I couldn’t sleep. I had the phone resting on my pillow, brightness turned all the way down, and my bedroom door closed because my roommate had stayed in the living room watching a movie. He uploaded a new story at 3:02 in the morning. The title was a short line: “For the one who reads and never writes.”

I felt a shiver before I even started reading. I thought it was a coincidence, that I was projecting, that nothing was really happening between him and 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 at which each post gained one more view. In the too-perfect silence that surrounded someone who is truly reading you. The writer in the story wondered what this invisible woman would be like. Whether she read in bed. Whether she bit her lip when she reached the paragraph where he, the narrator, described burying his tongue in another woman’s cunt. Whether she slid her fingers all the way in when she switched off the screen, whether she came with his name in her mouth without ever having spoken it aloud.

At some point I stopped breathing. I read the last lines three times. In the final 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 the phone and let it fall onto the pillow.

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

But my hands were shaking, 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’d just stepped into 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 it. I wanted to be clever, to sound confident, not seem like just another one. In the end I gave up and wrote only: “I exist.”

I sent it before I could regret it.

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 inching toward a cartridge.

“I was waiting. You took your time.”

Three words after three years. They took my breath away.

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

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

I put the phone down again. Sat on the bed. The rain had picked up, and against the windows it sounded like someone tapping with their nails. I took a deep breath. Picked up the phone again.

I wrote that I’d 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, with two fingers still inside my cunt. 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 anyone a photo of myself if I didn’t know them 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.

“Want to play?” he wrote.

I answered yes before I even thought 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 in my head for years whenever I turned off the light. I told him I imagined myself walking at night into a house that wasn’t mine. That there was a man writing at a table by a window. That I made no sound when I came in. That the man didn’t turn around, but he knew I was there. That he kept writing while I came up behind him, while I laid my hands on his shoulders, while I read over his shoulder what he was typing. That 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 after because I had never dared imagine it.

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

“The man stands up from the chair —he wrote—. He doesn’t say anything. 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 forces them open with his knees. He still hasn’t looked you in the eyes.”

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

“He tears your dress open. You’re not wearing a bra. He takes your tits in both hands, squeezes them hard, pinches your nipples until a gasp slips out of you. He bends down and sucks one, then the other, circling your nipple with his tongue, biting just enough for you to know he can.”

I was reading with one hand and had already pushed down my pajama pants with the other. I yanked my panties aside. They were soaked, truly soaked, with my cunt lips swollen and hot. I ran two fingers over my slit from top to bottom and my legs started to shake. I grabbed the phone again.

“He pushes you until you’re lying on the table —he wrote—. The papers stick to your sweat-slick back. He lifts your dress to your waist. He rips your panties off in one pull. He stares at your cunt for a full second, without touching you, and you hear how he breathes. Then he lowers his face and eats you.”

“He licks you slowly at first, from bottom to top, all the way. He sucks your lips, one and then the other. When it’s the clit’s turn, he pinches 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 press his face into your cunt. He slips two fingers inside you, curved upward, and keeps licking you. You start grinding 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 for the first time he smiles at you. He unbuckles his belt without taking his eyes off you. He pulls down his pants. His cock is hard, marked, with a clear drop at the tip. He grabs your ankles, spreads your legs, and drives it into you in one thrust all the way to the hilt.”

I let out a moan into the pillow. I had three fingers buried in my cunt and with my thumb I was rubbing my clit to 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 doing it himself.

“At first he fucks you slowly —he kept writing—. Every thrust full-length, pulling his cock almost all the way out and then pushing it back in until his balls slap your ass. You brace your heels on the edge of the table and move to take him. You dig your nails into his forearms. You ask for more. He tells you to shut up, and he takes your throat with one hand, not squeezing, just resting there, and that hand on you drives you crazy.”

“Now he starts fucking you hard. The table creaks. The papers fly. You scream every time he drives it in. He bends down and sucks one tit while he keeps pounding his cock all the way to the hilt. Then he straightens and grabs your hips to slam you against him. Every удар sends shockwaves up your spine. By now you don’t know whether he’s fucking your cunt or your throat, because your moans come out like you’re being drowned.”

“He flips you over. He lays you face down on the table, with your tits crushed against his written pages. He lifts your ass with one hand. He drives his cock into you again from behind. He grabs a lock of your hair and yanks your head back. Now he’s fucking you for real. Each thrust makes a dirty noise, skin against wet skin. You hear his broken breathing, the grunts that escape him every time he buries himself all the way in.”

“You come first. You come screaming against the wood, clenching around his cock with your cunt, trembling all over. He doesn’t stop. He keeps fucking you while you come, drawing out your orgasm until you can’t breathe anymore. And when he feels he’s about to come, he pulls out, turns you over again, climbs on top of you and comes on your tits, on your neck, in your open mouth. You stick out your tongue and swallow what lands.”

I was reading with one hand and touching myself with the other. I had turned the phone brightness to the lowest setting and his words seemed to rise out of 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 under my T-shirt and grabbed one breast, pinched my nipple until it hurt. My other hand had never stopped working my cunt. I was so wet it was running down my thighs and onto the sheet. I found myself biting the pillow to keep quiet, the screen lighting up my face and each new message making the phone vibrate against 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 spread my legs in my own bed as if the real man were there, shoved three fingers in to the knuckles, and started fucking myself with my hand, imagining it was his cock.

The orgasm rose up from inside me like a wave. My whole body tightened, my cunt convulsed around my fingers, I bit my arm not to scream. A warm gush escaped me and soaked my hand and the sheet. I finished before his last message arrived. I stayed there with my face buried in the pillow, still shaking, fingers inside my throbbing cunt, while the phone vibrated once more beside me. When I looked, he had written only one line.

“You came too, didn’t you?”

I didn’t answer. No need. He already knew.

He always knew.

Since that night, five months have passed. Sometimes we write to each other. Sometimes he disappears for weeks and I go back to being his ghost follower, 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, like always, and sometimes at four in the morning when insomnia catches him. In those, now, I think I can hear my own name between the lines, though I know that’s impossible, because I never told it to him.

When we play again, he writes how he’d spread my legs on top of his desk, how he’d shove his cock into my mouth until I started tearing up, how he’d make me come with his tongue three times before he let me touch him. I tell him I’d suck him on my knees, that I’d let him come on my face, that I’d swallow every drop. We both come with the phone 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 always when I ask him a question that matters. In the end he replied with something very much his own.

“If we meet, it ends. You know that, right?”

I knew it. That’s why I still read him in the early hours, with the lights low, the door shut, and my hand already under my panties before opening his profile. That’s why I still haven’t told him my name. That’s why, when he posts a new story, I still wait twenty-two minutes before writing to him. Because I know the day I send him a message without counting the minutes, the day I stop shaking before hitting send, the day I send him a photo of my open cunt instead of a word, it will all be over. And I’m not ready. Not yet.