The Reader Who Wrote Back to Me After a Year

It had been exactly a year since a reader had sent me a very long email, the kind where you can tell someone spent the whole night drafting it. At the time, I replied with two polite lines and buried it in a folder I never opened again. Not out of disinterest, but because life had become uphill and I had no head for anything beyond surviving the day.

But that afternoon was different. For weeks my body had been on fire, irritated from within, with the kind of desire that won’t go away on its own. I woke up wet and went to sleep the same way. Any brush of clothing against my nipples distracted me halfway through a sentence. I was tired of myself, of my own hand, of fantasizing about nameless shadows.

So I opened the forgotten folder and looked for his email. His name was Mateo. I reread what he had written me a year ago and, this time, I understood it differently. It wasn’t a shy admirer’s message. It was an invitation I hadn’t known how to read.

I replied without thinking too much about it. If he doesn’t answer, I lose nothing, I told myself, and hit send before I could change my mind.

—I thought you were never going to write back to me —his reply came twenty minutes later.

Twenty minutes. A year of silence from me and he answered in twenty minutes, as if he’d had the email tab open the whole time. Something about that pleased me more than I was willing to admit.

***

At first we were cautious. I asked him about his year, he asked me about mine. There were a couple of polite messages, of testing the waters, the kind that help you measure how far the other person is willing to go. But the politeness didn’t last long. I hadn’t written to him again to talk about the weather.

—I’m going to be honest —I typed—. I wrote to you because I’ve been horny for weeks and it won’t go away.

He took a while to answer. I imagined the line had thrown him, that maybe I’d been too direct. And then this came:

—Then tell me. What is it that won’t go away?

I smiled alone in front of the screen, my heart pounding in places that weren’t my chest. I settled into the bed, leaned my back against the headboard, and balanced the phone on my bent knees.

I told him. I told him I woke up wanting someone to fill me, that my nipples were hard all damn day, that I’d spent too much time sleeping on the wrong side of the bed. I spared him nothing. I was surprised by how easily it came to me, the freedom of writing to someone who didn’t know my face, who wasn’t going to judge me at breakfast.

—You’re driving me wild —he replied—. And I haven’t even told you what I plan to do to you yet.

—Tell me.

***

What came after was a conversation unlike any I’d had before. Mateo knew how to write. He didn’t use those worn-out lines from men who only want to finish fast. He built. He delayed. He made me wait.

—The first thing I want —he wrote— is to undress you slowly. Not rip your clothes off. Lower one strap, then the other, and look at you for a while before I touch you. I want to watch you get impatient.

I closed my eyes for a second. I pictured it so clearly that I felt the cold air on my bare skin.

—And then? —I wrote.

—Then I kiss your neck. But only your neck. I go down with my mouth and stay on your breasts for a long while, because I’m obsessed with them. I play with your nipples with my tongue until you ask me to go lower, and even then I still won’t go down right away.

I clenched my thighs without even realizing it. He was right to make me wait; the waiting was driving me crazy, and that was exactly what he wanted.

I decided I wasn’t going to be the only one burning. If he knew how to play with words, so did I. After all, there, hidden behind a screen, I could brag without shame about the one thing that made me vain: what I can do with my mouth.

—Now it’s my turn —I wrote—. I’m going to tell you the first thing I’d do.

—I’m all yours.

—I’d start by kissing just the tip. Softly, barely touching you, so you’d go desperate. Then I’d go down with my tongue, slow, all the way to the bottom, and linger there for a while, sucking you slowly, feeling your whole body tighten.

—God.

—When you start moaning, I’d come back up just as slowly, running my tongue over all of you. And only when you couldn’t take it anymore, I’d take you all at once, all the way in, and let you move however you wanted. Use my mouth however you like.

There were a few eternal seconds without a reply. I imagined him on the other side, phone in one hand and the other occupied, and I liked the image so much I had to take a deep breath.

—You’re going to pay for that —he finally answered—. You have no idea how many times I’m going to remember this message.

—That was the idea.

***

We kept going like that for days. It wasn’t one single horny night and then silence. It became a new routine, delicious, slipping into every empty corner of my day. I’d write to him mid-morning, between two tasks, a short line I knew would leave him thinking about it until the afternoon. He’d answer when he could, sometimes with a single line capable of soaking me through at the worst possible moment.

Once he wrote to me while I was standing in line at the supermarket. I opened the phone out of habit and read: “I can’t get your mouth out of my head. Do you know how hard it is to work like this?” I had to put the phone away and stare fixedly at the shelves, cheeks burning, feeling like the most obscene woman in the whole line.

Another night I decided to turn the game around. Instead of telling him what I wanted him to do to me, I described what I was doing in that very moment, alone in my bed, with his last message still lighting up the screen. I narrated every movement of my hand, slowly, as if instead of writing it I were showing it to him live.

—Don’t stop —he wrote—. Tell me everything. Don’t leave anything out.

And I left nothing out. I told him all the way to the end, until I let the phone fall onto the sheet with my breathing ragged. It took me a while to write again.

—Are you still there? —I asked.

—Barely. You’ve just ruined me for anything else tonight.

I laughed alone in the dark, with a feeling of power I hadn’t had in a long time. There was nothing more exciting than knowing the exact effect my words had on someone kilometers away.

What surprised me most was how much I already cared about his desire, the desire of a man whose voice I didn’t even know. It wasn’t just what he said; it was how he made me feel seen, desired, waited for. Every message of his was a hand on my skin.

***

One rainy afternoon, with the sound of water against the window in the background, Mateo told me something that changed the tone of everything.

—I have a house in the countryside —he wrote—. Far from everything. There are no neighbors, no noise, nobody for kilometers. Just the sky and the silence.

—And why are you telling me that? —I asked, though I already knew.

—Because ever since we started talking I can’t stop imagining you there. Outside. No need to keep our voices down. No walls, no neighbors banging, nobody. Just you screaming everything you want under the sun.

I stared at the screen for a long while. The image formed on its own, complete: the grass, the heat, the open sky, the two of us with no witnesses but the wind. The idea of being able to moan without measuring myself, to scream at will, to let my body make all the noise I normally swallow down, clenched something inside me in a new way.

—Tell me more about that house —I asked him.

—There’s a wooden porch overlooking the fields. I imagine you there at dusk, with the last light hitting your skin. And at night, when it cools down, I imagine you inside, in front of the fire, on top of me, moving slowly, with all the time in the world because nobody is waiting for us.

—Under the sun and under the moon —I wrote, almost to myself.

—Exactly. All day long. Until we have no strength left.

—I imagine you entering me just as the sun goes down —I wrote him, letting myself be carried away—. With the grass underneath and the heat still stuck to the skin. No hurry, because there’s no clock telling us anything.

—And at dawn again —he replied—. When it cools and we cover ourselves with just one blanket. Slowly, half asleep, as if we had our whole lives to do it.

I had never longed so much for a place I had never been to. That house, which probably didn’t resemble the one I was imagining at all, had become the fixed stage for all my fantasies. The porch, the fire, the open fields. And him in the middle of it all, waiting for me.

That night I didn’t need help from anyone or anything beyond rereading his words. It was enough to close my eyes and place myself on that porch, with the sun going down, his mouth tracing over me and no one for kilometers to care how much noise I made.

***

I don’t know if I’m ever going to meet Mateo in person. Part of me fears that reality won’t live up to what we’ve built with words; another part dreams of that wooden porch and of finding out whether his mouth lives up to what his keyboard promises. For now it’s enough for me to know he exists, that on the other side there’s someone who desires me with the same intensity with which I desire him.

And that’s what I like most about all this: discovering that desire can ignite completely without a single touch, that one well-placed sentence at just the right time can make me wetter than any hand. That fantasy, when shared with someone who knows how to hold it, has a power no hurried body can match.

I hadn’t felt so alive, so hot, so eagerly waiting for something in years. And it all began because I dared to open a forgotten folder and write three lines to a stranger.

Let the shy ones learn, I think every time I hear one of his messages arrive. Sometimes all it takes is daring to write first.