The Writer Who Made Me Burn Without Knowing I Existed

Three years ago I got a notification from someone I didn’t know. It was a follow request, nothing more, one of those that come in every day on the invisible edges of the algorithm. I had five free minutes before dinner, and out of pure laziness I opened the profile before rejecting it.

There were no photos of him. Or there were, but anyone with two working brain cells could tell they didn’t belong to him: a man with his back to the sea, another writing with his hood up, a long shadow against a white wall. All chosen carefully so as to show nothing. The rest of the profile was short phrases on a black background. Fragments. Poems. Microfiction.

Erotica.

But not the cheap kind, the kind with emojis and blurred faces. This was something else. Words that entered through the eyes and settled low in the stomach. Words that seemed written for one single person, even though a thousand were reading them.

I read the first post and my throat closed up.

It described the waiting of a woman who couldn’t sleep. It said she stared at the ceiling and bit her lower lip until she drew blood. It said the body remembers better than memory does. It said women who wait are the ones who know the most. In another fragment he described a mouth opening slowly over a hard cock, the tongue circling the head before swallowing it whole, the saliva running down the balls, and he did it with such anatomical precision that I clenched my thighs under my desk.

I accepted the request without thinking twice. It wasn’t kindness. It was curiosity, with my gut tight and my cunt already wet, why lie to myself.

That same night, when Mariano was already asleep and the house was wrapped in that dense silence only neighborhood houses have at three in the morning, I went back to his profile and read everything he’d posted that month. There were more than forty entries. It took me two hours. When I put the phone down, my breathing was fast, my panties were soaked, and my nipples were so hard they hurt against the fabric of my pajamas, and I hadn’t touched myself. I didn’t dare. Not yet.

***

From that first night until today, a thousand days have passed. I counted them once, because I’m obsessive about numbers, and because I needed to put a figure to something that had no shape.

I don’t know what his name is. I don’t know where he lives. I don’t know how old he is. I suspect he’s in his thirties, because in some of his texts he casually mentions a decade I lived through as a teenager, but I could be wrong. In the few times he’s answered questions from his female followers, he says he’s tall. That he works out. That he likes the sea, even though he doesn’t live near it. That he reads every day. That he writes about women he’s never going to meet. And that he fucks, if the hints he drops are anything to go by, the way he writes: without rushing, biting, staring into your eyes until the woman comes twice before he lets her breathe.

I am one of those women.

I never liked a post. Never commented. Never sent him a message. Not once in three years.

The others did. Hundreds. Thousands, maybe. Women asking him to dedicate a poem to them, to write them something personal, confessing what they do to themselves with their fingers while reading him. He replies to a few. Politely, distantly, with that courtesy people have who’ve learned that silence is more powerful than an answer.

I prefer to be his shadow.

There’s something addictive about staying invisible. It isn’t shyness, or not only shyness. It’s the certainty that if he answered me, if he replied even with an emoji, something would break. Something delicate, something that only exists while he doesn’t know who I am.

I watch him from behind the glass, like those girls in movies who stand at the nightclub door watching everyone else dance. I save his posts in a hidden folder on my phone. The folder is called “recipes” so nobody gets tempted to open it. Inside there are more than three hundred screenshots. Sometimes I wonder if I’m the only one who does that, or if there are other women in cities I don’t know doing exactly the same thing, collecting his words the way you collect letters from a lover who doesn’t exist.

***

Mariano and I have been married for eleven years. We love each other, I suppose. We laugh together, we pass the keys to each other when one of us leaves for work, we sleep wrapped around each other on Sundays. We don’t yell. We don’t cheat. We don’t betray each other beyond that quiet boredom that settles into couples after the first decade and that no one dares name.

With him I fuck on Tuesdays and Fridays. That’s what we decided years ago, when we stopped being wild and started being functional. Twice a week, almost always in the same position, almost always with the lights off. He gets on top, opens my legs with his knee, slides his cock into me slowly, all the way, and pumps in a calm rhythm, always the same, a domestic, tidy back-and-forth. He sucks one nipple for a minute and a half — I’ve timed it without meaning to — and then pushes himself upright again. I close my eyes and rub my clit with two fingers until I come. He watches me come the way you watch a well-oiled machine, then comes inside me thirty seconds later with a short grunt and pulls out of me without ceremony. It isn’t bad. I finish. He does too. Then he kisses my shoulder, leaves his cum running down my thigh, and falls asleep.

With him I never used to touch myself. Before my anonymous poet, I mean.

Now I do it almost every night.

I wait for Mariano to fall asleep. I listen to his breathing until it turns deep, that submarine breathing I know by heart. Then I take my phone to the bathroom, lock the door, tug my panties down to my ankles, and sit on the edge of the bathtub with my legs open. I open the recipes folder.

I start anywhere. Sometimes I reread a fragment I already know by heart, one where he describes a woman undressing while looking at herself in the mirror, opening her cunt lips with two fingers and watching herself shine. Other times I open a new post, one he uploaded that same afternoon, and I read it slowly, with my hand resting on my thigh, not moving yet, waiting for my body to ask permission.

There are nights when I don’t need much. Two sentences, three, and I’m already sliding my middle finger between my lips, searching for my swollen, slippery clit. I start with slow circles, just the pad barely grazing, while I read how he describes a woman on her knees sucking a cock all the way down her throat. My mouth falls open. The circles speed up. With my other hand I pinch one nipple over my pajamas, hard, the way I know he would, twisting it until a lash of heat drops into my belly.

When I can’t stand it anymore, I shove two fingers into my cunt. I pull them out dripping and bring them back to my clit, sliding them, tracing eights, pressing. Sometimes I use my thumb on my asshole too, just the tip, because in one of his texts he wrote that women who wait need to be opened up everywhere. The first time I dared, I nearly fell off the bathtub. Now I know exactly how far to push.

I imagine his voice. The voice I invented for him. Low, deep, right by my ear. “Keep going, don’t stop, I want to see you come thinking about me, slut, my quiet little slut, the one who never writes me.” I tell myself those things with my lips closed, in a whisper that never quite makes a sound, while I bury my fingers up to the palm and move my hips against my own hand as if it were a cock.

There are other nights when I read for an hour without moving, because anticipation is more intense than anything else. I learned that from him: waiting is doing it too. I stay there with my cunt swollen, soaking the edge of the bathtub, and only when my pulse is pounding between my legs with a force that hurts do I let myself start.

When I come, I bite the towel. I can’t help it. It’s a spasm that rises from my feet, contracts my belly, makes me arch my back against the cold tiles. Sometimes a second orgasm hits me without me looking for it, just from keeping my fingers pressed inside for another minute. I end with my hand shining up to the wrist, my thighs shaking, my breathing ragged.

Afterward I wash my hand, wash my face, look at myself in the mirror and pretend nothing happened. I go back to bed, slip under the sheets careful not to wake Mariano, and stare at the ceiling. The same ceiling that woman from the first post I read has been staring at for three years now.

I’m starting to think that woman is me.

***

Sometimes I’m afraid.

Afraid of going crazy. Afraid I’m idealizing a man who may be short, bald, bad-tempered, miserable. Afraid that one day he’ll post a real photo and everything will break. Afraid he’ll stop posting. Afraid he’ll post something and I’ll take it as a direct sign and be wrong in the worst possible way.

One night, six months ago, I came very close to writing him.

He had posted a text about a woman who looked at a stranger’s profile every night and never wrote to him. He described every gesture. He described how she bit her thumbnail, how she took off her glasses to bring her face closer to the phone, how sometimes she smiled to herself and then felt ashamed of smiling. He also described how she slipped her hand into her pants without stopping reading, how she stroked her wet cunt over her panties before pulling them aside, how she licked her fingers afterward. I do all of that. I do it exactly like that.

It was impossible that he was describing me. Impossible. There would have to be a camera inside my room. He would have to know who I am, and he doesn’t. He can’t know.

And yet every sentence was me. Every pause. Every silence he imagined, I had lived.

That night I locked myself in the bathroom with my heart hammering against my ribs and touched myself reading his text for the third time. I came in less than two minutes, almost with anger, squeezing my clit like I wanted to hurt myself, biting the inside of my cheek so I wouldn’t cry out. When I finished, with my pulse still racing and my fingers sticky, I opened the private chat. I typed: “How do you know?”

I deleted the question before sending it. I locked the phone. I left the bathroom. I got into bed and lay there rigid as a corpse until dawn.

The next day, he posted something else and I kept being his shadow.

***

What I like most about him, if I can say I like anything about someone who doesn’t fully exist, is that he writes as if he knows how to wait.

He doesn’t rush. He doesn’t describe bodies all at once. He lingers on the edges. On how a woman ties her hair up before walking into the room. On how she slowly takes off one stocking, thinking about something else. On how she smells her own skin after a long shower. On how her thighs tense when someone runs a tongue over the inner face of the softer one, before reaching her cunt. Small things, things only someone alone notices.

When I read him, I don’t feel read. I feel seen. And that’s worse, because Mariano looks at me every night and never sees me.

Yesterday he posted something that left me wrecked all day. It said: “There are women who spend years waiting for the signal that’s never going to come. Not because the signal doesn’t exist, but because they decided, without realizing it, to be the scenery and not the protagonists.”

I read it three times at work, locked in the floor bathroom. The fourth time I read it out loud, in a whisper, to see if hearing it sounded different from reading it. It sounded worse. I lifted my skirt right there, leaning against the cubicle door, and slipped my hand under my underwear. I was soaked. I rubbed my clit with my middle finger, fast, without ceremony, biting my lower lip so I wouldn’t make a sound, while I listened to footsteps outside. I came in silence, squeezing my eyes shut, with my forehead pressed to the metal door. Then I cleaned myself with toilet paper, washed my hands twice, and went back to my desk with a blank face.

That afternoon, when I got home, I stood in the kitchen doorway watching Mariano make dinner. He was humming something. He was cutting an onion with that calm efficiency he has for everything. He loved me. I loved him.

But I was scenery too.

***

Two months ago, my sister caught me in her kitchen staring at my phone with the face I make when I’m reading him. She set her mug down on the counter and looked at me in silence until I lifted my eyes.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yeah, just tired.”

“Is there someone?”

“No.”

Both answers were true and both were lies.

When I left, my sister hugged me a second longer than usual. I thought maybe she also had a hidden profile on her phone, someone she read in secret, a ridiculous-named folder where she kept screenshots. I didn’t ask her. Some things are more beautiful when no one says them out loud.

***

Tonight, Mariano is away on a trip.

I’ve repeated that to myself three times since I sat down on the bed with my phone. Mariano is away on a trip, the house is mine, nobody can hear me, nobody’s going to ask why I take so long to fall asleep.

I opened his profile two hours ago. I read what he posted this morning. Then I read what he posted last week. Then I started rereading old things, things from two years ago, things from the early days, when I barely knew him.

I’m naked from the waist down. I didn’t need the bathroom this time. My legs are spread over the sheet and there’s a pillow under my ass, and I’ve already come twice without rushing, once with my fingers and once with the rounded handle of the hairbrush that was on the nightstand and turned out to have exactly the thickness of the cock I imagine for him. I’m still wet. Still swollen. I could come a third time without trouble. But I’m not touching myself. Not now.

And right now, as I think all this, I have the private chat cursor open on the screen.

I haven’t written anything yet. I stare at the white rectangle. I stare at the keyboard. I stare at the little airplane icon that’s supposed to send it.

I think about all the things I could tell him. That I’ve been reading him for three years. That I’m the ghost follower who never liked a post. That I have a folder on my phone called “recipes.” That many times, in the dark of the bathroom, I’ve come with his words in my head, biting the towel, my fingers buried to the palm. That right now my cunt is soaked and there’s a brush mark between my thighs.

I also think about all the things I don’t want to tell him. That I’m married. That I’m thirty-seven. That every time Mariano fucks me I try to imagine the cock opening me is the cock of a man I don’t know what looks like. That I invented his voice myself, low and calm, and that if one day he called me on the phone and sounded different, I would die.

I think about whether I’ll be ready to break three years of silence for a message that, if I’m lucky, will get a polite reply.

I think about whether, after breaking it, I’ll still be able to touch myself listening to the voice I invented.

I close the phone.

I don’t turn it off. I set it face down on the nightstand and lie there staring at the ceiling, that same ceiling the woman who didn’t yet know she was me has been staring at for three years.

Maybe tomorrow.

Maybe never.

Maybe that’s exactly what he wants from us.