The Writer Who Never Knew He Had Me

The first time his name appeared on my screen was on a Tuesday night, around eleven, when I should already have been asleep. A follow request from someone I didn’t know. The profile picture was a black-and-white old typewriter, and the description simply said: “writer, reader, curious.” No real name. No face photo. Just those three words and a posting history that took me twenty minutes to realize I wasn’t going to be able to stop reading.

I accepted the request without thinking much about it.

That was three years ago.

***

I never sent him a message. I never gave him a single like. I didn’t even open his profile from my account, because sometimes I would go in directly through the phone browser so as not to leave a trace. I didn’t want him to know I was reading him. I didn’t want him to know I existed.

There’s something strangely pleasurable about that: being invisible to someone who affects you.

His posts were short stories, sometimes just fragments of three or four paragraphs. Scenes where he described encounters with a precision that was not pornographic but unsettling, like when someone tells you a dream and manages to make you feel it in your body. That was what he did with words. He got under my skin without asking permission, and lower too, between my legs, where I ended up soaked through without having touched anything but the phone.

Once he wrote about a woman reading in bed at night, with the lights off, just the glow of the screen lighting her face. He wrote that that woman was the most erotic image he had ever seen. Not because she was naked. But because she was absorbed, completely inside something that was not him.

I was in my bed when I read it. With the lights off. With the glow of the screen lighting my face. And with my other hand tucked under the pajama pants, already drenched, moving slowly over my clit as if he could see me.

It took me a few seconds to realize it.

***

I don’t know his name. I don’t know what he looks like. In his posts, no image of himself ever appears: he uses illustrations, book covers, photographs of empty cities at dawn. From what he’s let slip in different replies to his followers, you can infer that he’s a little over twenty, that he works out regularly, that he reads a lot, and that he has a dry sense of humor that only surfaces in the comments, never in the texts. In the texts he’s something else. In the texts he’s completely serious.

His female followers adore him. Around three hundred, maybe more. Most of them women. Some leave him long comments explaining what each story did to them, what exact sentence they had to read twice, at what point they stopped breathing normally. Others are more direct. A couple have asked him things I won’t repeat — one asked him to describe how he’d fuck her against a window, another told him in detail what she did to herself while reading him — and he always replies with a politeness that isn’t coldness, but calculated distance.

I read those exchanges with a mix of curiosity and something like jealousy, though that sounded ridiculous even inside my own head.

I never interacted. Not once in three years.

***

The reason is simple: I was embarrassed. Not embarrassed to read him, that I did from day one without any guilt. I was embarrassed that he might know the effect he had. There’s something about admitting “your words turn me on” that leaves you completely exposed, and I wasn’t ready for that with a stranger who didn’t even know my name.

Besides, it wasn’t only desire that I felt when I read his texts. It was something more diffuse, harder to name. A kind of recognition. As if someone were describing exactly the kind of thing I had been thinking about for years but had never found written anywhere. That specific tension between two people before anything happens. That moment when any movement can break everything or start everything, and neither of them yet knows which it will be.

I read somewhere that the most powerful fantasy is not the one involving a specific body, but the one that leaves room to imagine. That true erotica lives in what is never fully shown. If that’s true, that writer was an absolute master.

***

There was one night, in winter, when he posted a longer story than usual. Three pages. A scene between two people who don’t know each other but recognize each other, who happen to be in the same place by accident and who, without many words, end up in an empty room in the building where they both work. He described the small details: the texture of the wall against which she leans her back, the way he brushes her hair out of her face before doing anything else, the temperature of the room.

Then came everything else. He wrote how he slid his hand under her skirt and found her panties already soaked, how he pulled them aside with two fingers and sank them into her cunt without asking, because there was no need to ask. He wrote the wetness. He wrote the very specific wet sound of those fingers going in and out while she bit his clavicle so she wouldn’t moan too loudly. He wrote the way she groped for his fly blindly, pulled out his hard cock, and gripped him firmly, learning the thickness with her palm as if memorizing it forever.

He wrote that she sank to her knees on the cold floor of that empty room and took him fully into her mouth, without ceremony, to the back of her throat, and that he held her hair with one hand while he fucked her mouth slowly, almost tenderly, looking into her eyes full of saliva. He wrote the way she sucked him — with her tongue around the head, with her lips tight at the base, with that absolute concentration of someone doing exactly what she wants to do — and how he had to pull out abruptly so he wouldn’t come too soon.

He wrote afterward the moment he lifted her up, turned her against the wall, hiked her skirt to her waist, and tore off her panties without asking permission. He wrote the first full thrust, all the way in, and the short, muffled gasp that escaped her when she realized how much of him she could take. He wrote the following thrusts, harder each time, his hand covering her mouth because she could no longer hide it, the sound of his thighs slapping against her ass, the smell of sex in a room that belonged to nobody.

He wrote how he turned her again, sat her on a table, yanked her legs apart, and devoured her soaked cunt with a hunger he hadn’t shown in the whole previous scene. He wrote the flat tongue moving up from the entrance to the clit, the slow circles, the way she pressed his head against her thighs and told him “don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop” until she came in his mouth with a long shudder that lasted several seconds.

He wrote that he rose with his chin shining and took her again, still tasting her on his lips, and that this time they fucked looking into each other’s eyes, face to face, saying absolutely nothing, until he came inside her with a low growl and she felt it all, every pulse, every hot spurt emptying into her cunt.

It was explicit. And it was also, in some impossible way, elegant. What he described was not just the act, but the texture of what each one felt: the doubt about whether the other was thinking the same thing, the moment when doubt becomes certainty, the exact instant when someone takes the first step and the world changes irrevocably.

I read it twice. The second time more slowly, paragraph by paragraph, like someone eating something very good and not wanting it to end.

Then I turned off the phone and stayed there a while in the dark, with the warmth of the duvet and my head full of images that were not the story’s characters, but mine. A version of me. And someone whose face I couldn’t see clearly but whose voice I imagined deep and calm, like the way that writer built his sentences: unhurried, without unnecessary noise.

I’m not going to lie about what I did next. I kicked off my pajama pants under the sheet, spread my legs, and slid two fingers into my cunt all at once, all the way in, because I was already so wet no more preparation was needed. I pulled them out, glistening, and took them to my clit to draw slow circles, imitating the imaginary tongue of an imaginary man who had learned to do that just by reading how he described it. Then I pushed them back inside, deeper, and with my other hand I pinched one nipple between forefinger and thumb until it hurt, because I wanted to feel something that wasn’t just soft pleasure. I wanted to feel it the way he wrote it: raw, unadorned.

I imagined it was him with his fingers inside me. That it was his mouth closing around my nipple. That it was his cock, the one from the story, forcing its way between my thighs. I lifted my hips against my own hand as if I were riding him, the duvet shoved aside, sweating in the middle of winter, biting my lip so I wouldn’t make a sound even though I lived alone. I fucked myself with three fingers, my wrist aching from the angle, until everything inside me clenched and I came squeezing them as if they were him, with a long gasp swallowed by the pillow.

Afterward I stayed like that, my hand still inside me, breathing, my cunt throbbing around my own fingers. I pulled them out slowly and brought them to my mouth without really thinking, because I needed to taste the thing he had aroused in me from a distance, without touching me even once.

I fell asleep late, and the next day the first thing I did when I woke up was open his profile from the browser, without logging in, to see if he had posted anything new.

There was nothing. Just the story from the night before, with fourteen new comments from women who felt the same as I did and, unlike me, told him so.

***

Three years. Three years following him without his knowing it.

In that time I moved apartments, quit a job I hated, started another one I like more, had a relationship that lasted fourteen months and ended without drama or resentment. Everything changed, except that Tuesday-night ritual, or Thursdays if he had posted something new in the middle of the week, or weekend dawns when I couldn’t sleep and needed something to carry my mind somewhere else.

Open the profile. Read. Close the phone. Put a hand between my legs or not, depending on the text, depending on the day. End up with something humming in my body that took a long time to go out.

At some point I realized it was the most honest kind of experience I had had with anyone in a long time, and the person in question had no idea I existed. That seemed sad and funny to me at once. But above all it seemed completely real.

***

Last month he posted something different. Not a story. A question, one of those you sometimes toss out to generate replies: “Is there anyone who reads you in silence and never told you so?”

I stared at the screen for several seconds without moving.

There was something provocative in that question, as if he knew the answer. As if he were speaking directly to those of us who do exactly that: read in silence, never say it, live in that comfortable and slightly cowardly space between desire and distance. Between wanting someone to know you and not being willing to pay the price of being known.

My thumbs hovered over the keyboard.

I wrote: “Yes.”

I deleted it.

I wrote: “Three years.”

I deleted it.

I wrote: “You’re describing exactly what I am to you. A ghost reader. And I wouldn’t change it for anything.”

I deleted everything. Closed the app.

***

That night I didn’t sleep well. Not because I was sad, but because of that kind of unspent energy desire creates when it’s contained for too long. I was in bed with my eyes open, thinking about him, about his question, about the comments he had probably already gotten from people braver than I was.

I wondered whether any of the women who replied was exactly like me: someone who had spent months or years reading him without saying a word, who had imagined him without having a concrete face on which to rest the fantasy, who had used his words as material for something more intimate and completely solitary. I wondered if he knew. If he wrote thinking about that: all the women on the other side of the screen, in the darkness of their rooms, with the phone on their chest and the other hand tucked under their panties.

I wondered what would happen if I sent him a message. Not a confession, just a “hi,” just a “I’ve been reading you for a long time and I don’t know why I never told you before.” I imagined the reply. I imagined several versions of the reply, and in one of those versions the conversation didn’t end with a polite “thank you for reading me.”

And then I stopped imagining what I would say and started imagining what I would do. The hands. The voice. The weight of a body I don’t know but have invented in quite some detail over three years of late-night reading. I imagined him ringing my doorbell on a Thursday afternoon and me opening it without being too surprised, as if on some level I’d been expecting him all that time.

I imagined his hands on my face, just like the character in the winter story. I imagined his deep voice telling me something unimportant, something completely banal, and yet sounding like the sentences he writes: unhurried, with nothing extra. And then I imagined that same voice, lower, against my ear, saying “I know, I know exactly what you’ve done with what I write, I want you to tell me.”

I imagined biting his lower lip in the hallway, with the door still half open, before giving him time to come all the way in. I imagined his hands searching for my ass over my pants and squeezing it until he lifted me, forcing me to wrap my legs around his waist. I imagined his cock pressing against my cunt through two layers of fabric, already hard, while he carried me blindly to the sofa.

I imagined him pulling my shirt over my head and sucking my nipples one after the other, unhurriedly, with the same patience he uses to build his longest sentences. The tongue around them, the soft teeth after, the whole mouth closing hot over my breast until I dug my nails into the nape of his neck. I imagined undoing his fly with clumsy fingers, taking out his cock and discovering it was exactly as I had been imagining it for years: thick, hard, with a clear drop already beading at the tip that I wiped away with my thumb and licked off while looking him in the eyes.

I imagined kneeling on the rug and taking him in my mouth slowly, savoring every inch, working my tongue under the frenulum while I went up and down. I imagined hearing his voice break for the first time, a low groan I had never read in any text, because texts don’t make sounds, and that one was mine. I imagined sucking him until he pulled my hair to get me off him, because he didn’t want to come in my mouth yet, because he had other plans.

I imagined him laying me back on the sofa, spreading my legs, and leaning down to look at my cunt up close, with that concentration he has when he reads. I imagined his tongue first slow, then more insistent, two fingers of his entering me at the same time, curling forward, finding the exact spot on the first try as if he’d studied it. I imagined coming all over his mouth without dignity, pressing his face against me, trembling on his tongue through a long orgasm that left my thighs weak.

I imagined then, without transition, being face-down on the sofa with my ass lifted and him behind me, driving into me hard, all at once, with a guttural groan from both of us. I imagined the sound of his hips slamming into mine, the weight of his body covering my back, his left hand finding my clit while he fucked me hard and his right hand gripping my hair to pull my head up. I imagined hearing him speak while he thrust — “like this, that’s how you were reading me, that’s how you got yourself worked up” — and I imagined answering him with a broken voice, coming again around his cock, squeezing him until he had to bite my shoulder to hold on.

I imagined him pulling out at the last moment, turning me over, straddling my chest, and finishing himself off with his hand over me, breathing hard, coming in thick spurts over my tits and my neck while I stuck out my tongue to catch whatever reached my mouth. I imagined staying there, smeared with him, while he let himself fall beside me without saying anything, exactly like in the stories: with no words left over.

I closed my eyes. My right hand had been between my legs for a while without my being fully aware of it. My fingers were soaked, my clit swollen, my cunt throbbing around three knuckles as if something had really happened. I came once more like that, alone, in the dark, biting my forearm so I wouldn’t scream, thinking about a man whose face I have never seen and whose voice I have invented entirely.

I never sent him a message.

But I didn’t regret anything either.

***

I still follow him. I still read his texts on Tuesday nights, or whenever he posts something new, or on the early-morning hours when I can’t sleep. I still sometimes go in through the browser, without an account, so there’s no record that I was there.

The difference is that now I know exactly what it is. It isn’t an obsession or a crush. It’s something smaller and more precise than all that: it’s the only place where I find exactly the kind of thing I need to read. And there’s something about the fact that he’s a stranger, that he doesn’t know my name or my face or what I do on Tuesday nights with my hand between my legs and his latest story open on the screen, that makes everything work in a way it wouldn’t if I truly knew him.

The erotics of distance. The fantasy of someone writing to you without knowing they’re writing to you.

If he ever finds out I exist, it will probably ruin everything. So for now I prefer to stay here, on the other side of the screen, being exactly what I am.

A ghost reader.

And let him keep writing.