Three Years Following the Man Who Doesn’t Know Me

Three years ago I got a notification I wasn’t expecting. A profile called @versosnocturnos had followed me on the photo app where everyone posts their perfectly edited lives. Before accepting, I went into his account and stood there in front of the screen for several minutes: he had no photos of his face, only fragments of text written over dark backgrounds, verses that went straight to the point. In his bio there was only one line: erotic writer. And below that, a link to his channel on the blue messaging app.

I accepted without thinking too much about it.

That was the beginning of something I still don’t know how to name.

***

I know very little about him. What I do know I pieced together from stray details he himself left in his posts over these three years. In one Q&A round he answered that he’s in his twenties, maybe closer to thirty, though he never specified. When someone asked him directly how old he was, he replied with a single sentence:

—Does it matter?

He didn’t add anything else. And he was right, it didn’t matter, or at least that’s what I convinced myself to think.

His profile pictures always have the same aesthetic: a man with a good build, the kind of body that clearly looks worked on, but with no visible face. I never knew whether those images were of him or of some stranger pulled from the internet. Someone asked him that once in the same questions section. He ignored the question. That told me something too about what he’s like: he doesn’t answer what he doesn’t want to answer, and he doesn’t bother inventing excuses not to.

***

The problem, if it can be solved, is that I started reading him seriously.

Not the way you skim any random post on that app, thumb sliding before your brain processes anything. But really: with my phone propped on the pillow late at night, when the house was silent and I had the time and the loneliness to give full attention to every line he wrote.

He writes in detail. That’s what hits me most about his style. He doesn’t use pretty words to disguise what he’s saying, but says exactly what he means with a linguistic economy I find elegant and a little intimidating. When he describes a scene there are no filler adjectives: when a character sticks it in another, he writes it that way, without half-measures, without metaphors. The cock goes into the cunt, the tongue sucks the nipples, the fingers sink into the ass. He names everything by its name and that’s what makes his texts impossible to put down.

He writes about desire in a way I haven’t found anywhere else. Not desire as a finished product, but the moment before: the tension, the waiting, the awareness that something is about to happen. But he also writes the after: the moment when the woman in the story feels the first thrust all the way to the back, the exact second the cock opens her from the inside, the stream of hot semen running down her thighs when he finishes. He does that well too. Maybe better than anyone I’ve read before.

The first time I finished one of his long stories I sat motionless for several minutes with my hand between my legs without having noticed when it got there. Not just because of the explicit content, though that too. It was because of the feeling that someone had named with exact precision something I had never known how to put into words on my own.

***

I became a ghost follower without consciously deciding to.

I never liked a single post. Never commented. Never sent him a private message. I saw everything, read everything, mentally saved whole paragraphs I thought were perfect, and went on with my day as if nothing had happened. As if those words didn’t follow me on the ride home, in the shower when water ran over my tits and I stayed under the stream longer than necessary with it aimed between my legs, at work when I stared at the screen without really seeing what was in front of me and my cunt clenched beneath my clothes just from remembering one of his lines.

My friends don’t know that profile exists. No one knows. It’s mine in the only possible sense when something has no reciprocity: it’s a one-way secret, with no witnesses and no consequences for anyone but me.

***

There was one night in particular, about eight months ago, that I remember more clearly than the others.

It was a Thursday. I’d had one of those long days that doesn’t leave you sleepy so much as awake and without energy for anything concrete. I got into bed after midnight, opened my phone almost on instinct, and saw he’d posted something new: a long story, the kind he writes every two or three weeks and that always has more text than you expect when you see the thumbnail.

I started reading.

The story was about a woman who had spent weeks fantasizing about a man she barely knew. Not a complete stranger, but someone she knew a few things about and not enough. Someone whose voice she had never heard but who already occupied too much space in her head. The woman watched him from afar, never interfering, building up that tension with nowhere to put it. At night she masturbated thinking of him, with two fingers sunk into her cunt to the knuckles, biting the pillow so she wouldn’t make a sound, and when she finished she was left with the bitter taste of knowing he didn’t even know she existed.

I read the first line and felt the air in the room change temperature. My nipples hardened beneath the old T-shirt I slept in.

I kept reading.

In the story, the woman finally acted. Not dramatically or with big declarations. She simply wrote a short message and sent it before fear had time to talk her out of it. What followed was a conversation that moved slowly and then not so slowly. In three messages he was already asking if she was wet. By five, she was describing how she was sliding her fingers into herself while she wrote him. By ten, they’d agreed to meet that same night.

He described every exchange with the same precision as always: that way of naming things without detours, without ornament, that I find almost unbearably attractive when I encounter it in his texts. And then he described the meeting. The apartment door opening, her walking in, him grabbing her by the nape and kissing her against the wall before she could even say hello. His hand slipping under her skirt and checking with two fingers that she was soaked, drenched through to her panties, ready to be fucked right there standing up. The first thrusts against the wall, with her still wearing her purse over her shoulder because she hadn’t had time to drop it. Then the bed. Then his mouth sucking her cunt for what felt like hours, until she screamed for him to stop and at the same time grabbed his hair so he wouldn’t move. The way he turned her over and fucked her from behind while her face was pressed to the mattress and her ass was lifted. The semen running down her back at the end, because he pulled out at the last second to finish all over her.

By the time I got halfway through I had my phone resting on my chest and my eyes on the ceiling.

—This is me —I said softly, to no one.

Not me as a person, because he doesn’t even know I exist. But yes, the situation. The same distance, the same silent watching, the same desire building up with nowhere to go.

***

I set the phone on the nightstand. Outside, a car passed slowly along the wet street. Inside, the only light was the screen turning itself off.

I thought about him. Not in any concrete image, because I don’t have one that is truly his. I thought about the voice I don’t know. The hands I’ve never seen. Really, what I thought about was the mind behind those texts: someone who understands something about desire that I struggle to put into words, who understands it so well he turns it into something readable for everyone else.

I wondered if he knew there were women like me reading him. Ghost followers who never give any sign of life but are there all the same, on the other side of the screen, completely attentive. Who read him at two in the morning with the phone on the pillow and keep thinking about his lines long after turning the screen off. Who slip a hand under their pajamas while they read and come with his name in their head even though they don’t know his real name.

I figured he did know. I figured that’s why he wrote that way.

I ran my hand over my stomach without thinking. An automatic gesture, almost unconscious. The room was silent, I was alone, and I’d spent too many weeks carrying that tension without doing anything useful with it. I slid my hand a little lower, over the pajama bottoms, and when I passed over my pubis I felt the heat that had already been gathering there since before I decided anything. I was wet. Not a little. Soaked to the point that the fabric of my pants had already absorbed the moisture and was sticking to my cunt lips every time I closed my legs.

I closed my eyes.

I imagined him with the description he’d given of himself: tall, worked build, that quiet seriousness you read between the lines in everything he writes. No concrete face. Only presence, which is the hardest thing to invent and yet that night came easily, naturally, as if I’d been building it for months without knowing it was for this.

I imagined him reading me. That I was the one who had sent that story message. I imagined his voice, completely invented, deep and direct like his writing, telling me in my ear what he wanted to do to me, without asking permission, without apologizing for anything. I imagined his hands moving with the same deliberate precision with which he chooses words when he describes a scene: without hurry, one hand gripping my jaw to keep my face lifted toward him, the other slipping under my shirt and slowly rising until it found my hard nipples and pinched them until a sound escaped me that he wasn’t going to let me hold back.

I pulled my pajama pants down to my thighs. I shifted my panties to one side without taking them off. I felt the cold air of the room against my exposed cunt and for a second I stayed like that, not moving, letting the waiting be part of what was happening. I’d learned that from him too: that the moment before has its own value.

My fingers moved slowly between my lips. Not with the perfect choreography of his own stories. Honestly and a little awkwardly, the way it really happens when you’re alone and have too much in your head and your body simply wants something concrete. I was wetter than I’d been in a long time. My fingers slid in without effort, slick with my own moisture, and when I reached my clit I pressed with the pad of my middle finger and let the air out between my teeth.

—Fuck —I murmured.

I started moving in small circles, with just the right pressure, not speeding up yet. I took my time. There was no reason not to. I had the whole night and no one on the other side of the wall to hear me.

I imagined him kneeling between my legs. That was the first concrete image that formed. His head between my thighs, parting me with his hands to get access, and his tongue flat, licking me from the opening of my cunt up to my clit in a long, slow movement. No hurry, again. As if he had all the time in the world for me. Then his tongue focusing on my clit, his lips sucking me, two fingers slipping in slowly and curling to find the exact spot that he, in his stories, always described as if he knew it by heart.

While I imagined him, two of my own fingers sank into my cunt. I was so wet they slid in to the knuckles without the least resistance. I felt my own walls squeeze around them and threw my head back against the pillow. I started moving them in and out, slowly, while with my other hand I pulled my shirt up to my neck and grabbed one breast. I pinched my nipple hard, the way he would have done it, and the brief pain shot through my whole body and went straight down to my cunt.

I switched hands. With my left I kept fucking myself with my fingers and with my right I went back to my clit, in faster circles now, without losing the rhythm. My breathing had gotten short a long time ago. My legs were spread as wide as I could manage and my feet planted on the mattress for leverage. The bed started moving a little with my own rhythm.

At some point, with my eyes closed and my fingers sunk to the bottom, I thought of a specific paragraph from that story I’d just read. The scene where the man turned her over and fucked her from behind without warning, with her still recovering from coming against his mouth. The way he described the first thrust: without announcing it, without ceremony, with that silent brutality he has when he writes about what really matters. I thought of that concrete image — his cock opening me from the inside while my face was pressed to the mattress — and felt something clench and then open.

I pulled my fingers out of my cunt and used them to make my clit wetter. I pushed them back in. Pulled them out again. I was close and I knew it. The wet sound of my own fingers going in and out was the only thing audible in the room, and for a second I imagined he could hear it from the other side of the country, from wherever he was writing at that moment.

—Fuck me —I said softly, to no one. To him, even though he wasn’t there—. Fuck me good.

I came with three fingers inside me and my other hand pressing my clit in tight circles. The orgasm split me in half. I felt the walls of my cunt contracting around my own fingers in long pulses, one after another, and a louder moan escaped me than I intended. My legs trembled on the mattress. A warm wet patch slid down my thigh, toward the sheets, and I didn’t care.

For a while I didn’t think about anything else.

***

When I was done I stayed looking at the ceiling. My fingers still inside me, now motionless. My body relaxed, my head still a little lit up. I could feel the residual throbs of my cunt squeezing around my fingers every few seconds, each one weaker than the last. Outside, the street had gone quiet.

I pulled my hand out slowly. My fingers were sticky all the way to the palm. For a second I brought them to my mouth without thinking and sucked them, tasting myself, imagining it was him making me suck them. Then I wiped them on the sheet, without elegance.

I opened my phone. His post was still there, with the same likes as before. None of them mine. No comment from me.

I stayed a ghost.

***

We’ve been like this for three years, he and I, even though he doesn’t know I exist in that equation. In that time he’s posted dozens of stories, several poems I thought were too good for the format he uploaded them on, and long Q&A rounds that gave me more information about how he thinks than any formal interview could have. I’ve seen him answer stupid questions patiently, sidestep the ones he doesn’t want to answer with ease, and every so often toss off some stray sentence about his writing process that I find more interesting than most of the stories he publishes.

I know he reads with discipline. I know he writes every morning before doing anything else. I know he has firm opinions about certain things and expresses them without apologizing or waiting for approval.

Once, in that questions section, someone wrote that his texts made her feel things she couldn’t describe. That she got wet reading him, was the exact word she used. He replied:

—That’s what they’re for.

Two words. Exact. No further explanation, because none was needed.

***

Sometimes I think about sending him something. A short phrase. Not a declaration or a proposition. Just some acknowledgment that his texts exist and reach places he can’t see from where he is. Concrete, physical places. Places that more than once made me come alone in bed with his ghost name in my mouth.

I always find a reason not to.

That I’m shy, mainly. That I don’t know what I expect to get out of that interaction. That I prefer the version of him I have in my head, built only from his words, without the noise of a real conversation that could ruin it or complicate it in ways I don’t feel like dealing with. That I’m afraid of being just one more among the many who write him similar things, telling him which fingers they fucked themselves with while reading him, and that he’ll respond with the same distant courtesy he probably responds to all of them with.

That, above all, I’m afraid reality will be less than what I invented.

***

There is a strange logic to this kind of bond. It isn’t obsession, it isn’t platonic love in the classic sense of the expression. It’s something more specific: the awareness that a person exists in the world and produces things that matter to you, and the decision to remain on the margins of that existence without claiming any space inside it.

In a way it’s comfortable. It doesn’t have the complications or disappointments of the real. It doesn’t have the risk of discovering that the person you imagined and the person they really are have nothing to do with each other. It doesn’t have the risk that the cock you masturbate imagining might, in bed, turn out to be something different from the one you built while reading him.

But on nights like that one, when I finish reading him and am left with that particular feeling of having touched something true — with my fingers still wet and my heart still beating against my ribs — I wonder what would happen if I crossed that distance. If I stopped being the reader who leaves no trace.

So far, the question remains suspended. Without an answer. Only the question itself, waiting for the moment when I have enough courage or enough desperation to finally answer it.

For now, I keep reading.

And he still doesn’t know I exist.