My Lovers and Their Trades: What I Discovered at 50
When I moved back to the neighborhood where I grew up, it took me a few days to recognize it. The streets were narrower than I remembered, the squares smaller. I went back at fifty with a lighter suitcase and more orderly ideas than ever before. I had spent months building something serious with Claudia, a woman who was good for me, who held me up to the mirror of my own contradictions without asking me to stop being who I was. And that forced me to think seriously about everything else.
I made a decision. It wasn’t the first time I had tried, but this time I felt it was final: I would keep seeing men, because denying that would be lying to myself, but I would do it with criteria. I no longer had the energy for encounters that weren’t worth it. I wanted no more rush, no more anonymity, no more men who came and went from my bed without leaving anything behind.
My rules were simple but non-negotiable. Over forty years old—if they were older than me, even better. That they kissed with tongue, deep, without fear: that turns me on more than anything else, and a man who doesn’t kiss seems incomplete to me. That they came at least once a month; less than that makes no sense. That they weren’t too skinny; I prefer men who weigh more than eighty kilos, although there are exceptions one doesn’t plan for. And that they could talk about something beyond sex. A brief conversation before or after doesn’t seem like too much to ask.
With that filter, I started selecting. I ended up with six or seven men. None of them had a fixed role from the very first meeting: some arrived saying they were tops and, over time, started asking for different things. Others arrived ready for anything and were surprised when I suggested they stay a while afterward. That was how it worked: they wrote, I replied according to my schedule, we arranged it, and we saw each other for between forty-five minutes and an hour. Sometimes longer. But nobody came anymore just to unload and leave. That was behind me.
***
Over time I began to notice something I hadn’t gone looking for: a man’s job says quite a lot about how he is in bed. Not as an absolute rule—exceptions exist and I’m grateful for them—but as a pattern that repeats with a consistency I can no longer ignore. I saw it without meaning to, encounter after encounter, and by now I’ve formed opinions.
The ride-share drivers were the most common from the start. I picked them up on the street, in chat, some through another contact. They’re men used to moving fast, to never staying anywhere too long, to living between the steering wheel and the cellphone. They arrive saying they’re a hundred percent top. The first time, they usually live up to it: they come in with their cock already hard, pushing against their pants, shove me against the hallway wall, turn me around, pull my pants down without ceremony, and ram it into me to the hilt with two spits and the accumulated hunger of an entire shift. The second time, they start moving differently in bed. They let themselves be kissed longer, they take their time when I take their cock in my mouth, they drive their hips forward looking for something deeper while they stare down at me with broken breath. The third time, they ask outright. Today two of my regular lovers are drivers, and both ended up asking me to fuck them. I always tell them, with a smile that isn’t entirely innocent, that I’m the fag.
—But with me it’s different —one of them told me one afternoon, while buttoning his shirt in the bathroom mirror, my semen still drying on his chest.
It wasn’t different. It was the same as with the others, only he still didn’t quite know it yet.
I didn’t say anything. I offered him coffee and he said he had a ride waiting.
Public-sector employees have another profile. They present as bisexual—some use that word, others prefer not to use any—and at first they’re cautious, testing the water before getting in. The first encounter is usually restrained, almost formal: they sit on the edge of the sofa with their fly still closed, accept a drink, talk about the weather. I let them. I kneel down slowly, unbuckle their belt without rushing, pull out their cock and take the whole thing into my mouth in one motion, until the tip hits my throat and I feel their whole body tighten. When I start working with my mouth—tongue underneath, cheeks sucking, hand on the balls—something in them breaks. A groan slips out that they didn’t expect to hear from themselves; they grab my head and start fucking my mouth as if they’d been granted permission for the first time in years. They finish in a way they can’t hide: thick jets filling my tongue, my palate, my lips, and they stare down at me with their mouths open, unable to believe what just happened. And by the second or third date they’re kissing without me having to ask, swallowing their own taste from my mouth, biting my neck, as if they’ve crossed some threshold with no way back. They’d rather not kiss at first, but once they do they can’t stop.
***
The men in construction are a category apart and, if I’m honest, the one that surprised me most. They’re the ones who enjoy it most when I dress in something that takes me out of their everyday world: a fitted shirt, something in fine fabric, any detail that pulls me away from the world they spend the day in. They get turned on in a different way, more physical, more direct. They rip my clothes off without unbuttoning anything, throw me face-down on the bed, and pry my ass open with their thumbs to spit inside me before driving their cock in balls-deep with a single thrust. They talk to me differently. They give me nicknames without asking permission. One called me “my woman” with such naturalness that at first it threw me off and, over time, seemed honest to me, and he would say it in my ear while he fucked me hard against the mattress, one hand on the back of my neck holding my face to the pillow and the other squeezing my hip. Another once called me “my girlfriend” after months of seeing each other, with complete seriousness, even though in that same date he had first asked me to suck his cock kneeling between his legs—slowly, looking him in the eyes, letting a strand of spit trail down over his balls—and then to take him from behind on all fours in the same bed where, half an hour earlier, he had blown my ass apart.
They’re the most alpha when they come in and the most surrendered once they loosen up. The contradiction doesn’t last long: once they get used to it, they let their guard down and show themselves fully. The one who called me “my woman” would end up asking me, voice breaking, to slide two fingers into him while I sucked him, and then to fuck him on his back, legs spread and ankles over my shoulders, staring straight at me while I speared him slowly and he grabbed his own cock and came alone, touching it only to guide the shot over his own chest. And in that surrender there’s something that makes them different from the rest.
The state professionals surprised me for another reason. Every one I’ve had was a bottom. Without exception, which is already a statistic. They let themselves be stripped without resistance, get on all fours with the ease of someone who knows the terrain, and ask me to eat their ass for a long time before anything else. One would finish twice per session: the first time with my cock inside him, not touching himself, pushing his hips back to take it deeper; the second a while later, with my mouth wrapped around him while I shoved two fingers into the still-open, throbbing hole from the first fucking. And they’re the ones who most enjoy the time afterward: lying there, naked, sometimes holding each other, with my cum still dripping down their thigh, talking about things that have nothing to do with sex. One would tell me about work problems, projects that weren’t moving forward, colleagues making life difficult, all with a distracted hand stroking my already soft cock over his belly. He’d ask me things too. They had heads less weighed down by guilt than the others. Whether that has to do with their work or their personal histories, I don’t know, but the pattern repeated too many times to be a coincidence.
The merchants were the fewest and the ones who lasted the least. They’re men who feel time in a particular way: they think someone’s going to recognize them, even if they’re in a locked room on the other side of the city. They fuck looking sideways at the door. They cum in silence, clenching their teeth, as if a moan might give them away. The guilt after orgasm is immediate and irreversible. Five minutes don’t pass between the hot spray on my back and the guy searching for his clothes in jerky movements, wiping his cock with the first towel he finds, as if he had to justify himself to someone who isn’t in the room. I don’t judge that; everyone carries what they can. But I no longer have the patience for that dynamic.
***
Today I have four steady men. Two are drivers.
The first comes with a frequency I never quite manage to predict. Sometimes twice in a week, then he disappears for almost a month. When he comes back, it’s as if no time has passed: he writes, we arrange it, he comes over. I don’t ask where he’s been. He doesn’t tell me and I don’t press. He started out saying he was a top, no qualifications, and in the early dates he lived up to it: he’d drop me to my knees as soon as he closed the door, pull out my cock and take it into his mouth until he made me tear up, and then fuck me against the sofa with a force that left a mark. Today he’s the one asking me to fuck him, and he does it with the same naturalness with which he used to arrive saying the opposite. He comes in, kisses me deep in the hallway, takes me to the bedroom, slips his pants off without saying a word, and gets on all fours on the bed, showing me his ass spread with one hand. “Go on, fuck me the way I like,” he says, shameless now, and I slide into him slowly so he feels every centimeter, gripping his hair, and I end up coming inside him while he handles his hard cock between his legs. The change was gradual but complete.
The second driver is more predictable. He writes to me almost every week, without fail. He also arrived saying he was a top. He also ended up the same way. He always asks for the same thing and in the same order: first to suck him long, twenty minutes if necessary, until his stomach starts to tremble and he pushes my head away so he won’t come yet; then to eat his ass face-down, my face buried between his cheeks while he rubs his cock against the mattress; and then to take him from the side, spooning, one of his legs raised over my hip and his hand guiding my cock inside. He finishes biting his forearm so he won’t scream. There’s something about that kind of man that needs someone else to take the lead for him, even though in the rest of his life they’re the ones in control of everything. In bed they seek exactly the opposite of what the world demands of them outside it.
The third is in construction. He owns several apartments, which makes him a little different from the average profile. We see each other once a month, sometimes less depending on his schedule. He started out as a top—the kind who would flip me over and fuck me without asking—today he’s versatile, and lately he’s been coming almost exclusively so that I can have him. He likes me to watch him while I finish. He lies on his back, lifts his legs himself with both hands behind his knees, and asks me to slide it in slowly so he can watch it go in. While I fuck him like that, with my eyes fixed on his, he strokes his hard cock and asks me to talk dirty, to tell him how much of a fag he’s gotten over the years. Sometimes he asks me to cum on him: I finish on his chest, on his neck, sometimes on his face and open mouth, and he swallows it smiling while he finishes himself off with two or three shakes. He’s the kind of man nobody on the street would ever suspect of anything.
The fourth is different from all the rest. He doesn’t come to my place: I go to his. He’s one hundred percent bottom, although he enjoys oral sex both ways and takes his time with it. Our dates are truly long, unlike the others. We always start on the sofa, dressed, kissing deeply for a while, until he kneels between my legs, opens my pants, and sucks me slowly, all tongue, glancing up at me every so often to see what face I’m making. Then we move to the bed and I return the favor: I suck him for a long time, unhurried, playing with his balls, going down to lick his ass with my whole tongue until he opens himself on his own, asking for more. When I finally fuck him, I do it lying on top of him, face to face, kissing through every thrust, and he holds me tight with his legs closed around my waist and whispers in my ear not to stop, to fill him completely. I cum inside him and stay like that, leaning on his chest, feeling his heart, until it slips out on its own. There’s sex, but also coffee afterward, unhurried conversation, sometimes the TV on in the background while we lie there without any need to move. He’s the only one I could imagine sharing something more permanent with, not in the practical sense, but in the sense that being there after the sex is over doesn’t weigh on me.
He has one flaw that has no solution: he never looks for me. If I want to see him, I have to be the one to write. And I do, because every time I go it’s worth it, but sometimes I wonder what he carries inside that makes him so passive in that too. A big disappointment, I imagine. He hasn’t told me and I haven’t asked. There are things one learns not to touch.
***
I never completely gave up the adrenaline of the occasional hookup. It would be a lie to say I did. At fifty, that adrenaline doesn’t disappear; it just changes shape, becomes more selective. I no longer move with the same urgency as before, no longer look the same way. But when someone really catches my eye, I’m still capable of acting. I haven’t lost that, and I hope I don’t.
Physical appearance was never what mattered most to me, though I do have preferences. I’ve been with men who weigh one hundred and twenty kilos and with men who weigh seventy. With men who have cocks so thick they barely fit inside me, who force me to open my ass little by little with spit and patience, and with one who had one barely two centimeters long and made up for it with a tongue that made me come twice without touching my cock. What matters to me is what happens when they’re in bed: how they breathe, how they touch, whether they stay or run off, whether they kiss me with semen still in their mouth or pull away.
I prefer men older than me or around my age. Something about that gives me shared ground, a way of understanding each other without having to explain too much. Younger men bore me quickly, even if they technically fuck well and their cock is always hard. Something is missing that only time gives, and that something can’t be learned by reading.
Claudia knows I’m a man with edges. I don’t know exactly what she knows about all this, nor do I need to know. Our relationship works differently, and I take care of it. I learned, perhaps late but in time, that choosing well doesn’t mean choosing little. It means knowing what you need and not pretending it doesn’t exist.