Gay

I showed up at that party in my swimwear thinking it would be just another day with my boyfriend. I had no idea I’d end up on my knees, showing another man what he was missing.

It was nine-thirty in the morning, an almost-corrected Excel sheet, and suddenly his boyfriend’s naked body was brushing his neck. Working was going to be impossible.

I’d been at the company for three weeks when he leaned over the table and told me I had something that caught people’s attention. That same afternoon, I followed him.

When that man put his hands on my back, I knew it was no longer about the fever or the exhaustion from the trip, but about something I had been avoiding for years.

I knew his schedule, the sound of his boots, the exact moment he took off his shirt because of the heat. What I didn’t know was how far that obsession would take me.

He knew he was going to lose before they even started. But giving in right away gave him nothing: the pleasure was in resisting, in forcing the other to wrench victory from him with bites under the full moon.

I’d spent three weeks swallowing dust and loneliness when the driver looked at me fixedly, without smiling, and said: “Come, my house.” It wasn’t an invitation: it was an order, and I followed him.

I’d spent two years imagining this day. I had no idea a suited fifty-something, with his gaze locked on mine, would decide for me what my first time would be like.

The phone rang and it was him, offering me a session that same afternoon. From his tone, I knew we weren’t going to talk only about massages.

For years I told myself I was the typical straight guy. I was lying. My hand jobs were for the guys in the locker room, and it took me too long to admit it.

I was nineteen and impossibly horny. He noticed it the moment he opened his apartment door, and there was no way to hide what we both wanted.

I agreed to go up to a room with twelve mattresses on the floor, never imagining that by morning I’d leave with more than one man marked on my skin.

I was naked in bed, aching, and he offered to examine me. I had no idea how far he was willing to go to make it stop hurting.

When I opened the door, I was expecting a paper bag and a “good morning.” I wasn’t expecting him to keep looking inside and ask, in a low voice, if I lived alone.

I was married, I was straight, and I was sure of who I was. That dawn, in a car parked by the beach, I stopped being so sure.

The coach looked at me from across the table and smiled. My father gripped the back of my neck and whispered, “Son, we’re going to do whatever it takes to get you on the team.”

I arrived at his place convinced the needles wouldn’t touch my soul. Damián made me understand very quickly that he had prepared for the opposite.

When I moved to the capital I thought I was only looking for work. My roommate taught me something else: that men look at what they shouldn’t, and one gesture is enough to prove it.

The gym stud who humiliated me in front of half the gym wrote me from a dating app fifty meters from my place. Fifteen minutes later, he was ringing my doorbell.

It was almost eleven when the elevator dropped me at the empty parking garage. I had no idea those keys would cost me so much, and so little, at the same time.