That Night at the Bar Changed the Way I Desired

I’m not gay. I’m saying that up front because the sentence sounds defensive, but it’s the only honest way I have to begin this story. I was twenty-seven when it happened, and today I’m forty-eight, so I’m talking about something that took place more than two decades ago and yet I still remember it with a clarity that no other night in my life has managed to erase.

I was in Seville for work, a full week away from my girlfriend at the time and from routine. That Thursday I had dinner late, badly, and alone, and around eleven I lost all desire to go back to the hotel. I went into the first bar I saw open in a narrow street near Plaza de la Trinidad. It was a small place, with just enough light not to trip over things and music playing low enough that you could still think.

There were eight or nine people there, I’m not sure anymore. A couple at the bar, a group of three in the back, and one guy alone at a table by the window. I guessed he was about thirty, maybe a little younger. He wore a blue shirt with the collar open and had that way of sitting that some men command effortlessly, as if the chair had belonged to them forever.

I ordered a gin and tonic and sat at the bar. I didn’t look toward his table. I had no reason to look. And yet, when I lifted my eyes to the mirror at the back, he was already watching me.

“Cheers,” he said from afar, without smiling.

I raised my glass out of politeness and turned my head back. My heart did something strange, a sort of stumble, but I didn’t give it any importance. I thought it was fatigue. I thought it was the gin. I thought anything except what I was starting to think.

Twenty minutes later I went to the bathroom. It was a narrow stall, with two urinals side by side and a poorly lit mirror. I went in, unzipped, and took my dick out to piss. Before I’d finished, the door opened behind me. I didn’t look. I knew perfectly well who it was.

He took the urinal next to mine. He didn’t have to; there was plenty of room to wait outside. I kept staring at the tiles, trying to keep my hand from shaking. And then, unable to help myself, my eyes slid sideways.

It was half a second. A quick, sidelong glance, supposedly subtle. But what I saw stayed burned into me: he had it out, thick and heavy, the foreskin pulled back and the head shining under the dirty bathroom light. He wasn’t pissing. He was holding it in his hand, half hard, as if he were showing it to me on purpose. He caught my glance instantly. When I fixed my eyes forward again, I saw in the mirror that he was smiling. A slow smile, without surprise, as if he’d been waiting exactly for that for twenty minutes.

My face was burning. And something else was burning too, lower down, something that had started swelling inside my pants without permission. I finished without lifting my head, put it away as best I could, washed my hands too fast, and left almost running. I paid the bill without sitting back down and pushed open the street door. The night air hit my face like a bucket of cold water.

“Hey,” I heard behind me.

I turned around. He was leaning against the bar’s doorframe, lighting a cigarette. The lighter flame lit up his chin and cheekbones.

“I live three blocks away,” he said, exhaling smoke. “I’ve got decent whisky. If you feel like another drink, no rush.”

I had to clench the hotel keys in my pocket so my hand wouldn’t show. My head said no. My mouth said something else.

“Okay.”

***

His name was Adrián. I learned it in the doorway, while I was digging for the keys in a full ring. He lived on the second floor without an elevator, in a small apartment that smelled of books and men’s cologne. He switched on a floor lamp, put music on at a barely audible volume, and took two glasses from the sideboard.

We talked. We really talked, for more than an hour. I told him I worked for a logistics company, that I was in Seville for an audit, that I’d had a girlfriend for three years. He told me he was a math teacher at a secondary school, that he’d grown up in Cádiz, and that the scar on the back of his hand came from jumping a school fence when he was twelve.

Nothing he said was a direct hint. Nothing I said was an excuse to leave. We drank slowly, went on to a third drink, and at some point I stopped looking at the exit.

“You’re very nervous,” he said, not accusing me.

“It’s just that I’ve never…” I began, and fell silent.

“I know,” he said. “That’s why I’m telling you.”

He set his glass on the table, got up, and sat beside me on the sofa. Without touching me. Just close enough for me to feel the heat of his thigh against mine.

“We’re not going to do anything you don’t want,” he said. “And if at any point you say stop, we stop. Okay?”

I nodded. My mouth was dry and my ears were ringing.

His hand settled on my knee and moved up very slowly, without urgency, until it stopped halfway up my thigh. I didn’t breathe. He didn’t move either.

“Look at me,” he said.

I looked at him. He had dark eyes and they were very still.

“If you want to leave, you leave. No problem. But if you stay, I’m going to fuck you.”

I didn’t leave.

***

He kissed me first on the neck, just below the ear. It was an odd sensation, not because I didn’t like it, but because it was new. A three-day beard scraping where I had never felt a beard before. The smell of tobacco mixed with aftershave. I closed my eyes and let it happen.

He unbuttoned my shirt button by button, as if he had all the time in the world. His open hand traveled over my chest, my stomach, and stopped at my belt. He waited. He was waiting for permission. When I gave it with a nod, he undid it, pulled down my zipper, and yanked my cock out of my briefs in one pull. It was rock hard, soaked with pre-cum, so much that it stuck to the skin of my belly.

“Jesus, look at how hard you are,” he muttered, closing his fist around it and stroking slowly, his wrist turning over the head. “You’ve been hard all night, haven’t you?”

I couldn’t answer. He gave me a couple of slow handjobs, unhurried, and on the third he bent down and took it all the way into his mouth. He didn’t lick it, didn’t test it: he swallowed it in one go, to the back of his throat, until I felt the tip bumping against his throat and his lips pressing against my pubic hair. I let out a rough gasp that even surprised me. No woman had ever sucked me like that. None had dared swallow me whole without gagging, without pausing, with that technique of someone who knows exactly what to do with a cock inside their mouth.

He sucked me slowly, sliding up and down with his tongue curled around it, hollowing his cheeks, pulling off every so often to spit on the head and take me back in. He licked my balls one by one, took them into his mouth, tugged gently. When I felt I was about to come, he pushed my hip away with his hand.

“No,” he said, wiping his chin with the back of his wrist. “Not yet. That load is for inside.”

“Relax,” he murmured, straightening up. “Don’t be in a hurry to feel anything in particular. Just feel whatever comes to you.”

He took off his shirt too. He had the body of a man who goes to the gym without obsessing over it, with a bit of hair in the center of his chest and a pale mark where he’d worn a necklace. He took my hand, guided it over his shoulders, over his chest, and lowered it until it slipped beneath his pants.

He was hard. Very hard. Feeling him in my palm was the strangest and, at the same time, most logical thing I had ever felt. I unbuttoned his pants with my other hand and took him out. He was big, thick, with a thick vein running underneath and a purple head, taut, shiny with fluid. He wasn’t a girlfriend, he wasn’t a woman, he was nothing I knew. And yet my body responded before my mind knew what to think. I jerked him awkwardly, not knowing the rhythm, and he put his hand over mine to show me how he wanted it.

“Like that, tighter, twisting at the top,” he murmured against my ear. “You’re going to learn how to jerk me off.”

He gently pushed me down by the shoulders. I dropped to my knees on the rug. He was in front of me, at face level, pointing at me. I had never had a cock that close. My hands were sweating.

“Stick out your tongue,” he said, very calm. “Just the tip. Lick it.”

I did as he said. It was a tiny, timid contact, and that first taste—salty, a little rough—disoriented me and lit me up at the same time. He put his hand on the back of my neck without squeezing.

“Open your mouth. Suck it like someone has sucked yours.”

I took him in. At first only halfway, gagging a little when I tried to go deeper. I learned fast. I learned to breathe through my nose, to control the gag reflex, to set the rhythm with my tongue curled underneath. I heard him moan for the first time when I found the exact spot, the one that made his thighs tremble. He pulled it out of my mouth for a second and rubbed it against my lips, my chin, my cheek.

“Very good,” he said, his voice rougher. “You’re going to be a filthy little pig when you want to be.”

I pulled his pants all the way down. He finished taking off mine. We were both standing in the middle of the living room, with the lamp lighting us only from the side, our two erect cocks pointed at each other.

“Come here,” he said, taking my hand.

***

The bedroom was dim. He had me lie face down and settled in behind me, leaning on one elbow. He ran his hand over my back, slowly, tracing circles lower and lower. He wasn’t in a hurry. He didn’t have the anxious urgency I remembered from other times, with other people. Only patience.

He took a tube of lubricant and a condom from the nightstand drawer and left them within reach. He spread my ass cheeks with both hands and I felt the cool air on my hole, exposed for the first time in my life to another man’s gaze. He bent down and blew slowly on my asshole.

“It’s the first cock that’s ever going in here, right?” he said. “I’m going to do it right. You’ll remember this night when you’re old.”

And then I felt the tongue. A choked cry escaped me against the pillow. He licked my hole slowly, in circles, pressing the tip against the opening, pushing inward. I had never imagined that could be done, much less that it could feel so good. He licked me for minutes on end until I was soaked, biting my ass cheeks every so often and returning to the center. When he started touching between my cheeks with his finger, I went completely tense.

“Breathe,” he said.

I breathed.

“Again.”

I breathed again, deeper, and felt my body begin to loosen under his fingers. He coated his hand with cold lube and started with one finger, slowly. The finger slid in slickly up to the knuckle and stayed there, moving in tiny circles, opening me from the inside. Then two, unhurried, speaking softly in my ear while he asked if I was okay, if it hurt, if I wanted him to stop. He curled them upward and touched something inside that made me jolt and moan despite myself.

“There,” he said, smiling against my shoulder. “There it is. That’s your spot. You’re going to learn to come just from that.”

He pushed in a third finger. It burned a little, but the burn was mixed with a heavy, dense sensation climbing up my spine. I didn’t want him to stop. It was a feeling my body still didn’t know how to name, but one that was demanding more. I pushed back against his hand almost without realizing it, and he gave a low laugh.

“Look at the little newbie,” he murmured. “He’s already asking me for cock with his ass.”

“The first time we’re going very slowly,” he said, pulling away for a moment to put on the condom and coat it well with lubricant. “If it hurts at any point, you tell me and I stop. There’s nothing to prove.”

He got behind me, on his knees between my spread legs, and lifted my hips with a pillow underneath. I felt the tip press against me, thick, pushing against the ring. I clenched my teeth by pure reflex.

“Don’t push against me,” he whispered. “Let yourself go. I’ll do the work.”

He pushed a couple of millimeters and stayed still. The head went in all at once with a sting that made me bite the pillow. He waited. Then a little more. Another pause. I could feel him opening me from the inside centimeter by centimeter, my body, which had resisted at first, learning to take him, to surrender to him. It wasn’t painless. But the pain was small and the curiosity was enormous, and between the two a new space opened up, something I had never felt before and hadn’t known could be felt.

When he was all the way in, his balls resting against mine, he leaned over my back and kissed the nape of my neck.

“There,” he said. “The hard part’s over. You’ve got all of it inside now. Now you’re going to enjoy it.”

He began to move with a soft, almost lazy rhythm, pulling almost all the way out and then sinking back in to the hilt. Each full thrust tore a moan from me that I didn’t recognize as my own. His free hand slid beneath my body and took my cock with a strange firmness, not too hard and not too timid, matching the rhythm of his wrist to the one he was setting with his hips. Fucked and fucking at the same time, all in time.

“Like that,” he panted against my ear. “Clench your ass when I pull out. Watch me shove it all the way in.”

He sped up. The thrusts became deeper, drier, more obscene. The sound of his thighs slapping against my ass filled the room, and over it the wet noise of lubricant, and over that both of us gasping like animals. The bed creaked. He grabbed my hair with his free hand and pulled me back, arching me, and at that angle the tip started rubbing inside me exactly the same spot he’d found with his fingers before. I saw lights behind my eyelids.

“I’m going to come,” I managed to stammer. “Fuck, I’m going to come without touching myself.”

“Come,” he growled, without slowing down. “Come with my cock inside you. I want to feel you clench.”

I came in only a few minutes, almost without warning, with a shudder that shook me from head to toe. It was a long, thick orgasm that stained my belly, the pillow, and his hand. My ass tightened in spasms around his cock and he let out a guttural moan, driving in harder, faster, searching for the bottom. Three or four more thrusts and he sank all the way to the hilt and stayed there, pressed against me, with his whole cock inside, coming into the condom with rough grunts that came from deep in his chest. I felt perfectly how he shuddered inside me, how he emptied in spurts that filled the latex.

He stayed still on top of me for a long while, breathing against my back, not pulling out. When he finally did, very slowly, I felt a strange emptiness, almost disappointing. He let himself fall beside me, took off the knotted condom, and tossed it into the trash with a lazy flick.

It took me a while to open my eyes. When I did, he was looking at me.

“Welcome,” he said, without irony.

***

We showered together in a tiny bathroom, laughing at the elbow I kept jamming into his side every time I tried to reach the shampoo. Under the hot water, he soaped my back, my ass, pressed himself against me from behind with his cock once again half hard against my butt. I felt him grunt softly, but he didn’t push it: he just bit my shoulder, slapped my ass so it echoed against the tiles, and went on rinsing his hair. That shower was almost as exciting as what came before, not because of what we did—we barely kissed under the water—but because of the feeling of naturalness, of not having to pretend anything.

I slept on his sofa for a few hours and the next day, back at the hotel, I sat on the edge of the bed and spent half an hour staring at the ceiling. My ass hurt with a dull, pleasant ache, a physical reminder of what had happened. I was trying to decide whether I regretted it. I didn’t regret it. The only thing I felt was a strange calm, like when something you’d suspected for years without daring to admit finally gets confirmed.

I went back to Seville every time I could for almost a year, with whatever work excuse I could invent. Adrián introduced me to a friend of his, Mateo, and on some of those nights there were three of us: I learned to have a cock in my mouth while another fucked me from behind, to have the two of them come on me, to ask for it myself when my body wanted it. I learned things I hadn’t known I needed to learn, about other people and about myself, and I also discovered that what frightened me wasn’t desire, but how little room everyday life left for it.

After that Adrián accepted a position at a university in Lisbon and distance did what distance usually does. We wrote to each other for a few months, promised to see each other, never saw each other.

I married my girlfriend, we had two daughters, and I lead a life anyone would describe as heterosexual and happy. And it is. But sometimes, when I go to Seville for work, I pass that street near Plaza de la Trinidad and stand for a few seconds looking at the second-floor doorway without an elevator.

Adrián probably doesn’t live there anymore. I don’t know where Mateo is. But some part of me still climbs those stairs every time I pass, and comes back down at dawn with my shirt badly buttoned and the feeling of having discovered, too late and too early, a door I hadn’t known existed.