The Ad That Led Me to Live with a Stranger

That winter I felt trapped in my own body. I lived in a rented room at the back of an old house, worked part-time in a bakery, and at night I surfed the internet looking for something I didn’t even know how to name. I was twenty-two, skinny, hairless, and had never been with a man more than once. The idea of a relationship—something steady, someone who would call me “my love”—felt like a fantasy reserved for other people.

One July dawn, idly browsing the personals in a forum, I found one written in capitals: “SEEKING YOUNG SUBMISSIVE FOR SERIOUS RELATIONSHIP. NO GAMES.” It made me laugh and, at the same time, stopped me cold. I read it twice. The user’s name was Andrés.

I wrote to him from a new account. I told him I was twenty, that I studied nursing, and that I’d been living alone since I was seventeen. None of that was true, but it seemed to me those lies would make him smile. I sent him three photos saved on my phone: one looking over my shoulder, another of my bare torso in the bathroom mirror, and the third—the one that cost me the most—taken from behind, bent over against the bed.

Andrés replied twenty minutes later.

—You’re exactly what I was looking for —he wrote—. Do you have somewhere to live?

I told him yes, that I lived with my uncle. Lie.

—Move in with me. I’ll pay for the taxi.

I read that sentence four times before answering. He was thirty-two, lived on the top floor of a building in the port area, and, according to what he told me, had been alone for over a year. The speed of everything was ridiculous. I knew that. But I also knew that no one was waiting for me in my rented room and that, for once, someone seemed to be waiting for me.

I gathered what I had into two supermarket bags.

***

The taxi arrived at two-thirty in the morning. I climbed the four floors on foot because the elevator was sealed off. On the landing, before ringing the bell, I looked at the neighboring doors. They all had clotheslines stretched across them with baby clothes, underwear, damp sheets. It smelled of cheap detergent and cold food.

Andrés opened the door wearing a tank top. The chest photo he’d sent me didn’t do him justice: he was shorter than I’d imagined, broad-shouldered, his arms covered in black hair and his face marked by old acne scars. He wasn’t the person I wanted him to be. But he was already there, with two bags and no possible way back.

—Come in —he said, taking the bags from me as if they weighed nothing.

The apartment was one large room with a kitchen in the back. The bed was unmade, the windows had black cloth curtains, and on the nightstand there was an empty beer can and a box of tissues. As I set my things down on the floor, I felt him looking at me from behind. It was not an innocent look.

I stuck my ass out a little, just a little, pretending I was arranging my backpack. When I turned around, he was already hugging me.

He kissed me like no one had ever kissed me before. With soft lips, unhurried, biting me slowly. He whispered something I didn’t catch and lifted me in his arms with an ease that left me stunned. I had never been with someone able to pick me up like that, without effort. He laid me on the bed, pulled off my T-shirt, pulled down my pants, and stayed there a long while looking at me as if it were the first time he’d ever seen someone naked.

—Turn over —he asked—. I want to see you.

I did. I got on all fours and lowered my head against the pillow. Andrés talked to me while he stroked my back with both hands. He said things that would have sounded ridiculous coming from anyone else, but in his mouth they sounded true: that I had the nicest body he’d seen in months, that he would take care of me, that I shouldn’t worry. When I heard him pull down his pants, I tensed.

***

I looked at it between my legs almost out of the corner of my eye, and my breath caught. It was thick and long, much more than any photo had prepared me for. My hands went cold.

—I’ve never tried one that size —I told him.

Andrés gave a quiet laugh.

—Don’t worry, my love. An ass adapts.

He nudged me gently to open my legs again and lowered his face toward me. He kissed my neck, my shoulders, the base of my back, my thighs. I let him. Part of me was still looking for an excuse to leave. The other part was completely surrendered.

He put it in my mouth before anywhere else. It was heavy, salty, and I could barely take it in. While I tried to suck it as best I could, he held my neck and told me to breathe, slowly. I felt my eyes fill with tears, and not because I was sad.

—Turn over again —he said when he tired of watching.

He spread my legs with a firm gesture. He tried twice. Both times it slipped because of my nerves. I was clenching my thighs without meaning to, my fingers tightening into the sheets. Andrés pulled back for a moment, opened the nightstand drawer, and came back with a jar of Vaseline. He rubbed it on without looking at me. Then he ran his fingers over my asshole, slowly, in circles, until I stopped pulling away.

When he pushed it inside me, he did it little by little. Centimeter by centimeter. I felt my walls give way, and at the same time I felt something inside me was about to break. I bit the pillow. He spoke into my ear.

—Breathe, breathe hard. That’s it. You’re doing great.

When his balls slapped against me, I knew there was nothing left to go in. He stayed still for a few seconds, giving me time. Then he started moving. Slowly at first, then with a steadier rhythm, one hand on my hip and the other on my neck, keeping my head pressed to the mattress. I wasn’t enjoying it yet. I was enduring it. But the mix of pain with his loving words—because he kept calling me “my love,” “my darling,” “my boy”—lifted me out of my body and carried me somewhere new.

***

Then I remembered Eduardo. The one from the summer before, the one who’d locked me in a hotel room and come inside me twice in a row without asking anything. The one who’d left me on the street at six in the morning, my pants wet and my mouth dry. I hadn’t thought of him in months. And suddenly, beneath Andrés, everything came back: the fear, the shame, the urge to run.

But Andrés wasn’t Eduardo. Andrés kissed my back as he moved. He bit my ear slowly. He asked if I was okay.

When he came inside me, he didn’t even try to pull out.

—Wait —he said when I begged him to take it out—. If I move, it’ll come out more. Wait a little.

I waited. And he came again, or so it seemed, because I felt a new warmth spread to the base of my stomach. When he finally pulled out, I saw a mix of cum and a thin thread of blood on the sheets. I started crying. Not from pain: the pain was almost gone. I cried for Eduardo, for the unfamiliar apartment, for the two bags thrown on the floor, for the speed with which my life had just changed.

Andrés hugged me from behind and said something else I wasn’t expecting.

—I love you, you know that?

It was the first night. He didn’t know me. He didn’t know my last name. And yet he said it with such certainty that I believed him. I hugged him back. I whispered that it was the biggest one I’d ever taken. Andrés gave a low laugh.

—I know, my love. I know.

As I fell asleep face-down, with his chest pressed against my back, I felt him reach for his phone. Then a couple of very short flashes, like switched-off camera bursts. I didn’t think anything of it that night. Later I would think about it more than once.

***

I put up with Andrés for almost two years. Put up with him, because I can’t find a better word. It’s not that I loved him as much as I convinced myself I did. He was comfortable, he was constant, he gave me a roof and food and, above all, he spoke to me in a language I had never heard before: the language of sweet words, of diminutive nicknames, of long-term plans. We made love in parks at dawn, in bar bathrooms, in borrowed cars, in hourly hotels on the side of the highway. He liked sex outdoors, and I went along with him even though half the time I didn’t dare. I accepted many things I didn’t want to accept. I also accepted that he would watch other boys on the street. That he would take his time answering messages. That he’d show up with marks on his neck that weren’t mine.

One November night, while I was waiting for him in a café near the port, I saw him come in on the other side of the avenue. He was arm in arm with a very tall girl, long-haired, wearing a tight dress and high heels. He didn’t recognize me through the glass. I followed them for two blocks.

She was trans. I knew it at once, not by her body—it was spectacular, much prettier than many women I know—but because she was talking to Andrés with a kind of ease no first date would have. They had history. Maybe months. Maybe all the time I had believed he belonged to me.

***

That very same dawn I threw a scene in the kitchen. I yelled, I broke two glasses, I said things I’m not capable of repeating now. Andrés listened to me until the end, sitting in a chair, without raising his voice even once. When I was done, he poured me a glass of water and said, slowly:

—Tomorrow I want you out of here. Carola is moving in with me.

I didn’t ask for explanations. I didn’t need them. I filled the same two supermarket bags I’d arrived with two years earlier—now a little more worn, with a couple of his T-shirts mixed in—and went down the four floors slowly, counting the landings. On the last one, before leaving, I heard his voice from above.

—Take care, my love.

I didn’t turn around.

I’ve lived alone ever since. Sometimes, when I go online, I open that section of the classifieds again. I read them without answering. I always recognize the same language: the language of men who promise immediate love. I learned long ago not to trust it. But I also learned that, on some cold nights, I still want to believe it.