The Dark Room Where Bruno Lost Me in the Shadows

We came out of the Finnish sauna with our skin burning and our nerves still scrambled from what we’d done in the upstairs rooms. Bruno looked at me with those eyes of his, bright and not a shred of shame, and came close enough that I felt his breath at my ear.

—Now we’re going to the real one —he whispered—. I want to see you get lost down there.

He didn’t need to say anything else. The main dark room at Termas Vulcano was on the lower floor, at the end of a corridor that narrowed like a funnel. I’d heard it mentioned a thousand times, but I’d never gone all the way down.

We crossed a black curtain, heavy as a theater drape, and the world shut off at once. The darkness was almost total. Only two very dim red bulbs marked the corners, and a few blue dots set in the floor drew a path toward the center. It took me a few seconds to make out the shapes: hunched bodies breathing, shoulders moving, silhouettes pressed against the walls.

The space was huge. Three rooms connected by low arches, the walls lined with padded leather, the air thick with sweat, lubricant, and something more animal I wouldn’t know how to name. Deep techno pounded through the floor and rose through the soles of my feet to my chest. Every kick of the bass made the mattresses vibrate.

The two of us went in naked, still dripping water and sweat from the jacuzzi. Whenever a red flash passed over us, the bodies gleamed for an instant and then disappeared again.

Bruno took my hand and led me to the heart of the first room. There was a round mattress, low and enormous, surrounded by benches and with chains hanging from the ceiling like decorations in a strange dream. You don’t go in and out of here the same, I thought.

As soon as we arrived, the shadows surrounded us. Twenty, twenty-five men moving slowly, unhurried, as if they had all night. Heavy breathing everywhere. Friction. Hands that didn’t quite dare yet but were already searching.

Bruno shoved me to the center of the mattress and put me face down, ass in the air. He lay on top of me, his chest pressed to my back, all his weight flattening me against the leather. He started slowly, without hurry, his mouth back at my ear saying things I’d rather not repeat, while he worked in and out, grazing every inch.

In the darkness, everything else was erased. There was only the heat, the weight of his body, the smell of man, and the feeling of him opening me up slowly.

And then the anonymous hands began. Fingers running over my back and arms. Someone pinched my nipples from one side. Another mouth, down below in the gloom, licked me without asking while Bruno kept setting the rhythm.

At first I tensed up. Part of me wanted to turn around and see who was touching me, put a face to every caress. But Bruno pressed my neck down against the mattress, as if he could read my thoughts, and I understood there was nothing to see. That was the point. You just had to feel and let go.

Little by little my body loosened. I stopped counting hands. I stopped trying to understand where each tongue, each finger, each breath at the nape of my neck was coming from. I became pure skin, a point on the mattress where everything converged, and for the first time in a long time I thought of nothing.

He got up for a second, turned me onto my back, and sat down on my face. He rubbed himself all over me and I gave myself over with a hunger I didn’t know I had, lost in his smell, seeing nothing. At the same time I felt an unfamiliar mouth swallowing me whole, all the way down, and another tongue working me underneath.

—Like that, don’t stop —I heard Bruno say, though by then I no longer knew whether he was talking to me or to the shadows.

He got down off my face and moved beside me, both of us upside down, and we found each other at the same time. His mouth on me, mine on him, almost choking, drooling, moaning into one another while bodies kept closing in around us, touching us everywhere.

***

At some point someone got behind Bruno and started fucking him while he ate me out. Then another got behind me and did the same. The four of us ended up linked in a chain, moving to the same beat, a single creature made of many hands. The darkness simplified everything: there were no faces or names anymore, only sensations strung together.

Then they split us apart. I was left on all fours in the middle of the mattress and Bruno disappeared into the shadows. For an instant I felt a strange emptiness, as if I’d been dropped in the middle of the sea.

It didn’t last long. A cock that wasn’t his drove into me in one thrust and ripped a cry from me that got lost in the techno. Then another found my mouth. Hands grabbed my hair and pulled, using it as reins to drive me forward and back.

I became the center of something without end. One behind, another in front, and when one got tired the next replaced him without pause. I lost count right away. I don’t know how many there were. I just moaned and pushed back, asking for more without words, knowing that in that darkness no one was going to judge me.

Sweat ran down my forehead and mingled with everything else. My knees were marked by the leather of the mattress and my arms were trembling from holding myself up, but I didn’t want it to stop. Every time one withdrew and a second passed before the next arrived, I pushed my hips back, searching, impatient, as if the empty space were the only unbearable thing in the whole night.

Suddenly I recognized a laugh close by. It was Bruno, beside me, in the same position as me, parallel, being fucked from both sides just like I was. I knew him before I saw him, by the sound, by the way he breathed.

We groped for each other with our hands. We found each other. And we kissed with tongue while we were both being used, sharing spit and gasps, two strangers to everyone except each other.

—You’re enjoying this, bastard —I said against his mouth.

—You’re enjoying it more —he answered, and laughed again.

***

At some point they lifted us up and sat us back to back on the mattress, our asses together, holding each other up. Two men stood in front of each of us and started fucking us at the same time. I felt the thrusts and, through my own back, I could feel Bruno’s moving to the same rhythm, like an echo.

We turned our heads as best we could and kept making out sideways, laughing between kisses at how absurd and how good it all was.

Then they laid us on our backs, side by side, legs spread and raised. Bruno found my hand in the gloom and squeezed it hard. Four or five men took turns: one would give me a stretch of brutal thrusts and then move on to Bruno, another would do the same in the opposite direction, a chain that seemed never to end.

We looked into each other’s eyes in the darkness, or what the darkness let us see, which was almost nothing: a glint, a shape. We kissed whenever we could. We whispered dirty things in each other’s ears while we were used without rest. And yet, in the middle of all that anonymous chaos, the only thing I truly felt was his hand in mine.

This is ours, I thought. Getting lost together so we can find each other.

***

The end was pure chaos. They put us on our knees in the center of the mattress, surrounded by a circle of men masturbating in silence, their silhouettes all moving to the same beat of the techno.

Bruno and I held each other. We kissed with tongue, slowly this time, oblivious to everyone else. And we started jerking each other off, forehead to forehead, our breathing mixing together.

—Look at me —he asked—. Don’t close your eyes.

I didn’t close them. We came almost at the same time, him a second before me, the two of us staining our chests and faces, marking ourselves as if we wanted to leave proof that it had happened.

At that very instant the whole circle erupted. Streams came from every direction, onto our faces, hair, backs, shoulders. They bathed us until we were soaked and sticky, and we couldn’t tell whose every drop came from.

We stayed wrapped around each other on the mattress, trembling, laughing like two madmen. Bruno licked one of my cheeks and I returned the gesture, and we stayed like that for a while, catching our breath, while the last silhouettes dissolved into the shadows and returned to their places against the walls.

We left the dark room almost an hour and a half later, half blind from the lack of light, covered in fluids up to our eyebrows, our assholes open and throbbing, our throats wrecked. The corridor lights hit me full in the face and I had to close my eyes.

Bruno wiped my face with his hand and looked at me with a tired smile.

—That’s the wildest thing I’ve ever seen you do —he said—. And it got me harder than anything.

—Look who’s talking —I answered.

That night at Termas Vulcano was the dirtiest, most anonymous, most brutal thing we’d ever experienced: total darkness, dozens of strangers using us for an hour and a half while the two of us, deep down, only wanted to lose ourselves in each other. And we did. Completely.