The Gray-Haired Man Waiting for Me in the Booth

I was twenty-eight and worked in a small print shop downtown. After closing, I used to stop by the internet booths on Solar Avenue, not so much to check my email as to get away for a while from my rented room and from the feeling that my life was always going to be like this. One afternoon, while I was wandering aimlessly through a lost forum, I came across a mention of a place called Red Star, fifteen blocks from my job. They said it was a meeting point for men, that the booths had doors with bolts on the inside, and that things happened there that didn’t happen anywhere else.

I didn’t go that same night. It took me three days to gather up the courage, and when I did I still didn’t go in with the intention of doing anything. I just wanted to look.

The place was in an old arcade, with cracked mosaic tile on the floor and a heavy smell of disinfectant. A hand-painted sign announced “Booths — 3 soles an hour.” The attendant, a thin man with a mustache, didn’t even look up when I paid. He gave me a key with a number on it and pointed to the back of the hallway without saying a word.

I walked slowly. The booths were arranged in two facing rows, and I immediately noticed what the forum had said. Half the doors were closed, but some were deliberately left slightly open. As I passed, I looked without meaning to. In the first one, a young guy was staring at the screen with his hand inside his pants, moving fast, biting his lip. In the third, an older man held my gaze for a second and turned his chair so I could see. He had a hard cock, thick, the foreskin pulled back to the base and the head shining with saliva or whatever it was. He held it in a clenched fist and stroked it slowly, squeezing his balls with his other hand, not hiding, looking for my eyes.

I felt a heat rise up to my forehead. I quickened my pace, went into my booth, locked the door behind me, and sat down in front of the computer without turning it on. I stayed like that for ten minutes, listening to the creaks in the hallway, a heavy breath on the other side of the partition, the unmistakable sound of a hand sliding over a well-wet cock, a cough that was swallowed almost at once.

I didn’t come here to do anything. I just wanted to look.

I didn’t do anything that night. But I couldn’t sleep afterward. I lay on the mattress with my cock hard against the elastic of my underwear, remembering the man in the third booth, the way he pulled the foreskin back with two fingers to show me the red, polished head. I grabbed it and jerked off in my hand in less than a minute, biting the pillow so the neighbor wouldn’t hear me.

***

My day off was Thursday. I waited for it like someone waiting for an exam. I showered with strange care, trimmed my nails, rubbed cream on places I normally ignored. Under the shower I slipped two soapy fingers into my ass and held my breath when I felt the ring give. At the central market there was a stall selling men’s underwear, and I bought a black string thong. I had never worn anything like it. In front of the mirror in my room I tried it on three times before deciding to go out wearing it under my pants. The string slid between my ass cheeks and rubbed my hole with every step; when I went down the stairs, I got hard from the friction alone.

At seven in the evening I was once again in front of the hand-painted sign. This time the attendant didn’t look up either.

I walked down the hallway even more slowly than the first time. The booth at the back, the last one in the row on the right, had its door open just enough. There he was.

He was a man of about fifty-something, with gray hair combed back and a big, solid body, the kind that commands respect without raising its voice. His shirt was open halfway down his chest, his pants around his knees. He was masturbating calmly, as if he were at home, not looking at the screen. His cock rested against his belly, long and veined, with gray hair at the base and two heavy balls hanging between his parted thighs. When I stopped for a second at his doorway, he pinned me with his gaze without hiding it, spit into his palm, ran the saliva from the base to the head in one slow stroke, and nodded inward with his chin in a gesture that was almost an order.

I went in.

He locked the door. The booth was narrow; two bodies barely fit. He was inches away from me. Up close, his cock was thicker than it had looked from outside, and that was the first thing I said, without thinking, in a voice I didn’t recognize as my own.

—You’ve got a big one —I murmured.

—Yeah. You like it? —he answered without smiling, as if stating a fact.

—Yes.

—Get on your knees. And open your mouth wide.

I did. There wasn’t room to kneel all the way, so I crouched and braced myself on the edge of the chair. Once I had him at face level, the smell hit me all at once: sweat, cheap soap, a sour, masculine undernote that instantly moistened my mouth. I stuck out my tongue and licked him from the balls to the tip, slowly, following a thick vein that ran up the side. He let out a short grunt and placed an open hand on the back of my neck.

—Take it all. Don’t be shy.

I opened my mouth and started taking him in. The head filled my tongue, salty, with a thick drop that stuck to my palate. I began to suck him slowly, up and down, using my hand at the base, feeling his cock harden even more inside my mouth. Saliva ran down my chin and onto his balls, and he rubbed himself against me with his own cock every time he let me breathe.

After a while, without warning, he pressed down. He drove his hand into my neck and pushed my head all the way down. I felt his cock push against my palate, the back of my throat, cutting off my air. I gagged once, a longer time the next, and pulled back, gasping, eyes watering, with a thread of spit hanging from my lip to the tip of his head.

—That’s it, like that, soak it all —he murmured, holding his cock and rubbing it against my swollen lips—. We’re going to a hotel. But you pay for the room.

—Okay.

***

The hotel was three blocks away. It was one of those places with heavy curtains at the entrance and a front desk with polarized glass. He knew the way and he knew the receptionist: he made a gesture without speaking, and they gave us the key to room five. I paid with a bill I’d been saving since the previous week for something else.

We went up a narrow staircase that smelled of bleach. The room had a large bed with sheets an almost unnaturally white white, a mirror on the ceiling, and a TV that wouldn’t turn on. He locked the door and undressed without saying a word.

When I saw him standing in the middle of the room, he was different from how I had seen him in the booth. There he had been sitting, and perspective can be deceiving. Standing there in full, his body was much bigger than I remembered, and his cock seemed to have grown: it hung heavy between his thighs, still half-mast, with the head peeking out of the foreskin, wet with my own saliva. A new fear came over me, cold, sliding from my neck to my knees.

—Better another day —I said, my hand still on the button of my shirt—. It’s late, I have to be in early tomorrow.

He looked at me without moving, for a second that lasted too long.

—You made me come all the way here. I’m going to fuck that ass.

He said it like that, without raising his voice, almost lazily, as if explaining the rules of a game I had accepted by walking in. And before I could say anything else, he had me by the arm and was shoving me toward the bed.

He ripped my shirt off in one yank. When he pulled down my pants and saw the black thong, he let out a short laugh through his nose.

—Look at that, what the little whore came with —he murmured, running his open palm over my exposed ass cheek—. Dressed up so someone can stick it in you.

He squeezed one cheek in his whole hand and stretched it to look at my hole. With his thumb he prodded it over the black string, pressing just a little, and I felt everything tighten and at the same time open by itself, as if my body already knew before I did.

—Suck me again. And look at me.

What happened next I remember in fragments.

I remember sucking him again, this time lying on my back at the edge of the bed, with my head hanging off and my throat in a straight line, while he shoved his whole cock into my mouth at once and pulled it out covered in foamy spit. He held my head with both hands and fucked my mouth as if it were a cunt, driving his pubic bone against my nose, letting me catch only the barest breath between thrusts. I remember saliva dripping from my chin to my chest, and him using it to rub his balls across my face. I remember that at one point he pulled out his cock, slick with spit, slapped my cheeks with it, first one, then the other, and told me “swallow it, whore, it’s yours” before shoving it back in until it hit my uvula.

I remember we ended up in sixty-nine, and that his tongue went into places no one had ever gone before. He spread my ass cheeks with both hands, spat on my hole, and licked me deep, pushing the tip of his tongue inside, pulling it out and pushing it back in, circling, biting the edge. I felt it hot, wet, and it tore a sound out of me that I also didn’t recognize as mine, a long moan that slipped out with his cock still in my mouth. I sucked him and drooled while he devoured my ass, and for one very brief instant I thought it was going to be okay.

Then he turned me over.

He put me on all fours on the bed, with my knees wide apart and my ass high in the air. He spat on my hole again, spit on his cock, ran the head from top to bottom along my crease, rubbing it over me, pressing it against me, making me feel its weight. I felt the tip rest against me, pressing slowly, gaining ground millimeter by millimeter, and I thought of saying something, but before the words reached my mouth he drove in with all his body weight.

The scream came out before I thought of it. It was as if he had split me in two, as if a hot iron had gone all the way up into my stomach. I fell forward onto the sheets, and he came down on top of me without letting go, his cock buried to the balls, his pubis pressed against my ass. He covered my mouth with one hand and with the other grabbed a fistful of sheet and shoved it between my teeth.

—Bite down, whore —he said in my ear, almost calmly, his beard scraping the back of my neck—. And hold on. You’ll open up soon enough.

I bit down. And I cried.

***

I don’t know how long it lasted. It could have been five minutes, it could have been twenty. He started moving slowly, pulling his cock almost all the way out and then slamming it back in with a dry thud that made my forehead hit the mattress. Each thrust ripped the breath from me, and I could feel the cock moving inside me as if it were opening walls that were never meant to open. He grabbed my hips with both hands, dug his fingers into my flesh, and started fucking me harder, in a steady, brutal rhythm, slamming his balls against mine every time he reached the bottom. The room filled with the wet sound of flesh against flesh, his short gasps, my moans muffled into the bitten sheet.

—What a tight ass you’ve got, you son of a bitch —he growled, spitting on my back and rubbing the spit in with his palm—. You’ll remember this cock for the rest of your life.

At some point he pulled out, and the relief was so huge I thought it was over. I felt a stream of blood and saliva trickling down my thigh. But he only yanked my legs until my hips were at the edge of the bed, on my back, and bent me until my knees were against my chest. He looked at my hole, open, swollen, throbbing, and smiled for the first time all night.

—Look how I left you. Wide open for me.

And he went back in, this time standing, with his hands on the backs of my thighs, folding me in half. Each thrust knocked the air out of me in one blow. He slapped my ass cheek with an open hand, hard, and the crack echoed through the empty room. Slap and thrust, slap and thrust. He looked me in the eyes while he drove into me, never taking his gaze away, and I couldn’t close mine even though I wanted to.

—Touch yourself —he ordered—. I want to see you come with my cock inside you.

I grabbed my wet cock and jerked it in short, clumsy pulls, my hand shaking. I came almost immediately, in thick spurts that splattered over my belly and chest, and when I came my ass clenched all around him and drew a long grunt from him.

Until he finished.

He pushed three more times, deep, brutal, and stayed buried to the balls, pinning my legs against my own chest. I felt him hot inside, stream after stream, as if he’d poured boiling water into me, his cock throbbing against the walls. When he finally withdrew, he pulled his cock out slowly, looking at it, and I noticed something thick running down the inner sides of my thighs to my knees, semen mixed with something darker. I let myself fall onto the bed, on my side, with my legs still open, my hole throbbing, open, unable to close, and my whole body trembling.

He came over. His cock was still hard, shiny, painted white and red, and when I had it at face level I saw traces of blood at the base and on his balls.

—You broke me —I said, and my voice came out cracked, childlike.

—You should have told me it was your first time —he replied, without reproach and without tenderness, as if he were talking about something else.

He sat on the bed, grabbed a corner of the sheet, and wiped my tears with a gesture so gentle it seemed to belong to someone else, to another man. He kissed my forehead, then my temple, then my neck. I stayed still, letting him, not knowing what to feel.

After a while, I don’t know why, I leaned in and started sucking him again. This time without pressure, without a hand on my neck. I licked his balls first, one and then the other, cleaning them with my tongue, and then slowly moved up the vein to the head. I took it all in, cradled it in my mouth, sucked it calmly, tasting the mix of his semen and mine and the blood. He stroked my hair while I sucked him, and little by little he got hard again, until I felt his balls tighten against my chin. He came in my mouth without warning, in two thick, hot waves, and this time I swallowed without thinking, every last drop, sucking the tip so nothing would be lost.

We dressed in silence. We went down the same narrow staircase. At the hotel door he gave me a crumpled bill for the taxi and left in the opposite direction without saying goodbye, without turning his head.

***

It took me weeks before I could sit down without burning. The first time I saw blood when I wiped myself, I cried in the bathroom with the tap running so the neighbor wouldn’t hear me. I thought I had to go to the hospital, but shame won out over fear, and in the end my body closed up on its own, as it always does.

For months I stopped going down Solar Avenue. I stopped looking at older men in the street. When I came back from work, I took a four-block detour just so I wouldn’t go near the hand-painted sign. I threw the black thong in the trash without ever wearing it again.

And yet there are nights when I remember. Not the bed, not the pain, not the name of the hotel, but a very specific moment: the booth at the back, the door slightly open, the gray-haired man lifting his eyes to make a gesture that needed no words. I remember the exact second I went in, and the exact certainty that after crossing that door I was going to be someone else.

I took a long time before going looking again. When I did, it was with more care, more conversation, more calm. I learned to ask, to wait, to say no in time. I learned that not every gray-haired man in a half-open booth has to be the one from that night.

But that man was the first, and that doesn’t go away. You learn to keep it in a box that you only open when you want to, and only in the dark.