The Sauna Bear Filmed Me Without My Knowing

On the first Thursday in May, I walked into El Refugio without really knowing what I was looking for. Sebastián had moved to Córdoba with his new boyfriend four months earlier, and my bed had smelled of a single body ever since. A colleague from the university had whispered the tip to me over coffee, as though confiding a password: “If you like big men, that’s the place.”

I’m one of those. Forty-two years old, one hundred and ten kilos, a thick beard reaching halfway down my chest. Literature professor of the Golden Age at a public university in Rosario. I’ve spent half my life getting used to walking into places where my body doesn’t fit, so when I pushed open the door to El Refugio and saw a dozen men like me, I felt something close to relief.

The attendant, a bald guy with a piercing in his lip, handed me a towel and a locker key without asking me anything beyond my name. I gave him a fake one. Mateo, I said. It’s my father’s name, dead for ten years; I use it when I want to be someone else for a couple of hours.

—Changing room in the back, sauna to the left, rooms upstairs.

I undressed slowly, folding my clothes as if it were a ritual. The white towel was too small to wrap around my waist. My cock hung heavy between my thighs, thick even at rest, and I felt the cool air of the changing room brush my balls as I went up the stairs barefoot, trying not to slip.

The sauna was dim. Three silhouettes settled themselves on the wooden tiers; only the glow from the hot stones lit their thighs. One of them had his hand between his legs, lazily jerking off, unhidden. I sat in the lowest corner, far from the others, and breathed in the eucalyptus-scented steam.

One of them stood up after a while. He was shorter than me, broader, with a shaved head and a jet-black beard shining with sweat. His towel gaped at the hip and exposed a hairy thigh all the way to the groin. He came down two steps and sat beside me without asking. His thigh pressed against mine.

—First time —he said. It wasn’t a question.

—Is it that obvious?

—You can smell it.

I laughed despite myself. He did too. He had very white teeth and a small scar splitting his left eyebrow.

—Damián.

—Mateo.

He offered me his hand. When I took it, he didn’t let go. He slowly guided it up to his thigh, to the edge of the towel, then beneath it. I let him lead. When my fingers brushed his cock, I found it already hard, thick, throbbing against his belly. I wrapped my hand around it and he let out a short breath through his nose. I started massaging him slowly, feeling it swell even more, the tip growing slick against my palm.

—Come upstairs —he whispered in my ear—, or I’ll suck you off right here in front of everyone.

***

The room he took me to was little more than a double bed with dark sheets, a red light on the ceiling, and a clothes rack with two towels. The door shut with a sharp click. Damián dropped his towel to the floor and stood in front of me, looking at me as if he were measuring me. His cock curved upward, thick, red at the tip, with a vein running up the right side. His balls hung heavy, tight against the root.

—What do you like?

—I don’t know yet.

—Then let’s find out.

He gently pushed me against the wall. The cold tile made me arch. His mouth landed first on my neck, then my shoulder, then moved down my chest. He bit my left nipple just enough to draw a sound from me, not enough to make me pull back. He sucked the other nipple flat-tongued, circling it, pulling it with his lips until it stood hard. Meanwhile his hands roamed my sides, kneading every fold as if reading braille, and one slid under the towel and grabbed my cock full-on, palm open.

—You’ve got a good body —he murmured against my belly—. And a hell of a cock.

—I’ve got the body I’ve got.

—That’s what I said.

He knelt down. My towel fell without my touching it. Damián took me whole into his mouth at once, without warning, swallowing me until his nose sank into the hair of my groin. I had to brace both hands on his shoulders to keep from losing my balance. I closed my eyes. It had been years since someone had sucked me off with this much hunger. I felt his throat close around the head, the hot, tight depth of it, saliva running from the corner of his mouth and onto my balls. When he pulled back to breathe, he had my cock in both hands and sucked each ball one by one, taking them fully into his mouth, tugging at them with his lips.

—What a cock, you son of a bitch —he muttered, and took me back in.

His tongue went up and down the shaft, paused at the frenulum, teased the slit at the tip as if he were licking his fingers after eating. He started pumping me with his hand while he sucked only the head, lips sealed tight around it. I dug my fingers into his shaved scalp, moving his head at the rhythm I needed. Saliva hung from his black beard in strings.

When I realized I was about to come too soon, I pulled his hair to make him stand up. He obeyed with the smile of a man who knows exactly what he’s provoking, lips swollen and shining.

—What do I do with you? —I asked, almost to myself.

—Whatever you want. But hurry up, because there are people upstairs waiting their turn.

—Shut up.

—Make me shut up.

I shoved him onto the bed. He fell back, laughing, his stomach and chest rising and falling with his breath, his cock bouncing against his navel. I spread his legs and knelt between them. His smell was thick, salty, with a background of wood and sauna sweat. I ran my tongue along the inside of his thigh and felt him shudder. I licked the crease of his groin, his hairy balls, and went lower, to his ass. I buried my tongue there without asking permission, pushing between his cheeks, feeling the opening give little by little beneath the wetness.

—Fuck, shit —he panted, clutching the sheets.

—Don’t make me wait.

—You can wait a little.

I worked him without rushing. My tongue went in as far as it could, my lips sucking the edge of his hole, my teeth grazing the skin of his perineum. When I had him wet enough, I slid in one finger and then two, searching for that spot inside. Damián began lifting his hips against my hand, moaning like an animal, one hand on his own cock, pumping it without rhythm.

—Get it in me already, you son of a bitch, I can’t take it anymore.

—You can wait a little —I repeated, pulling my fingers out.

I grabbed his cock and put it in my mouth myself this time, just for a few seconds, to hear him moan again. I sucked him from base to tip with a flat tongue, going up slowly, and when I got to the head I spat on it and went back down. Then I licked his balls, and went back to his ass. Every time I was about to give him what he wanted, I pulled away by a millimeter. It’s a trick I learned late in life: the best part of sex is almost always the prelude.

I crossed his legs over my shoulders. I spat into my palm, ran it over my cock twice, set the tip against his open hole and pushed. The head went in at once. Damián arched his whole back.

—Slowly —he hissed through his teeth.

—Now you hang on.

I eased in little by little, centimeter by centimeter, until my balls slapped against his cheeks. I had to cover his mouth with my hand so the scream wouldn’t carry out into the hallway. He bit my palm. I felt him closing around me with a force that made me lose my rhythm. I had to stop, breathe, count to five in my head, feeling him throb around my cock.

—Move —he ordered when I let his mouth go.

And I moved. Slowly at first, with my cock coming almost all the way out before sinking back to the hilt, and he moaned with every thrust. Then harder, gripping his hips with both hands, taking him with my whole weight on top of him, and the bed began hitting the wall and the sound of bodies —wet flesh colliding, balls slapping his ass, broken gasps— filled the room.

—Like that, like that, harder —he muttered—, wreck my ass, wreck it all the way.

I lifted one leg, pressed it against his chest, and drove deeper. Damián had his eyes shut and his mouth open, panting out words that couldn’t be understood. He grabbed his cock and started hammering it in the rhythm of my thrusts. I saw the semen rise along the shaft before he came: thick white ropes that splashed over his hairy belly, one reaching his collarbone. He shook all over, and his ass clenched so hard around my cock that it wrung two more thrusts out of me and that was it.

The orgasm surged up from my balls like an electric shock. I pulled out at the last second and spilled my load over him, over his stomach, mixing with his, one long stream reaching his nipples and another shorter one soaking the hair of his pubis. I collapsed on top of him, burying my face in his beard and shoulder, my cock still dripping between our sticky bellies.

***

We stayed like that for a while, silent, while he stroked my back with the tips of his fingers, sliding over my own sweat. I heard my heart pounding in my ears. I thought about Sebastián, about four months without sex, about how stupid I’d been not to go out sooner.

—Drink some water —Damián said suddenly, handing me a bottle he pulled from under the bed.

I drank almost half of it in one swallow.

—Want to see something? —he asked, while he searched for his phone among the pile of clothes on a rack I hadn’t noticed before.

—Something like what?

He sat beside me. The screen lit up in his hand. And there, in the video he pressed play on, was me. My face. My broad chest. The reflection of the red light on my skin. The shot had been taken from the clothes rack, almost up by the ceiling, at a wide angle that took in the whole bed.

My stomach dropped to the floor.

—What the hell is that?

—Relax.

—Don’t tell me to relax. Delete it.

—I’m going to delete it. But first I want you to watch it.

He held it in front of me. I pushed it away with my hand. He held it out again. On the screen, my own body moved with a looseness I didn’t remember having. Damián below, legs open, cock hard, ass slick. Me on top, fucking him with my cock buried all the way inside him, making him moan. It was beautiful, in a way, and horrible at the same time.

—Damián, I swear if this shows up anywhere...

—Mateo —he cut me off—. I recorded it because I’ve been coming here for two months and I’d never seen a guy like you walk in. I’m not going to post it. I’m not going to show it to anyone. I’ll delete it right now if you want.

He pressed a couple of buttons. The video progress bar disappeared. Then he showed me the empty gallery.

—Done.

—I don’t know if I trust you.

—I don’t know you either, and you just went inside me without a condom. Either we both trust, or neither of us does.

He was right, and that made me angry.

***

We dressed in silence. I went down the stairs ahead of him. In the changing room, while I tied my shoelaces, I sat down beside a guy wearing a T-shirt from the faculty where I teach. I nearly had a heart attack. Luckily he didn’t look up.

Damián waited for me on the sidewalk with a lit cigarette. The street was wet from rain I hadn’t noticed falling.

—Want a coffee? —he said.

I said yes because I couldn’t think of a reason to say no.

We walked four blocks to a twenty-four-hour bar. He ordered two coffee-and-milk drinks and two medialunas. While we waited, he confessed that he was a motorcycle mechanic, that he had his own shop three neighborhoods away, and that he’d been married for ten years to a man named Lucas who knew perfectly well that he went to El Refugio on Thursdays.

—We have an arrangement —he explained.

—What kind of arrangement?

—The kind that works for us.

—And the videos?

—We watch them together when I get back. We jerk off to them, and then he fucks me thinking about the guy I was with. It’s our thing. If it offends you, I swear yours is deleted.

I stirred the sugar into my coffee without drinking it. I thought about Sebastián, about the six years we spent fighting over jealousy neither of us knew how to handle. I thought about how much it had cost me to accept myself, body and all. I thought about how strange what Damián was telling me sounded, and how little it offended me.

—Tell Lucas I want to meet him next time.

Damián lifted his eyes from his coffee. He laughed softly.

—Are you sure?

—No.

—Even better.

***

The following Thursday I walked into El Refugio without hesitation. This time I already knew where the locker was, where the sauna was, and how many steps the staircase had. Damián was waiting for me at the bar with another man whose name I only knew. Lucas was taller, thinner if you can say thin about someone who weighs ninety kilos, and had eyes the color of a green I didn’t remember ever seeing before.

—So you’re the famous one —he said, holding out his hand—. Damián won’t shut up about your mouth.

—I’m disappointed he only talks about the mouth.

—He also talks about your cock. He says it’s the thickest one he’s taken all year.

—That’s better.

The three of us went upstairs to the same room. This time there was no camera, or if there was, I chose not to ask. Lucas undressed first, with the ease of someone who’s been doing it in company for years. His body was different from Damián’s: less bulk, more muscle, a long scar on his side that he later told me came from gallbladder surgery. He had a long, thin cock, curved to the left, and small balls pressed close.

—Tell us what you like —Lucas said, helping me pull off my shirt.

—This time I do know.

—Let’s hear it.

—One of you sucks me off while the other eats his ass.

Lucas laughed, and Damián didn’t laugh, because he was already kneeling in front of me. He yanked my cock out of my pants and took it back into his mouth as if he recognized it. I sat on the edge of the bed and Lucas knelt behind Damián, pried his cheeks open with both hands, and buried his face there. I started hearing the sounds: Lucas’s tongue working at his husband’s ass, Damián’s mouth sliding over my cock, and the three of us breathing hard over one another.

Lucas came up afterward. He had patient hands and Damián had urgency, and I stayed in the middle letting myself be handled and taking turns handling them, losing and regaining the rhythm. Lucas licked my nipples slowly, one and then the other, while Damián kept sucking me below. Then it was Lucas’s turn to get on all fours so Damián could fuck him, and it was my turn to cover his mouth with my cock so he wouldn’t cry out. Lucas sucked me with his eyes shut, choking each time Damián drove his cock all the way into him from behind.

At some point I found myself with Lucas’s mouth on my cock while Damián worked me from behind, with two saliva-slick fingers opening my ass for the first time in years. Lucas’s tongue moved up my shaft and Damián’s teeth bit my cheek, and I thought it should have felt strange, but it didn’t. Then Damián pushed his cock into me, with the same round, thick head I had driven into him the previous week. I felt the burn first, the shock, then the heat opening inside me. Lucas kept sucking me from the front, swallowing me to the root each time Damián thrust from behind.

I came first, spilling into Lucas’s mouth, and he swallowed everything without taking my cock out until the last drop. Then Damián filled my ass from the inside, pulling out just before he finished to leave a stripe of warm cum all over my back. Lucas came last, jerking his curved cock with his right hand while he watched the two of us panting, and shot two streams onto Damián’s chest. The three of us ended up sprawled out, one on top of the other, listening to ourselves breathe, soaked in semen and sweat.

—Are you coming back next Thursday? —Lucas asked me, his face resting on my belly.

—I’m coming back many Thursdays.

—Good.

***

It’s been two years since that first Thursday. I still teach Garcilaso, Quevedo, the sonnets that make my students wrinkle their noses. I still live alone, in a studio apartment overlooking the river. I’m still fat, still bearded, still forty-two even though I’m already forty-four.

Damián and Lucas split up last summer, but the three of us still see each other, together or separately, depending on our moods. I learned not to ask them too much, and they learned not to demand an answer from me about what we are. It’s not a couple, it’s not a friendship, it’s not a steady threesome. It’s ours, and for once in my life I’m fine with it having no name.

The other day, while grading exams in the bar on the corner, a student recognized me and sat at my table. He asked if it was true that I was gay, because someone had told him so. I said yes. I asked him if he had a problem with that. He said no, he just wanted to know. Then he asked me if I liked men like him, skinny and hairless, or if I preferred others.

—I prefer the others —I answered, and asked for the bill.

I went out into the street thinking that one day, many years from now, someone would write a novel about men like us. That it wouldn’t be me writing it, because I devote myself to reading the ones written by other dead people centuries ago. But that it would exist. And that in that novel, a character like me would walk into a place like El Refugio for the first time and wouldn’t be afraid of what he was going to find inside.