The Scent of His Socks Confessed What He Felt
When I started at the marketing agency that had just hired me, Adrián was the first person to come over and greet me. I liked him instantly: honey-colored eyes, a crooked smile, and that conversational ease people have when they never doubt themselves. Three days after we started working together, I had already discovered two things: that he was straight and that he was married to a woman named Lorena, with whom he had a four-year-old son. None of that mattered. We clicked as if we had known each other all our lives.
We went out for beers every couple of weeks, I met Lorena and the boy at a family barbecue, and a couple of months later he met Diego, the guy I had started dating at the time. Those comfortable friendships, with no hidden agenda, are rare after thirty. I valued his the way one values a good armchair: for how naturally it molded itself to me.
Two years later, Adrián accepted a position at an agency in Rosario and moved there with his family. I missed him, though we kept chatting almost every day. We discussed games, talked about work, and sent each other long voice messages about nothing. Our friendship adjusted to the distance without losing anything essential.
One ordinary afternoon he wrote asking me to look over the program for an advertising conference in Mendoza. Three days, interesting speakers, a reasonable budget. We were both going. We agreed to share a room to cut the cost of the trip and, without thinking too much about it, I told him I would handle the reservation because my flight landed earlier.
My plane arrived four hours before his. The hotel was fifteen minutes from the airport, a modest five-story building with an inner garden. When the receptionist asked whether I preferred two single beds or one double, I still had my suitcases at my feet and the question caught me off guard. In the six years we had been friends, I had never once thought of Adrián sexually. He wasn’t my type, or so I had always told myself, and I had never read any signal from him suggesting otherwise.
“A double,” I said, before I even knew why.
If he asks, I’ll tell him it was the only one available.
I went up to the room, unpacked, and went downstairs to eat a sandwich at the hotel bar. When I came back, Adrián was already in the room, sitting on the edge of the bed and looking at his phone. He hugged me with his usual exuberance, said he was starving, and we went out to walk around downtown. He never asked about the bed. Not a comment, not a joke, nothing. That reassured me and at the same time left a new discomfort in my stomach, as if a door I had opened by accident had been left ajar.
We spent the afternoon touring the city, then went back upstairs to finish some office work, each of us with his laptop on the bed. When it turned ten, Adrián closed his, stretched, and said he would shower first. He went into the bathroom with his sleep clothes draped over his arm and closed the door without locking it.
He came out fifteen minutes later in his underwear. A pair of black briefs that clung to his hips as if they had been sewn onto his body. His hair was still wet, droplets running down his shoulders, and he had the expression of someone who had just washed the day away under hot water. I forced myself not to look at him too much. I pretended to read an email.
***
It wasn’t an epiphany. It was a current. I had seen his torso a thousand times at the club pool, at the beach, on the days when the office air-conditioning broke and we all walked around in T-shirts. But that night, in that hotel room, watching him stand there in the black briefs with his beard dripping, I felt the air change temperature. He was a little taller than me, close to five foot nine, pale skin burned by the summer sun, his arms covered in geometric tattoos that climbed to his shoulders. The rounded belly he hated, which for the first time struck me as something I wanted to bite. And the bulge—not huge, but clearly outlined beneath the cotton—hinted at the length of his cock, the weight of his balls, the exact shape of the glans pressed against the fabric.
“What?” he asked me, sitting down on his side of the bed.
“Nothing. I was thinking about tomorrow’s panel.”
He laughed without looking at me and turned on the television. He stretched his legs over the bedspread, crossed his right over his left, and settled back against the headboard. I had my laptop on my knees and pretended to reread a client brief I knew by heart. The blue light from the screen flickered across his knee, and my treacherous eyes slowly moved downward: firm calves, dark hair, a slender ankle, and the foot. The crossed foot, suspended in the air, with long, well-proportioned toes and short, clean nails. Feet had never caught my attention before. And yet I found myself wondering what it would feel like to run my tongue along his sole, from his heel to his big toe, unhurriedly, listening to his breathing quicken, feeling his cock swell beneath the briefs while I sucked each toe as if it were a tiny dick.
What the fuck is happening to me?
I shut the laptop harder than necessary and announced that I was going to shower.
***
The bathroom smelled of his shampoo and steam. His damp towel lay tossed over the bidet, the short hairs from his beard scattered all over the sink, and his sneakers sat in a corner, one fallen on top of the other. Typical of him. From each one protruded the white cuff of a used sock, folded over itself. I knelt without thinking and pulled one out.
It was white cotton with tiny green cactus designs. The sole was a little stiff, still warm, slightly damp. Without knowing why, without deciding to, I brought it to my face. The smell hit me: intense, the sweat of an entire day, sneaker leather, the body of a man who had walked for miles without any air circulating around him. I should have dropped it. Instead, I inhaled deeply, mouth half open, letting the smell of a man enter my nose and throat at the same time.
The erection came before I processed what I was doing. My cock went hard all at once against my zipper, pulsing, swollen, soaking my briefs with pre-cum within seconds. I stood up, locked the door, turned the shower on full blast so the noise of the water would cover anything, and pulled down my pants and briefs with an urgency I hadn’t felt in years. My dick sprang out stiff, red at the tip, with a thick drop hanging from the glans.
I pressed my back against the cold tiles. I took the second sock, also white, also stiff, and wrapped it around my right hand, squeezing it tightly against my palm so the sweaty fabric would cling to my cock. With my left hand I brought the first one to my nose. I inhaled deeply and slowly, letting that man-smell seep all the way inside me. And I started moving.
Slowly at first. The rough fabric, rough from Adrián’s dried sweat, scraped my glans in a way that normally would have pulled me out of the mood. That night it drove me on. Every pass of the sock over the corona made a spasm escape me, made my balls contract, made pre-cum trickle over my fingers. I gripped myself with my whole hand, wrapping my cock in the dirty cotton, and started pumping up and down, squeezing hard, feeling the sweat-stiffened fabric rub against the swollen veins in my shaft.
I closed my eyes. I imagined Adrián opening the door and stopping in the doorway, watching me, his crooked smile on his face, seeing me jerk off with his sock pressed to my face. I imagined him coming in without a word, pulling down the black briefs and letting a thick cock fall into the open air, thicker than it was long, the foreskin drawn back and the glans shining. I imagined him taking the sock from my hands and pressing it over my mouth and nose while he forced me to my knees against the tiles, spread my ass with both hands, and shoved his entire dick into me in a single thrust, without lube, without warning, with the dull violence of men who discover what they like too late.
I squeezed my cock harder. I imagined him fucking me against the bathroom wall, biting my shoulder, growling in my ear, “Suck the sock, faggot, suck it while I fuck you,” and me obeying, my tongue buried in the sweaty fabric, feeling his dick sliding in and out, his balls slamming against my ass with every thrust. I imagined him turning me around afterward, sitting me on the toilet lid, and sinking his cock into my throat, all the way down, until my eyes filled with tears and I felt the hair at his groin stuck to my nose. I imagined the taste: salty, thick, carrying the same sweat that sock was stuffing into my mouth.
I imagined kneeling in front of him afterward and licking his toes one by one, slowly, as if they were made of sugar, sucking them to the knuckle, running my tongue along his sole from heel to big toe, and him—after spending six years calling himself straight—moaning my name for the first time in a broken voice, gripping his cock and jerking off over my face while I kept eating his feet like a starving dog.
The rhythm quickened without my deciding to speed up. My hand moved up and down my dick at top speed, the sock already soaked with pre-cum, the fabric making that wet, filthy sound skin makes when it’s well lubricated. I inhaled harder through the other nostril, pushing my nose deep into the heel of the sock, where the smell was more concentrated, more acidic, more intimate. I put my tongue to the fabric and sucked it. It tasted of salt, foot, man. A muffled moan escaped me, forcing me to bite the cotton to silence it.
I thought, absurdly, about asking to borrow his socks and keeping them in an airtight bag in my drawer, opening it on nights when nostalgia became confused with desire, jerking off while smelling them whenever he sent me a voice message talking about meetings or games. I thought of his wife, his son, the Rosario office, all the reasons that fantasy would never leave that bathroom. Instead of stopping me, it pushed me even harder. I stroked myself faster, harder, squeezing the glans with the tip of the sock on every upward stroke, feeling my balls draw up tight against my body, feeling the cum build at the base of my cock, ready to shoot.
My orgasm came in four long, thick spurts that splattered the tiles, the first so strong it reached my chest, the next ones streaming over my fingers, the sock, and my thighs. My dick still throbbed in my hand, shooting hot ropes of semen, while I bit down on the other sock so I wouldn’t moan Adrián’s name out loud. My thighs trembled. My knees buckled and I had to brace myself against the wall to keep from falling. When I opened my eyes, the mirror showed me a thirty-two-year-old man, his cock still hard and dripping the last threads of cum, his best friend’s sock plastered to his face, soaked with saliva and semen, and a filthy, enormous happiness.
***
I rinsed the sock I had used to masturbate with under the shower stream, wringing it out until no more semen came out, then scrubbed it with soap until it was indistinguishable from the other one. I left them exactly as I had found them, folded inside the sneaker in the same orientation, taking care with that ridiculous detail as if Adrián were a professional detective. I washed the tiles with the handheld showerhead, erasing the white drips stuck to the grout, showered as I had announced, dried myself, put on clean briefs, and left the bathroom with the most neutral expression I could manufacture.
He was already under the sheets, eyes closed, breathing slowly. I turned off the bedside lamp, slipped beneath the sheets on my side of the mattress, and lay staring at the ceiling. He was twelve inches away. I could have stretched out my arm and rested it on his shoulder. I could have turned and spoken against the nape of his neck, as in any of the fantasies I had just masturbated to. But I did nothing. I listened to his breathing until I lost track of time, my cock half-hard again beneath my briefs, throbbing slowly, as if it had a memory of its own.
The three nights of the conference passed in much the same way. Dinners, talks, back to the room, separate showers, restless sleep. Every night, when it was his turn to shower first, I waited for him to come out, counted to ten, and went into the bathroom under the pretext of taking a piss. Every night I searched inside his sneakers for the sweaty socks, brought them to my face, and jerked off against the tiles while smelling him, imagining his cock in my mouth, my ass, my face. Every night I came harder than the one before, biting the fabric to swallow my moans, and every night I emerged from the bathroom with my face washed and my breathing normal, as if nothing had happened.
At some point, our skin brushed. A sleeping arm against mine, a calf that rested against me by accident and stayed there. Awake in the darkness, I sought out those touches as discreetly as I could: a change of position, a leg stretching two inches farther than necessary. When I managed it, there was no arousal. There was a warmth that settled in my chest and left my breathing calm, as if something had finally fallen into place.
That feeling—not the one in the bathroom with the socks—was what frightened me. Because I understood, while flying home, that the filthy fantasy involving his smell wasn’t the beginning of a passing hard-on. It was the beginning of something far worse and far more beautiful: I was falling in love with my best friend, and I wouldn’t be able to pretend otherwise much longer.