What Happened with My Neighbor in the Indoor Pool

My name is Adrián, and I’m twenty-three years old. I’m no pretty boy, but I take care of myself: I go to the gym four days a week and try not to lose the shape it took me so much effort to get. I’m saying that just so what came after makes sense, because until that summer I thought I knew exactly what I wanted.

I worked as a lifeguard to pay for the last few months of college. That was going to be my final year in the chair, so I chose a quiet residential complex on the Cantabrian coast, far from the crowded beaches. In the north, summer is treacherous: many gray days, a fine drizzle, and communal pools that were almost never full. Most afternoons I spent alone, watching over still water that nobody ever set foot in.

One of those leaden afternoons, almost at the end of my shift, I saw him come in. He was a neighbor I’d crossed paths with several times in the lobby, but with whom I’d never exchanged a word. Early forties, dark, his hair cut almost down to the scalp like a soldier’s. Big, broad-shouldered, with that build of a man who used to be an athlete and has no intention of stopping. He was wearing one of those short swimmer’s briefs and, beneath them, everything was outlined in a way that forced me to look away out of embarrassment.

I went out to sit in the lifeguard chair, pretending I was keeping an eye on the water. The truth was I wasn’t keeping an eye on anything. He raised a hand to greet me —something he’d never done before— and dove in headfirst.

The pool was semi-Olympic, long enough to train for real. He started with several freestyle laps and then switched to butterfly. Every time he lifted his torso out of the water, his shoulders and back tightened like ropes, and I could feel my mouth drying out. I told myself it was sports admiration. I was lying badly, even to myself.

During one of the rests between sets, he motioned for me to come over to the edge.

“Hey, kid. Not getting in today?” he asked, resting his arms on the coping.

“Not today, it’s a bit cool,” I replied.

“Come on, get in and train with me for a while. Swimming alone is boring.”

I hesitated for a second, or pretended to. It was too tempting an invitation to pass up. I took off my sweatshirt and flip-flops and jumped into the water. We spent half an hour splashing around, hardly speaking, matching each other’s rhythm. On the last set he suddenly slowed and turned to me with a crooked smile.

“Want to make it a little more interesting?”

“What do you have in mind?” I said, catching my breath.

“Whoever loses this last sprint has to run a full lap around the pool. Naked.”

I froze. But it was already completely dark, the pool lighting had been broken for weeks, and it was a black bathtub where you couldn’t make anything out two meters away. I looked him in the eye, defiant, and said the first thing my body asked for.

“Go ahead and take off your briefs.”

I wasn’t about to miss the chance to see what he had hidden down there.

He let out a deep laugh. We took our places at the edge, gripping the coping. Ready, set, go. I gave that sprint everything I had, but he had twice as much muscle as I did and beat me by half a body. He came out of the water spitting and laughing.

“You’re slow as hell, kid,” he said between laughs. “I was kidding, you don’t have to get naked.”

“No way,” I replied. “A man’s bet is a man’s bet.”

I got out of the water, took off my briefs, and let them drop onto the tiles. He didn’t look away from my body for a single second, and I let him look. I took off running around the perimeter, feeling the cool air on my wet skin, and when I came back he was still there, planted in place, no longer laughing.

“You’re a man of your word,” he said quietly, and went to get his towel.

While I dried off and gathered my things, he came over with his hair still dripping.

“By the way, I haven’t even introduced myself. Rubén.”

“Adrián. Nice to meet you.”

“If you’re not in a hurry, I’ll buy you a couple beers at my place. For the beating I gave you in the water.”

The sky lit up for me and I accepted before thinking. On the way he told me bits and pieces of his life: forty-six years old, mechanic at the city fire station, former rugby player back when he’d almost gone pro. I asked, as if by accident, whether his family left him time to train, and he said he didn’t have a family. No partner, no kids. He lived alone.

***

His apartment smelled of wood and cheap cologne, the kind that on him was perfect. He opened two beers, put out some snacks, and told me he was going upstairs to change, that he’d be right back. He took five minutes. He came back in an old, baggy T-shirt and gray sweatpants, and the bastard hadn’t put anything on underneath, because everything was outlined beneath the fabric. By then I was already clear that he hadn’t invited me over for the beers alone. So I decided to stop playing defense.

We sat on the sofa and talked about nonsense for a while, work, the summer drawing to a close. Then he set the bottle on the table and looked at me from the side.

“You’ve got to have some serious balls to strip like that, without thinking twice,” he said. “And from what I saw, you’ve got them well in place. You must not be short on girlfriends.”

I laughed nervously and felt heat rising up my neck.

“I figured you wouldn’t come. You could be with any girl you wanted, and you’d rather come have a drink with an old man,” he went on.

“It’s just that I’m not into girls,” I blurted out, looking him in the eye.

Something changed in his face. He looked at me like an animal that had just understood the prey stayed still on purpose, and he adjusted the bulge in his pants without trying to hide it.

“I wasn’t expecting that.”

“Sure?” I answered, and put my hand on him, over the fabric.

He held my gaze for half a second and lunged. We started kissing with an urgency that left no time to think, our hands everywhere. The first thing I did was rip off his T-shirt: I’d spent the whole afternoon imagining that broad chest covered in hair, those abs still marked despite the years. His tongue tangled with mine and I couldn’t stop thinking about what would come next.

I gently pushed him to sit down on the sofa and started working my way down with my mouth. His neck, his collarbone, that pectoral I lingered on for a long while, breathing in his man-and-pool smell, listening to him growl under his breath. I kept going down to the waistband of his pants. I pulled them down and found a thick cock, hard, the tip shining from how aroused it was, and beneath it a pair of heavy balls hanging tight. I paused for a second, almost respectfully, just looking at it.

I stuck out my tongue and started at the base, slowly moving up the whole shaft until I reached the head. I tried to take it all in at once and nearly choked, because it wouldn’t fit. So I took my time. I gave him the best blowjob I remember ever giving, coating it in saliva, playing with the rhythm, stopping just when I felt him at the limit. He gripped the back of my neck, panting, letting out broken curses. I stayed like that for what felt like forever until I felt him swell and come in my mouth with a hoarse grunt that came up from his chest.

I was about to wipe myself off when he took my face in both hands and kissed me, his tongue still dirty with himself, mixing everything together, not the slightest bit grossed out. My cock was ready to burst and nobody had touched me. He had other plans. He slipped one arm around my waist, the other under my legs, and lifted me off the sofa as if I weighed nothing.

***

He dropped me onto the bed and stayed standing at the edge, silhouetted against the little light coming in from the hallway. That man’s body, chest covered in hair and sweat, his cock hanging there again, half-hard between his thighs. He stripped me with one yank, lifted my legs, and buried his face between them. He started eating my ass in a way that made my back arch; he licked, pulled back, went up to my balls and then back down, and every pass sent a shiver from the nape of my neck to my feet. He did it for a long while, without rushing, until he started working in his fingers, one first, then two, opening me up patiently. I was on the verge of coming without anyone having even touched my cock.

He sat up, reached for a bottle of lube on the nightstand, and smeared it over me with two fingers while I watched from below. His cock was back in place, rock hard. I leaned in to wet it with my mouth so it would go in easier, because I knew what was waiting for me.

“Go slow or you’ll kill me,” I asked, getting on all fours.

“Relax,” he murmured. “I’ll set the pace.”

He started sliding it in little by little. I could feel the way he forced his way through, how my body gave centimeter by centimeter, pleasure and burn mingling until they blurred together. When he was halfway in I pushed back, and took him all at once to the hilt. A cry tore out of me that was more of a moan. He pulled almost all the way out and went back in slowly, once, then again, until I stopped noticing where the pain ended and the pleasure began. I turned my head and looked at him.

“Fuck me already.”

I saw the fire light up in his eyes. He grabbed my hair, pulled his cock all the way out and, with a single thrust, drove it in to the hilt. Each thrust was one more step toward a place I didn’t want to come back from. He kept pumping for a long while, folding me over the bed, until he asked me to change positions. He lay on his back and left his cock pointing at the ceiling, hard as a mast.

I sat on top and took him in all the way myself, controlling the rhythm, watching him writhe beneath me. It only took a few up-and-downs for me to come without touching myself, splashing his chest, emptying myself onto him, and I collapsed over his torso, gasping. He held me tight and started thrusting from below at a speed that made me moan against his neck. Suddenly I felt him speed up, swell again inside me, and he emptied himself with a roar that echoed all over the room. I fell spent on top of him, the two of us stuck together by sweat.

A while later he woke me with a cold beer in his hand and that crooked smile I was already beginning to know.

“You’ve got good stamina, kid,” he said. “Here, eat something. The night’s going to be long.”