What We Did in That Dark Theater
That city wasn’t ours, and I think that changed everything. Tomás and I had arrived at the end of June with two suitcases, a borrowed apartment belonging to one of his cousins, and the feeling that, far from home, we could finally be exactly who we were. Nobody knew us. Nobody was going to tell anyone anything. That immunity was the beginning of the problem.
We discovered it almost by accident, during the first week. We had gone to see a play in an old theater downtown, one of those places with worn velvet seats and an usher who no longer even looked at tickets. We bought the cheapest seats, the ones in the back, where the darkness was almost total and the stage was a long way off.
Twenty minutes in, I was no longer following the plot. I was following Tomás’s hand, which had slid from my knee to the inside of my thigh and was moving upward with calculated slowness, as if we had all the time in the world and no reason to stop.
—Stop —I whispered, not wanting him to stop.
—Are you sure? —he murmured against my ear, and I felt his smile more than I saw it.
I was not at all sure.
His hand found the bulge beneath the fabric of my trousers and began to squeeze slowly, tracing me with his fingers over my clothes. I felt myself harden against his palm, and I had to clench my teeth to keep from making a sound. Onstage, the actors were shouting at each other; in the row in front of us, an older couple laughed at the play. Nobody paid us the slightest attention, and precisely that distance, that whole world absorbed in something else a meter away from us, was what drove me wild.
Tomás lowered my zipper with a surgeon’s care. The brush of cold air, and then the heat of his hand closing around me, drew a gasp from me that I had to swallow halfway.
—Quiet —he warned me in a very low voice, delighted—. The act’s ending.
He jerked me off like that, slowly, for what felt like hours, while I clung to the armrest with white knuckles and stared straight ahead, pretending to be utterly absorbed. Every time the audience applauded, he used the noise to speed up; when the theater fell silent again, he slowed until I was left on the edge, suspended, desperate. By the time the play reached its climax, I could no longer hold out. I came into the handkerchief he had put in my hand “just in case,” shaking all over, holding back a moan that got stuck in my throat like a knot.
We went out into the lobby with burning cheeks and a nervous laugh we couldn’t get rid of. That night, back in the apartment, we did it again, slowly and unhurriedly, but we both knew something had changed. The bed was no longer enough for us.
***
From then on, it turned into a game. A game with rules we never said out loud but both understood. Every day, one of us proposed a new place; the other had to rise to the occasion. The whole city turned into a board, and we went marking squares.
We texted about it during the day, while I worked on the project that had brought me there and he wandered around museums killing time. “The tourist lighthouse this afternoon?” he wrote. “Two-hour line,” I answered. “Even better,” he replied. And I could feel my mouth drying out in front of the computer.
The lighthouse was the most visited monument on the coast, a white tower with a lookout at the top and tiny bathrooms at the base, always full of tourists with cameras hanging around their necks. We waited for a whole group to come out in a rush and slipped into the same stall, locking the latch with our hearts racing.
—You’re insane —I said, laughing softly.
—You’re worse, for coming —he replied.
And he got down on his knees.
Seeing him there below me, in that closet-sized space, with the fluorescent light flickering over his hair and the echo of a hundred conversations on the other side of the door, made me lose my mind. He took me out with impatient hands and took me all the way into his mouth in one shot, no preamble, his throat tightening around me while his nails dug into my ass to pull me closer.
I had to bite the back of my hand. I could feel him hot, wet, perfect; his tongue moved up and down over the head, and every time someone yanked a chain next to us or a kid screamed in the corridor, he took me deeper, as if the danger made him even hungrier. I held his head with both hands, setting the rhythm, staring at the cheap latch that was the only thing separating us from a scandal.
—I’m going to… —I gasped.
He didn’t pull away. On the contrary: he shoved my hips forward and swallowed me down whole as I emptied into his throat, eyes closed, an expression of pure pleasure that stayed with me the rest of the day. We left the bathroom separately, one minute apart, and crossed paths in the exit line pretending not to know each other. That performance, that theater of ours, almost pleased me as much as the other thing.
***
The park was my idea, so I wouldn’t always come out second best.
The city’s central park was enormous, kilometers of tree-lined paths that emptied of families at night and filled with shadows. We found a secluded bend behind some tall hedges, where only the orange light of a distant streetlamp reached. I kissed him against the trunk of a tree with an urgency I didn’t recognize in myself, slipped my hands under his T-shirt, bit his neck while he breathed against my hair.
—We’re really going to get caught here —he said, and his voice trembled, but not from fear.
—That’s the plan —I answered, repeating his own words back to him.
I turned him around, pulled his pants down just enough, and took my time getting him ready with my fingers, feeling him open for me while he bit down on his forearm against the bark. When I finally entered him, slowly, both of us let out our breath at the same time. I grabbed his hips and started moving, first carefully, then without holding back, driving into him at a pace that made him rise onto his toes.
A couple walking a dog passed in the distance. We froze, me buried in him to the hilt, both of us holding our breath while the voices came closer and then drifted away again along the path. As soon as they disappeared, Tomás turned his head and looked at me over his shoulder with a wild smile.
—Don’t stop now —he begged.
I didn’t stop. I drove into him harder, one hand over his mouth to muffle his moans and the other wrapped around the front of him, jerking him at the same rhythm. Sweat glued our half-off clothes to our bodies, the night smelled of damp earth and grass, and every crack of a branch was an electric shock running through both of us. When I felt him tense and spill over my hand, I followed right away, biting his shoulder so I wouldn’t shout, emptying myself inside him in waves that left me legless.
We got dressed in a hurry, laughing like two kids, and left the park holding hands, something we had never dared do at home.
***
We played the last square the day before we left.
Tomás’s cousin had gone away on a trip and left us the keys to the building roof, a narrow terrace with views over all the city’s lit-up skyscrapers. It wasn’t exactly sex in public —nobody could see us— but by then we weren’t after the risk alone anymore. We were after a goodbye.
I undressed him slowly under the starless sky, licking his chest, moving down his stomach, finally giving back what he had gotten at the lighthouse. I took him into my mouth calmly, savoring him, while he stroked my hair and whispered my name as if it were the most important thing in the world. Then we lay down on an old blanket and did it face to face, unhurried for the first time in weeks, me inside him, his legs circling my waist, his eyes locked on mine with every thrust.
—I don’t want this to end —he murmured, and he wasn’t talking only about the trip.
—It doesn’t have to —I told him, and I kissed him deeply while we moved together, the city wind brushing our sweaty skin.
We came almost at the same time, locked in each other’s arms, the whole metropolis flickering beneath us like a silent audience. Afterward we stayed there lying down, catching our breath, his fingers intertwined with mine.
—Tomorrow back home, no one’s going to believe what we did this summer —he said, with a tired smile.
—Then we won’t tell them —I replied—. Let it be ours.
And it was. We went back to our usual city, to our discreet life, to hands that didn’t hold each other in public. But something from that summer stayed with us, a new complicity, a shared certainty. And sometimes, in the middle of a boring family dinner, Tomás finds my knee under the table, slowly slides his hand up my thigh, and I understand perfectly what he’s telling me without words.
The game, really, never ended.
