When My Roommate Came Home Drunk, Everything Changed

My name is Andrés. I’m twenty, skinny, and not especially remarkable. I study engineering in Santiago and have been living in the university residence for a year and a half. What I’m going to tell you happened during exam week, and even though I know it wasn’t right, I don’t regret a thing.

My roommate is called Diego. Twenty-two years old, six feet tall, dark-skinned, with short black hair and honey-colored eyes that look incredible when they meet yours directly. He has the kind of body that doesn’t need the gym to look good: broad shoulders, a narrow waist, long legs. He also has tattoos on his left forearm and a way of laughing that disarms you without your quite understanding why.

Diego is exactly the kind of person I will never be: outgoing, unfiltered, always surrounded by people. He walks into any room and within five minutes everyone knows him. I’m the opposite: I do well with people I already know, but I shut down with strangers. He never fully understood that, though I never asked him to.

The problem was simple: Diego was straight. Very straight. The kind of straight guy who makes uncomfortable comments when he sees two men holding hands in the street, who pulls a weird face if someone mentions anything and changes the subject with a speed that says more than he realizes. So my attraction to him wasn’t just complicated, it was flat-out impossible, and I knew that from day one.

But knowing it changed nothing.

From the moment he arrived, I found him incredibly attractive. I watched him come into the room with an enormous backpack and two bags of clothes, and I thought it was going to be a very hard year. I wasn’t wrong.

We shared the bathroom with two other floors, but the hallway connecting the room to the shower was so narrow that only one person could fit through at a time. Diego had the habit of coming out of the shower with nothing but a towel wrapped around his waist and walking back to the room like that, looking for clean clothes, completely shameless. He always smelled like that lavender soap he used, and that smell still does things to me that I’d rather not analyze too closely.

One day, by accident, I saw him on his phone screen. He’d unlocked it to show me something and a photo appeared that was clearly not for me: some chick with her tits out, mouth open, and Diego’s cock resting against her cheek, glistening with spit. I stared for three seconds before looking away. Diego didn’t even notice. He kept talking about whatever he was talking about as if nothing had happened, and I spent the rest of the afternoon silent with that image stuck in my head: the exact thickness of his cock, the vein running along it from top to bottom, the way the tip brushed that girl’s lips.

That night I didn’t sleep well. I jerked off three times under the sheets, biting my forearm so I wouldn’t make a sound, imagining it was me with that cock in my mouth. When I finally came, silently and with my heart pounding, the semen dripped through my fingers and I had to wipe myself off with an old T-shirt. Diego was snoring in the bed next to mine, suspecting nothing.

What followed were months of fantasies I should never have fed. I imagined absurd things: getting down on my knees in front of him and opening my mouth, licking his balls while he grabbed my hair, fucking me with all his strength against the desk in our room. I masturbated thinking about him with a regularity that embarrassed me a little and that I couldn’t stop. Ridiculous fantasies about someone who didn’t even know I existed that way.

Until the night of the midterms.

***

It was Friday. I’d spent three days locked up studying thermodynamics and hadn’t left the building once in all that time. Diego, on the other hand, had already finished his exams and went out to celebrate with some friends from the design department. He told me he’d be back before midnight. I cared very little.

It was one-thirty when my phone rang. A number I didn’t recognize.

—Are you Diego’s roommate? —a girl’s voice asked.

—Yeah.

—He’s here at the entrance. He can’t make it up on his own.

I went down in a T-shirt and pajamas. I found him leaning against the wall with a stupid happy smile and half-closed eyes. The girl holding him passed him to me with a gesture that clearly said, “he’s yours,” and left without another explanation.

—Andrés —Diego said, dragging out my name in that exaggerated way that only happens when someone is really drunk—. Dude, I’m so glad you’re here.

—Yeah —I replied—. Come on, let’s go up.

He weighed quite a bit more than me and wasn’t coordinating his feet well. We climbed three floors holding onto the railing, bumping into the walls, half-laughing at nothing. When we got to the room I realized he was in worse shape than I’d thought: his eyes were almost completely shut and he had the balance of a ship in a storm. The smell of alcohol pouring off him filled the entire room.

I sat him on the bed and thought about leaving it at that. But he smelled bad, and the Diego I knew would have wanted a shower. So I lifted him up again.

—Shower —I told him.

—Shower —he repeated, as if it sounded like an excellent idea.

The bathroom was empty at that hour. I got him inside with difficulty and leaned him against the cold tile wall. I turned on the water to let it warm a little and held him while I waited. I took off his shirt, and when my hands touched his skin I felt something like vertigo: he was warm, firm, and smelled like that lavender soap mixed with sweat and beer. His bare torso, that close, was almost unbearable after months of only looking at him from a distance. I ran my fingers over his pecs without even thinking about it, feeling his dark nipples prickle in the cold bathroom air, and I had to take a deep breath just to keep from losing my mind right there.

Diego said nothing. His eyes were closed and he was breathing slowly, half asleep on his feet.

I pulled his pants down. He stayed in his boxer briefs under the stream of water, and I tried to focus on what I was doing and not on what I was seeing. I failed. The white briefs had gone almost transparent from the water, and through the wet fabric everything showed with cruel clarity: the bulge of his cock resting sideways against his thigh, the heavy balls beneath, the black pubic hair starting just above the elastic waistband.

I picked up the soap and started running it over his shoulders, his back, his chest. His muscles were loose from the alcohol. It was like holding something that doesn’t know you’re holding it. Every time I ran my hands along his sides I felt my heart beating too fast to be normal. I went down over his abdomen, following the line of hair descending from his navel, and stopped just before the boxer briefs. My hand was trembling.

This is wrong, I thought. This is very wrong and I know it perfectly well.

But I didn’t stop.

The water ran down his torso and disappeared under the fabric of the briefs. I looked at the shape they made underneath, that outline I’d seen so many times and been unable to do anything about. Diego breathed slowly. At some point he murmured something unintelligible, and then nothing else.

I brought my hand closer slowly. I laid it flat on his abdomen first, as if I were checking some unnamed thing. Then I moved a little lower, until my fingers brushed the elastic edge of his boxer briefs, and I stayed there for one eternal second, my mouth dry and my knees about to give out.

I started caressing him over the fabric. I ran my palm the full length of his cock, feeling the soft bulge respond slowly, swell, lengthen against my hand. I gently squeezed his balls through the briefs and felt his stomach muscle tighten. Diego wasn’t reacting with his mind, but his body was: his cock was getting hard beneath the wet fabric, becoming more and more pronounced, thicker and longer, pushing upward until the tip emerged over the edge of the briefs, red and shining under the stream of water.

I dropped to my knees on the wet bathroom floor. The cold water soaked through my T-shirt. I didn’t care at all.

I pulled his briefs down carefully, very slowly, as if time had suddenly changed speed. The fabric snagged on his thighs and at last he was free, hard, pointing upward, throbbing slowly against his own abdomen. And there it was, exactly as I had imagined it so many times over those months: big, thick, with that pale skin and the side vein running from base to tip, and the swollen purple head, already glossy with a clear drop that had just formed at the slit. I looked at it for a moment before touching it. Just a moment.

I took it in one hand and the weight surprised me. It was hot even under the water, pulsing against my palm with a heartbeat of its own. I pulled the skin back carefully and left the head completely exposed, smooth and gleaming. Diego let out a low sound, something between a sigh and a muffled moan. He didn’t open his eyes.

I started slowly. First I ran my tongue over his balls, one and then the other, feeling the weight of each against my lips, breathing in the smell of soap mixed with that deeper scent that was only his. I sucked them carefully, one at a time, taking them fully into my mouth while I kept stroking his cock slowly with my hand. Diego let out a barely audible gasp and his hips moved forward a centimeter, as if asking for more without knowing it.

I moved up. I ran my tongue from base to tip, following that vein that had obsessed me for months. When I reached the head, I circled it with my tongue slowly, tasting the salty fluid still seeping from the tip. I wanted it to last, I wanted to memorize everything: the texture, the weight, the heat, the way his body responded even though his mind was somewhere else entirely. I kissed the tip, licked it like an ice cream cone, and he let out another low groan.

And then I took it into my mouth.

I went down slowly, letting his cock work its way to the back of my palate. It was thick and filled my mouth completely, stretching my lips against his skin. I took him halfway and stopped, breathing through my nose, getting used to the size. Then I went farther, until the tip hit my throat and I had to pull back a little so I wouldn’t choke. I went down again. And again. Every movement was a revelation: the smooth texture against my tongue, the pulse in the vein running underneath, the clean taste of the head.

Diego rested a hand on my head without knowing what he was doing. That automatic gesture from bodies that understand before people do. He didn’t squeeze, didn’t push me, he just left it there, heavy and warm on my nape, while I kept going with all the time in the world. I started sucking him faster, moving up and down with a steady rhythm, keeping my lips tightly sealed around the shaft, using my hand at the base for what wouldn’t fit in my mouth. I slid my other hand underneath, stroking his balls, squeezing them carefully.

I stayed like that for a long time. The water kept running over us. The bathroom smelled of steam and lavender soap and sex. Outside, the building slept in silence. I sucked him with months of hunger built up inside me, with a devotion I had never put into anything in my life. When I pulled his cock out of my mouth to breathe, I held it against my cheek, like in the photo on his phone, and watched it shine wet with my saliva and the shower water. Then I took it back in, deeper each time, until I could feel the head pressing against the back of my throat.

While I was sucking him off, I had lowered my pajama pants with my other hand. My own cock was rock-hard, pointing forward, and I started jerking myself off in the same rhythm as I ate his. I couldn’t believe what was happening. I couldn’t believe the cock in my mouth was really Diego’s, after so many nights imagining it.

At some point Diego tensed his back against the tile. I heard his breathing change, become shorter, more uneven. His hips moved once, involuntarily. And then again, pushing his cock deeper into my mouth. The hand he had on my nape closed into a loose fist around a lock of hair. I felt his shaft harden even more between my lips, throbbing with a new urgency, and I knew what was coming.

I sped up. I took him all the way to the back of my throat, closed my eyes, and sucked with everything I had, pumping my head up and down fast, tightening my lips. Diego let out a deeper moan, almost a growl, and his hips clenched.

And then he came. In my mouth. The first rope hit the hot, thick back of my palate, followed by another, and another. Plenty of semen, salty, with that concentrated taste of the alcohol he’d drunk, filling my mouth until I had to swallow so it wouldn’t spill from the corners of my lips. I swallowed it all. I swallowed Diego’s entire load while he trembled against the tiles, moaning low without opening his eyes, without knowing what mouth he was emptying himself into.

I kept sucking him slowly until his cock stopped throbbing, until he gave me the last drops and began to soften between my lips. I came at that very same moment, kneeling on the bathroom floor, my mouth still full of him and my hand moving frantically over my own cock. My semen shot out over the wet tiles, mixing with the water running toward the drain.

And then it was over.

***

I dried him with the towel. I carefully wiped his cock, now soft and heavy between his thighs, and dressed him in the first thing I found in his backpack. I took him to bed and laid him on his side, with a pillow nearby just in case. He was asleep before I managed to turn off the room light.

I sat on my bed for a long while, staring at the ceiling. The adrenaline took time to wear off. I still had his taste in my mouth, and my tongue was tingling with the memory of the head’s smooth skin.

I didn’t feel guilty, exactly. I felt something closer to the sensation of having crossed a threshold there was no returning from. What had happened couldn’t be undone, and I didn’t want it undone. It was the first time something I had imagined had become real, and that carried a strange weight I didn’t quite know how to name.

The next morning Diego got up with a hangover face and asked me for water. I gave him two glasses and a couple of ibuprofen without saying anything. He sat on the bed with his elbows on his knees and his gaze fixed on the floor for a long minute.

—Did you bring me back last night? —he asked.

—Someone called you. I went down to get you at the entrance.

—Thanks —he said, without lifting his eyes—. How embarrassing.

—It’s fine.

And nothing happened. Diego remembered nothing, or if he remembered anything, he didn’t say a single word about it. The weeks that followed went on exactly as before: him loud and outgoing, me in my place, the two of us sharing an eight-square-meter room as if nothing had happened between its walls.

Only I knew something had changed.

Only I kept that image: Diego against the cold tiles, the water falling over his torso, his hard cock in my mouth, his hand on my nape not knowing it was there, his hot load sliding down my throat. Only I revisited it from time to time, with the same precision with which one remembers something that truly happened and not just something imagined.

Some secrets weigh nothing. This one didn’t either. On the contrary: every time I remembered it, it made me feel like I had touched something real in the middle of a year full of empty fantasies. Something that had been mine, even if only once, even if he never knew.

And that, strangely enough, was enough.