With Marcos in the Woods, We Crossed a Line

I slept badly that night. It wasn’t insomnia, strictly speaking, because sleep did come, but it came broken, split into halves that fell apart before I could hold on to them. I woke up two, three, four times, heart racing and the image of Marcos floating in that strange territory between sleep and waking. A mix of fear and something I still didn’t dare name.

At training the next day I couldn’t do anything right. My legs wouldn’t respond properly, my hands either, and every time Marcos passed near me something inside me tightened. He didn’t do anything special. He didn’t look for me with his eyes, he didn’t smile, he didn’t change a millimeter of the way he moved around the field. He behaved exactly as always, as if the day before had never existed.

That was, perhaps, the most disconcerting thing of all.

When the session ended I showered quickly, almost without drying off, and left the changing room without waiting for anyone. I already knew the path down to the woods by heart. I’d walked it over the last few days as if I had no other possible route. I reached the point where the pines grew denser and the noise of the road disappeared, and there was Marcos, hands in the pockets of his tracksuit bottoms, looking toward the trees.

He didn’t say hello. Neither did I. He started walking and I followed him.

We stopped in the small clearing where the ground was drier, away from the mud the stream left along the edge of the path. Marcos took out his pack of cigarettes and lit one with the calm he brought to everything. He inhaled slowly, blew the smoke upward, and held the cigarette out to me without saying a word.

“You don’t cough anymore,” he noted.

It was true. I took the cigarette and drew on it without drama. The smoke scraped my throat just like the first time, but now I knew how to take it. I handed it back and he smiled a little, crookedly, without opening his mouth fully.

“You learn fast.”

I didn’t answer. With Marcos the same thing always happened: the lines I should say arrived too late, when they no longer mattered. He, on the other hand, spoke as if he had all the time in the world and no doubt at all about which direction to take.

He smoked in silence for another moment. Then he looked down at my sneakers.

“Let’s see something,” he said.

“What?”

“Put your foot next to mine.”

I did it without thinking. The tips were almost at the same height. Marcos leaned forward as if he needed to confirm something he already knew.

“Forty-three,” he said.

“Me too.”

It could have ended there, but he slid the toe of his sneaker against mine, millimeter by millimeter, as if the exact length really mattered. When he straightened up, I noticed he was breathing a little faster than before.

“The arm now,” he said.

I looked at him without moving.

“You’re going to measure that too?”

“Of course. We have to do it properly.”

He turned his elbow and laid his forearm against mine from shoulder to fingers. From that distance I could smell shower soap beneath the tobacco, and something else of his, warm and clean at the same time, that made me lose track of what I’d been thinking.

“Still,” he murmured.

He kept his arm pressed against mine longer than necessary. Long enough for me to start feeling the weight of that contact not just on my skin, but deeper, in a place where normally no sensation ever reached. When he turned his face toward me, he was so close I could see a small scar on his jaw I had never noticed.

“Mine’s a little longer,” he said.

“A little.”

“We’ll have to check the hands.”

He said it with maddening calm. As if we were doing something completely normal, as if it meant nothing, as if the air between us hadn’t become denser and harder to breathe in over the last few minutes.

He raised one hand between us, palm open. I hesitated barely a second before lifting mine. Our palms met first timidly, then fully. His fingers were a little longer, yes, but what mattered was something else: the way he didn’t pull his hand away. He left it there, open over mine, and with the other one he adjusted our fingers as if he needed to measure each one separately. He touched the tip of my index finger. Then my ring finger. Then he slid down to the base of my palm and squeezed just enough for me to feel my pulse in my own fingers.

“Your hand isn’t as small as I thought,” he said, and gave a small smile.

I would have liked to answer with something clever, to throw back a half-joke, to protect myself behind a light remark. But all I managed was to swallow. Marcos noticed. I’m sure he noticed, because in that instant he stopped pretending that this game meant nothing. The way he looked at me changed: it became quieter, more direct, more serious.

He took the cigarette with the same hand that had just arranged my fingers and drew on it without letting go of me completely. Then he brought the filter to my mouth. I inhaled with my hand still trapped beneath his. The smoke went in slowly and came out even slower, mixing between us in the still air of the clearing. That was when he lifted his free hand and brushed my mouth with his thumb.

It wasn’t a rough touch. Just the slow pass of his fingertip along the edge of my lower lip, as if he had just found what he’d been looking for for a long time.

“We’re missing this,” he said.

I didn’t ask what he meant. I knew.

I froze. Marcos touched my lip again, this time with such careful precision that I felt my knees go weak. He was looking at me while he did it, not at my mouth: at my eyes. As if he wanted to make sure I was still there, that I wasn’t going to back out at the last second.

“Let’s see if they’re the same thickness,” he murmured.

I raised my hand almost without realizing it. He took my wrist and guided it to his mouth. I felt the warmth of his lips before I even touched them. They were softer than I’d imagined, fuller, more alive. I brushed the tip of my finger against them and he didn’t move. He only parted his mouth a little to breathe, just enough for that heat to reach my whole hand. He slid his tongue over my thumb, slowly, and sucked it all the way to the knuckle, never taking his eyes off me. The warm saliva running down my finger, the way he sucked with his lips closed, sent a jolt up my arm and straight to my cock, which had already been hard against the fabric of my tracksuit for a while.

Marcos dropped the cigarette to the ground and ground it out under his sneaker without looking away from me. Then he came closer. There was no distance left between us. I felt the heat of his chest, the warm dampness of his breath on my face, the smell of tobacco mixed with his freshly washed skin. I had time to think, with almost cruel clarity, that this was the exact moment when I could still pull back. I didn’t.

It was him who closed the distance for good.

First he brushed my mouth, just a touch that could have passed for an accident if he hadn’t done it again a second later. The next time it wasn’t a brush anymore, but a full kiss, direct, with a decision that wiped out all the doubts I’d been building since the night before. I felt his lips on mine and for an instant I was left without reaction, not because I didn’t want it, but because my body still didn’t know how to hold something I had imagined so many times without believing it would really happen. Marcos knew. He held me by the nape of the neck and deepened the kiss with a burning calm, as if he’d been thinking about it for a long time, as if he’d been building that moment from the first cigarette we shared.

Then I reacted. I grabbed him by the waist, clumsy at first, and he answered by pulling me closer, until the kiss stopped being surprise and became hunger. His tongue brushed mine and a full tremor ran through me, clean, brutal. There was nothing soft in what moved inside me, even if his gesture was. It was pure intensity, a fire starting slowly and with no intention of stopping. He slid his tongue deep into my mouth, searching for me, and I sucked on it as if I’d spent weeks waiting to do it. Every time I ran out of breath, Marcos pulled away just enough to breathe over my mouth and kiss me again, keeping me suspended exactly on that edge where everything was too much and yet still not enough. His hand went from my nape to my back, and from my back to my ass, and there it stayed, squeezing, pulling me against him so I could feel clearly what he had between his legs. And I did. His hard cock against my hip, outlined beneath the thin fabric of his tracksuit bottoms, throbbing against my bone.

I don’t know how long it lasted. Time in the woods had stopped working the usual way.

When we finally broke apart, Marcos smiled with his lips still wet and looked at me as if he had just confirmed something he’d known from the beginning.

“No,” he said softly. “They’re not the same.”

I wanted to answer, but all that came out was a broken laugh, more nervous than amused. Then I felt his hips move against mine. A subtle motion at first, almost imperceptible, that grew more obvious until I felt the hardness of his body against mine through our clothes. He started grinding against me, slowly, with a controlled sway, and his cock rubbing against mine through the two layers of fabric tore a gasp from me that I couldn’t hold back.

“I suppose now we check the rest,” he said.

I looked at him, not fully understanding.

“The rest,” he repeated with that calm of his that undid me. “The other day in the locker rooms I saw the way you were looking. I don’t blame you. I was looking too.”

I didn’t know what to say. I said nothing.

Marcos pulled down his tracksuit bottoms with the same naturalness with which he might have opened a window. The elastic fell to mid-thigh, dragging his briefs down too, and his cock sprang up, free, pointing toward his stomach. And what I saw left me speechless. Completely hard, thick, longer than I’d imagined, with the head swollen and shiny, a marked vein running along the shaft and his tight balls hanging beneath. A drop of pre-cum was showing at the tip, fat, trembling there as if it didn’t know whether to fall or stay. He watched me with a half-smile while I processed what was in front of me. I pulled mine down too, moved by an impulse that didn’t go through any conscious reasoning. Mine sprang out as well, hard, red at the tip, pointing upward with the same hunger. We stood facing each other, close, our cocks almost touching, and the difference between us was obvious: his thicker, longer, heavier.

“Can I?” he asked.

Just that. And I nodded.

He wrapped his palm around my cock and my knees almost gave out. He closed his fingers in a ring around the shaft and squeezed, measuring my thickness without taking his eyes off mine. It wasn’t a rough grip, but something more curious than impatient, as if he genuinely wanted to understand what I felt like inside his hand. He slid his fist down to the base, tugging at my skin, then brought it back up slowly to the head, where he turned his palm over the tip and smeared me with the fluid already leaking out. I felt the heat of his fingers and my throat closed. He repeated the motion, up and down, two, three times, setting a rhythm that made me clench my teeth so I wouldn’t come right there.

“You want to touch mine?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. And I said it too quickly.

It was the most intense sensation I had felt up to that moment. Hot, hard, and at the same time soft on the outside skin. I wrapped my hand around his cock and couldn’t close my fingers all the way; my hand wasn’t big enough. I felt the pulse beneath my fingers, steady and firm, as if it had a life of its own. The skin slid over the hard length when I moved my fist up and down, and with my thumb I ran over his head, spreading the drop still beading there. Marcos hissed through his nose and I squeezed harder. I lowered my fist again to the base and felt his balls with my other hand, heavy in my palm, full. Marcos started moving his hips slowly, fucking my fist with a confidence that excited me more than anything else I had felt before. I started moving too, pumping my hand with a rhythm I found on my own, while he let go of my cock to bring his hands to my face and hair, tracing me with a tenderness I hadn’t expected from him.

He kissed me again. Longer, deeper, biting my lower lip, sucking it until he let it go with a wet sound. With his hand on my nape he bent me forward, pressing firmly, pushing me down, and I understood what he wanted before he said it. I dropped to my knees on the damp autumn leaves and looked up at him.

Marcos looked down at me with dark eyes and breathing that was already ragged. His cock was at the level of my mouth, hard, throbbing, with a bead of pre-cum hanging from the tip. He gripped it by the base and dragged it over his lips, smearing my mouth with his juice, painting me with his head as if he were using me as a canvas. I nodded slowly.

I started by licking slowly, sticking out my tongue to collect the drop from the tip and taste him for the first time, salty and thick, with a metallic note that filled my whole mouth. I traced the full length with my flat tongue, from balls to head, savoring his warm, salty skin, getting used to the touch, the weight, the smell of man and soap. I kissed the tip, took it between my lips and sucked just a little, testing it, and felt his thighs tense. Then I lowered to his balls, one first and then the other, taking them one at a time into my mouth, sucking them carefully while I kept hold of his cock with my fist. When I went back up and took him all the way into my mouth, I felt his fingers open in my hair, grabbing a fistful, guiding me.

There was no urgency in that first moment. There was curiosity and something close to awe. I found the rhythm on my own, what made him close his fingers in my hair, what made him breathe deeper. I discovered that if I ran my tongue under the head, where the skin joins, he would groan softly. That if I took him all the way down and pressed my throat against the tip, a curse would escape him. I pulled him out completely and slid him back in, leaving a thread of saliva hanging from my mouth. His hips began to move in time, softly at first, then more decisively. He drove into my mouth to the hilt and I opened my throat wider, gagging a little at first, learning how to breathe through my nose when he was inside. My hands moved up and down in time with what went in and out of my mouth, slick with my own saliva, which ran down his shaft to his balls. With my other hand I was jerking myself, I couldn’t hold back anymore, I was getting close just from feeling him go in and out. I sucked hard, cheeks hollowed, pulling with my lips, and felt him tremble.

“Stop,” he said suddenly. “I’m close.”

I didn’t pull away.

His fingers closed in my hair harder.

“Are you sure?” he murmured.

I answered by squeezing harder and taking him deeper, until my nose was pressed to his pubis, and that was answer enough. I felt his whole body tense, felt his cock swell inside my mouth just before, and a second later the contractions. I felt him clench between my lips and the first spurt struck the back of my throat, thick and urgent, hot, and then another, and another, filling my mouth with semen. Marcos was panting softly, still pushing his hips, emptying himself against my palate. I swallowed everything, without letting go, feeling it go down thick through my throat until the last drops fell onto my tongue and his hips stopped moving and his hands loosened in my hair. I came right there too, kneeling, into my own hand, with his cock still between my lips, eyes squeezed shut and moaning around him.

I cleaned him slowly with my tongue, from top to bottom, collecting the last white drops left on his head, not letting a thing fall. He had gone still, one hand braced against the trunk of a pine, looking up at the sky between the treetops, his breathing still broken.

I stood up. My legs held me, barely. I wiped the back of my hand across my mouth and felt my lips swollen, my chin wet.

Marcos looked at me for a moment without saying anything. He lowered his eyes to my hand, to what I’d come with, and smiled crookedly. He crouched, took my wrist, and brought my fingers to his mouth. He sucked them one by one, slowly, holding my gaze, until he’d cleaned them. Then he kissed me, and I tasted my own flavor mixed with his, and I couldn’t tell which was worse and which was better. After that he pulled my pants back up himself, carefully, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Then he did the same with his.

“This stays between us,” he said. “Nobody else knows. Do you swear it?”

“I swear it,” I replied.

“We’ll talk tomorrow,” he said.

He kissed me one last time, slowly, with a sweetness that didn’t fit anything that had just happened and at the same time fit everything. Then he turned and disappeared between the trees without looking back.

I was left alone in the clearing, with the taste of tobacco and of him in my mouth, with leaves stuck to my tracksuit bottoms and with the absolute certainty that something in me had changed in a way that could never be undone.

Marcos. I would never be able to look at him the same way again.