Strangers

The key turned in the lock at two in the morning and I was still beneath him, with no intention of covering myself. Four pairs of eyes watched me from the doorway.

I’d spent years sneaking on just to look. That summer afternoon, I finally decided to open the door to one of them.

As soon as his parents went into the kitchen, the boy grabbed his cock over his jeans. No one in that house had any idea how dinner was going to end.

She humiliated me over a video call and I went out drinking until I collapsed. At the bar, two tall men held my arm and offered me a quieter place.

I offered the bus window seat to the old lady and she didn’t even look at me. I had no idea the real journey would begin in the hotel dining room, across from two strangers.

I pretended to be asleep so I could watch him. What I saw in the other bed that night completely changed the course of that trip.

I’d been in the waiting room for more than two hours when he called my name. I never imagined that same afternoon would end with us alone in a gurney no one used anymore.

I saw him on the corner with the whistle between his teeth, warning the dealers. I couldn’t stop looking at him, and I knew I wouldn’t go home that dawn without him.

I went trembling into that dark apartment to wait for a man I had never seen. What happened that afternoon marked me for the rest of my life.

I waited naked beside the olive tree, my backpack at my feet and my phone in my hand, never imagining that cold night would leave me with two different tastes in my mouth.

I looked up from my phone and his eyes were already locked on mine from the other side of the parking lot. Not a single word was needed.

I pulled down the jumpsuit zipper in the dim light, convinced I was alone. Then I felt the weight of a bony hand settling slowly on my knee.

At fifty-three, single and bored, Ramiro discovered that supply and demand also work at three in the afternoon, on the sofa in his living room.

He promised me a berth on the schooner if I went with him into the alley. What I saw through that window and what happened next changed everything I thought I knew about myself.

Four months later, we went back to the same locker room hoping to repeat that afternoon. We didn’t count on a third man, young and shameless, watching us from the other side.

The bedroom door was ajar. I looked through the crack without thinking and what I saw pinned me to the floor: my father was not who I thought he was.

For weeks I’d wanted him to come looking for me again. That night I understood that if I wanted to feel that way again, I’d have to go looking for it somewhere else.

I was drunk on the subway when I opened the app out of boredom. I had no idea that message from a stranger would end with me on my knees in a dark storage room.

I agreed to the game: the door left unlatched, the lights off, and a man I’d never see face-to-face. What I never imagined was running into him at the office on Monday.

He hadn’t slept in two days, but footsteps in the dark aisle woke him: someone was going into the bathroom where another boy was already waiting, and no one else knew.