The Night an Ambiguous Body Taught Me to Desire Myself

It was a strange compendium of virtues and flaws, an unrepeatable and peculiar creature, unlike anything I had known until then. To me, it embodied a dark dream, an unconfessable fantasy I had caressed for years and put off for just as long, awaited and feared at once, like one waits for and fears a storm that is going to change everything. If someone asked me what I liked about Darío, I wouldn’t know whether to answer “everything” or “nothing.” Neither answer would have been entirely false, nor entirely true.

He was a person, yes, but there was in his eyes, in his mouth, in the way he moved, an ambiguous and almost feral air, of a crouched animal, of an unclassifiable creature whose very existence seemed to defy the order of things. His appearance was not that of a man, and nor did it fit what one expects of a woman. He inhabited the midpoint of everything with a naturalness that was disarming, that place where things that are supposedly incompatible coexist without fighting.

His temperament had as much sweetness as cruelty, as much brightness as darkness. He could laugh with the innocence of a child and, a second later, look at you with a coldness that raised your skin in gooseflesh. Everything about him inspired both rejection and fascination, and if I had to choose a single word to define him, that word would undoubtedly be “unsettling.”

We had met on one of those apps where no one gives their real name at first. I was looking for something I didn’t know how to name, and he appeared one sleepless dawn with a backlit photo and a short phrase: “Dare, or do you only watch?” I dared. We met in a room rented by the hour, in an old building downtown, with a doorman who never looked up from his phone.

***

By the time that August afternoon arrived, we were no longer completely strangers. We had shared a couple of sordid, thrilling encounters that, no matter how hard I try, I can’t bring myself to be ashamed of. It was sticky hot, the kind of heat that seeps into your clothes, and an old fan with worn blades stirred the sweet, heavy air and the harsh perfumes of the dim room.

There was a bed with a faded bedspread, a stained mirror on the wall, and a crooked nightstand where a can of warm beer sat resting. On the television, with the volume almost off, scenes of an unreal orgy of men, women, and trans girls flickered by, a mute and distant tangle of bodies that drew my eyes without my deciding it.

Darío came in without knocking. He shut the door with his foot and stood for a moment in front of me, outlined against the sliver of light left by the shutters.

“You’re late,” I said, just to say something.

“You’ve spent half an hour staring at that screen instead of at yourself,” he replied, and the sentence hit me harder than I had expected.

He was right, and that annoyed me.

He came closer slowly. He smelled of tobacco and something sweet, like burnt vanilla. He ran one finger along my jaw, unhurried, studying me the way one studies prey that has already been decided is going to fall. I let him. That was, at bottom, the only rule between us: I yielded, and he took.

I had spent the whole week thinking about that moment. I had imagined it at the office, in the car, in bed beside an ordered, predictable life that suddenly felt чужд to me. I had gone over every detail of the previous encounters until I wore them out, the way one wears out a photograph by looking at it too much. And now that I had him in front of me, his presence filling the entire room, I felt that mixture of vertigo and relief of someone finally surrendering to something he knows is inevitable.

“You’ve been nervous,” he said, reading my face. “All week, right?”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Because I have too,” he replied, and for an instant that beastly shell of his cracked, revealing something almost fragile underneath.

“Take off your shirt,” he murmured. “I want to see you in the mirror.”

I obeyed. I sat on the edge of the bed and he positioned himself behind me, on his knees, tracing my back with his mouth. I remember his smooth brown skin, his dilated pupils, bright, his hands at once strong and delicate, capable of holding you with violence or brushing you as if you were made of glass.

“Look at yourself,” he insisted, speaking into my ear. “Don’t look away.”

***

What came after I remember in flashes, like a broken sequence of images that heat and desire twisted forever. I remember his androgynous voice, neither deep nor high, whispering things into my ear that set me on fire. I remember his tongue seeking out the most hidden corners of my body and drawing from them a pleasure I hadn’t known was there, asleep, waiting for someone who knew how to wake it.

He made me turn and kneel before him. When I took him into my mouth I felt him firm, alive, throbbing against my tongue, and I discovered that I liked that surrender, that giving up of control I had forbidden myself for years. His fingers tangled in my hair, setting the pace, and I followed him, docile, eyes closed and breath ragged.

“Just like that,” he whispered. “Exactly like that.”

There was a moment when he stopped, lifted my chin, and forced me to look at him. There was no tenderness in his eyes, but neither was there cruelty: there was a kind of recognition, as if the two of us knew something the rest of the world preferred to ignore. Then he kissed me, long and deep, and that kiss was more intimate than anything else we did that afternoon.

He placed me again with my back to him, on all fours over the rumpled bedspread, my face toward the mirror. I felt his open hand on my neck, pushing me gently, and then the pressure, slow at first, making its way in. There was a moment of resistance, a sting, the vague sensation that something inside me was giving way and rearranging itself. I clenched my teeth.

“Breathe,” he said. “Don’t fight yourself.”

I breathed. And the pain began to turn, thrust after thrust, into something else, more confused and more profound, a tide rising up my spine and clouding my head. His hips struck against me in a cadence that seemed hypnotic, and from my mouth came sounds I would never have recognized as my own. I felt his firm palms on my ass, the burn of each slap measuring pleasure against the limit of pain.

In the stained mirror I could see the whole scene, and seeing it made it even more unreal: me on all fours, my forehead beaded with sweat, and him behind me, joined to my body, moving in an obscene and yet strangely solemn dance. I didn’t recognize my own face. My mouth was open, my eyes glassy, with an expression of surrender I had never allowed myself to wear in front of anyone.

***

The end came like an explosion. I felt my whole body tighten, my thighs trembling, no longer obeying me, the air coming out of me in ragged pulls. Pleasure overflowed all at once, violent, and left me empty and yet strangely whole, stretched out on the damp bedspread, still with him inside me and his hand stroking my belly with a delicacy that didn’t match the beast he had been a minute earlier.

I stayed like that for a long while, panting, face pressed to the wrinkled fabric, listening to the monotone hum of the fan and the distant murmur of the television no one was watching. I had the sense of having died a little and of being born again in that sordid room, under that sickly light seeping through the shutters.

And then, emerging from that dark sea of pleasure in which I had been drowning, I lifted my eyes to the mirror again. I saw my sweat-soaked face, my still-lost eyes, and I understood something that changed the way I thought about myself.

I understood that Darío, that ambiguous, unsettling, impossible-to-classify creature, was not the only strange being on that bed. I was one too. For years I had told myself that I only “watched,” that this did not define me, that it was a passing curiosity. But the person looking back at me from the stained glass was not a voyeur. It was someone who desired, who gave himself over, who had found in the forbidden a piece of truth about himself.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked, still pressed against my back, his voice soft.

“That I don’t know what I am,” I admitted, and for the first time it didn’t hurt to say it.

He gave a low laugh, a warm sound with no mockery in it, and rested his forehead between my shoulders.

“Welcome to the midpoint,” he said. “There’s room for both of us here.”

We fell silent while the fan kept stirring the thick air. Outside, the city burned under the August sun, indifferent to the small revolution that had just taken place in a room rented by the hour. I closed my eyes and, for the first time in a long while, I wasn’t afraid of what I was. Only a strange calm, the kind that comes when you finally stop running from your own reflection.

When I left, night had already fallen, and the doorman still hadn’t looked up from his phone. I went down the stairs slowly, my body sore and a smile I couldn’t explain. I knew I would come back. Not for Darío, or not only for him. I would come back for that other self I had discovered in front of the mirror, the one that had been waiting for me for years, crouched in ambush, just as unsettling and unrepeatable as the creature that had taught me to see it.