The Night an Ambiguous Body Taught Me to Desire Myself

He was a strange compendium of virtues and flaws, an unrepeatable, peculiar creature, unlike anything I had known before. To me, he embodied a dark dream, an unconfessable fantasy I had cherished for years and put off for just as long, awaited and feared at once, the way one awaits 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 something ambiguous and almost feral in his eyes, his mouth, his way of moving—a crouching animal, an unclassified creature whose mere existence seemed to challenge the order of things. He didn’t look like a man, but neither did he fit what one expects of a woman. He inhabited the midpoint of everything with a disarming naturalness, that place where things supposedly incompatible coexist without fighting. He had small, firm breasts beneath his clothes, barely two promises that showed when he stretched, and between his legs a cock I had learned to fear and desire in equal measure.

His nature was as sweet as it was cruel, as bright as it was dark. He could laugh with a child’s innocence and, a second later, look at you with a coldness that raised gooseflesh on your skin. 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 nobody 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 line: “Do you dare, or do you just watch?” I dared. We arranged to meet in a room rented by the hour, in an old building downtown, with a concierge who never looked up from his phone.

***

By the time that August afternoon arrived, we were no longer complete strangers. We had shared a couple of sordid, exciting encounters that, no matter how hard I try, I can’t bring myself to be ashamed of. It was a sticky kind of heat, the sort that gets into your clothes, and an old-fashioned bladed fan stirred the sweet, heavy air thick with the room’s harsh perfumes.

There was a bed with a threadbare quilt, a spotted mirror on the wall, and a crooked nightstand holding a can of warm beer. On the television, with the volume nearly muted, images played of an unreal orgy of men, women, and trans girls, a tangle of bodies in which a blonde with her tits bare could be seen sucking two cocks at once, a brown-haired trans woman riding a guy while another fucked her from behind, semen streaming from mouths and asses, a deafening blur of moans that drew my eyes without my deciding to look.

Darío came in without knocking. He closed the door with his foot and stood there for a moment in front of me, outlined against the slit of light coming through the shutters.

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

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

He was right, and that annoyed me.

He came closer slowly. He smelled of tobacco and something sweet, like burnt vanilla. He ran a finger along my jaw, unhurried, studying me the way one studies prey that has already been chosen to fall. The finger traveled down my neck, over my sternum, and stopped right above the bulge already straining my trousers. He smiled when he noticed it.

“Hard before I even touch you,” he murmured. “You’re a filthy pig, you know that?”

“I know,” I answered, surprised by how hoarse my voice sounded.

I let him do whatever he wanted. That was, deep down, the only rule between us: I let him, 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 orderly, predictable life that suddenly seemed alien to me. I had masturbated two nights in a row, remembering how he had spread my legs the last time, how he had shoved his cock all the way inside me while I bit the pillow. I had gone over every detail of our previous encounters until I wore them out, the way a photograph gets worn from looking at it too often. And now that he was standing in front of me, his presence filling the entire room, I felt that mixture of vertigo and relief belonging to someone who finally surrenders 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 his feral armor cracked, revealing something almost fragile beneath it. “I’ve spent days wanting to fuck you until you’re a complete wreck.”

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

I obeyed. I sat on the edge of the bed and he knelt behind me, tracing my back with his mouth, biting my nape, dragging his teeth across my shoulder blades. His hands circled my chest, pinching my nipples until I moaned, then slowly, very slowly, moved down to unbutton my trousers and pull out my already hard, dripping cock.

“Look at it,” he said, closing his fist around it. “Look how horny you are.”

I remember his smooth brown skin against my back, his dilated, shining pupils, his hands at once strong and delicate, capable of holding you violently or brushing against you as if you were made of glass. He jerked me off slowly, torturing me, stopping each time he felt I was about to come, squeezing the base to make me hold back.

“Look at yourself,” he insisted, speaking into my ear. “Don’t look away. I want you to see the slut’s face you make.”

***

What came afterward, I remember in flashes, like a broken sequence of images that heat and desire scrambled forever. I remember his androgynous voice, neither deep nor high, whispering things in my ear that set me on fire: “you’re going to swallow the whole thing,” “you’re going to beg me for more,” “this mouth is mine this afternoon.” 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 awaken it. He licked my nipples, sucked my fingers one by one, spread my ass cheeks with his hands, and buried his tongue between them until I screamed into the quilt. No one had eaten my ass like that, with such filthy patience, that hot saliva going in and out, softening me, preparing me.

He made me turn around and kneel in front of him. He yanked down his jeans and underwear, and his cock sprang free, brown and thick, its shiny head already wet. Bigger than one would expect from such an androgynous body. I took it in my hand and felt its weight, its heat, the vein throbbing beneath my thumb.

“Open up,” he ordered, and without waiting he pushed it into my mouth.

When I took him into my mouth, I felt him firm, alive, pulsing against my tongue, and discovered that I liked that surrender, that relinquishing of control I had forbidden myself for years. He tasted of clean skin and a salty hint of semen already beading at the tip. I started slowly, sucking the head, playing my tongue around the glans, and he let out a low moan that made me even hornier. His fingers tangled in my hair, setting the rhythm, and I followed it obediently, eyes closed and breath coming in short gasps. He pushed it deeper and deeper, without haste but without mercy, until I felt the tip striking my throat. My eyes filled with tears, and a strand of saliva ran from my chin down to my chest.

“That’s it,” he whispered. “Just like that. Swallow it. All of it.”

He pulled it out and shoved it back in, fucking my mouth with short thrusts that made me gag. I squeezed my thighs together, my own aching cock between my legs, and touched myself while he used me. He made me look up at him from below, his cock buried between my lips, and smiled when he saw my face soaked in saliva.

“Look at you sucking,” he said. “If the people who know you could see you…”

At one point 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 though we both knew something the rest of the world preferred to ignore. Then he kissed me, long and deep, savoring his own taste in my mouth, and that kiss was more intimate than anything else we did that afternoon.

He put me back with my back to him, on all fours atop the rumpled quilt, facing the mirror. He tore my trousers all the way off, leaving me naked and offered up. He spat on my ass and used two fingers to spread the saliva around my hole, pressing and sinking in one finger, then two, opening me calmly while I pushed my hips backward, asking for more.

“You’re so tight,” he murmured. “I’m going to split you open.”

“Do it,” I panted. “Fuck me already.”

I felt his open hand on the back of my neck, gently pushing me against the mattress, and then the head of his cock searching for the spot, smeared with saliva and a little oil he took from the nightstand. The pressure was slow at first, making its way in, and I felt the head overcome the resistance of the ring and enter. There was a moment of pure pain, a stab, the vague sensation of something inside me giving way and rearranging itself to make room for him. I clenched my teeth and gripped the quilt with both fists.

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

I breathed. And he kept pushing, millimeter by millimeter, until I felt his thighs pressed against mine and his balls striking my perineum. He was completely inside me. I stayed still for a few seconds, feeling him pulse in my guts, and he stroked my back, waiting for me to open all the way. Then he began to move. At first slowly, pulling almost all the way out and sliding back in with calculated patience, then faster, with longer thrusts that tore a moan from me each time.

The pain began to transform, thrust after thrust, into something more confused and deeper, a tide rising up my spine and clouding my mind. His hips slammed against me in a rhythm that seemed hypnotic, and sounds came out of my mouth that I would never have recognized as mine. I felt his firm palms on my buttocks, the sting of every slap measuring pleasure against the boundary of pain. He slapped me, and with every smack my ass clenched around his cock and he grunted with pleasure.

“Say it,” he panted, grabbing me by the hair. “Tell me what you are.”

“Yours,” I managed between thrusts. “I’m yours. Fuck me harder.”

“Slut,” he whispered. “My slut.”

He drove it all the way into me, without respite, with a sweet fury that made me lose track of everything. In the spotted mirror I could see the entire scene, and seeing it made it even more unreal: me on all fours, my forehead beaded with sweat, my mouth open, a string of drool hanging from it; and him behind me, joined to my body, his cock sliding in and out of me, glistening, moving in an obscene and yet strangely solemn dance. I didn’t recognize my own face. My eyes were glazed, my expression one of surrender I had never allowed myself to show anyone.

He made me change position without pulling it all the way out. He laid me on my back, lifted my legs over his shoulders, and sank into me again to the hilt. From there he watched my face while he fucked me, and I could see his belly striking my ass again and again. He bent down and put his tongue in my mouth without stopping, and that double assault—the cock inside me and the tongue invading me—kept me on the edge for minutes that felt eternal. He gripped my cock, dripping against my belly, and began jerking me off in time with his thrusts.

“Come for me,” he ordered. “I want to watch you come while I fuck you.”

***

The end came like an explosion. I felt my whole body tense, my thighs trembling beyond my control, the air leaving me in ragged bursts. My orgasm surged up from my balls with such violence that it arched my back, and I shot in streams over my own belly and his hand, spattering his fingers with thick semen. I screamed something that wasn’t a word. And when he felt my ass clenching in spasms around his cock, he sped up for three, four brutal thrusts and came inside me with a hoarse moan, gripping my hips with both hands and digging in his nails. I felt the hot lashes of his orgasm filling me inside, and I was left empty and, at the same time, strangely whole, lying back on the damp quilt, still with him inside me and his hand now caressing my sticky belly with a delicacy that didn’t fit the beast he had been a minute earlier.

He pulled his cock out slowly, and I felt a hot thread trickling down my thigh. He gathered it up with two fingers and brought them to my mouth. I sucked them without thinking.

I stayed like that for a long while, panting, my face against the wrinkled fabric, listening to the fan’s monotonous hum and the distant murmur of the television no one was watching. I had the feeling that I had died a little and was being born again in that sordid room, beneath that sickly light slipping through the shutters.

And then, emerging from that dark sea of pleasure in which I had been drowning, I raised my eyes to the mirror once more. I saw my sweaty face, my eyes still lost, the semen drying on my chest, and I understood something that changed the way I thought of myself.

I understood that Darío, that ambiguous, unsettling creature impossible to classify, was not the only strange being on that bed. I was strange too. For years I had told myself that I only “watched,” that it didn’t define me, that it was a passing curiosity. But the person looking back at me from the spotted glass was not a voyeur. He was someone who desired, who surrendered, 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 gentle.

“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 soft laugh, warm and without mockery, and rested his forehead between my shoulders.

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

We stayed silent while the fan continued stirring the heavy air. Outside, the city burned beneath 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 remained, the calm of someone who has finally stopped running from his own reflection.

When I left, already at night, the concierge was still looking down at his phone. I went down the stairs slowly, my ass aching and a smile on my face that I couldn’t explain. I knew I would return. Not because of Darío, or not only because of him. I would return for that other self I had discovered in front of the mirror, the one who had been waiting for me for years, crouching, just as unsettling and unrepeatable as the creature who had taught me about him.