The Night I Discovered What a Sleeping Man Tastes Like

Damián and I had spent almost a year loving each other like two people who no longer knew how to live apart. I felt like his woman from the very first day, and he treated me as such: with that mix of clumsiness and tenderness only boys have who still don’t fully understand what’s happening inside them. I dreamed of a home of our own, of waking up together every morning and never having to make excuses to see each other.

The usual excuse was video games. I told my mother that Damián was staying over because we’d lost track of time with the console, and no one asked anything else. The truth was different. The truth began when the hallway light went out and he climbed under my sheets with his heart pounding in his chest.

That afternoon we had made love as many other times, unhurried, finding each other slowly. But something was different. For weeks I’d had an idea running through my head, a curiosity I was ashamed to confess even to myself. I had never given him oral sex. I had never dared. And that night, at last, I decided I was going to do it.

***

When we were done, he fell asleep almost instantly, like a child after playing. It always happened the same way. I, on the other hand, stayed awake, listening to his slow breathing, staring at the ceiling, feeling how desire was still alive in me when it had already faded in him.

We had gotten home so exhausted from school that he didn’t even change. He fell asleep still wearing his uniform: the wrinkled shirt, the school sweater still over his chest, the gray trousers I had seen him in so many times. There was something about that image that turned me on in a way I couldn’t explain. The boy I adored, spent, dressed, completely surrendered to sleep and, without knowing it, completely at my mercy.

I turned toward him very slowly. The bed creaked a little and I held my breath, but Damián didn’t stir. He slept deeply. Then it happened.

I lowered the zipper of his trousers with a slowness that bordered on torture, millimeter by millimeter, paying attention to each tooth of the metal so it wouldn’t make a sound. I unbuttoned the waistband. I tugged the fabric down carefully until he was left only in his boxers. He moved just a little, sighed, and went still again.

Until that night I didn’t know I had this weakness for smells.

***

I moved closer to him like someone approaching a secret. The boxers still held the heat and sweat of the whole day, and that scent hit me in a way I hadn’t expected. It wasn’t unpleasant. It was intimate, animal, deeply his. I stayed there for a moment, breathing him in, with my nose almost pressed to the fabric, feeling something loosen in my belly.

I thought about all the times I had wanted him without daring. The nights when he fell asleep and I stayed there looking at him, wondering what it would be like to cross that line. Fear had always held me back: fear that he’d wake up, that he’d look at me strangely, that I wouldn’t live up to what he expected from a woman. That morning, for the first time, fear stayed quiet and only desire remained.

Little by little I pulled his member out through the opening of the boxers. I had it before me, asleep and soft, and I was surprised by the tenderness with which I looked at it. We’d been sleeping together for months, I’d felt him inside me many times, but I had never tasted him. Never had him like this, alone, to look at him without rushing.

At first I felt something like disgust. It was a boundary I had never crossed, and my body hesitated. But curiosity won out. I leaned in and started to smell him, slowly, tracing his whole length with my nose. He smelled like a man. He smelled like him. And as I smelled him, without my doing much at all, his member began to wake up before its owner did.

I watched it harden little by little, slow and firm, rising against my face as if it had a life of its own. A bright drop appeared on the tip. It was right then, seeing that drop tremble in the light coming through the window, that I decided there was no turning back.

***

I smelled his glans for a long time, hypnotized. I paused at every vein, every ridge, stroking his testicles with my fingertips, feeling the soft hair under my caresses. Damián was still lost in sleep, completely unaware, and that idea—the idea of doing all that to him without his knowing—aroused me in a way that scared me a little.

The first thing was kisses. Small, shy, almost like a farewell. I barely brushed my lips against his hot skin. Then I stuck out my tongue and started to trace him, first along the shaft from bottom to top, and then carefully over the tip.

His taste surprised me. It was salty, intense, with that lean, masculine base I had imagined a thousand times without knowing if I’d like it. I liked it. I liked it too much. It was instinctive, one of those things no words can prepare you to feel until you feel it.

I stripped completely. I needed to be skin against sheet, with nothing on top of me, surrendered to what I was doing. And I kept going. I kissed him, licked him, took him into my mouth a little more each time, trying to imitate what I had seen in the movies I watched in secret. The sensation was contradictory, vertiginous: deeply erotic and at the same time forbidden, as if I were stealing something no one had offered me.

***

Half the night slipped away like that. Me naked, kneeling on the bed, and him asleep with his sex erect and his breathing growing more and more agitated, without the slightest idea of what his body was experiencing. Sometimes he frowned, other times he gave the faintest hint of a smile. His face said it all. He was aroused in his sleep, and I was the owner of that dream.

I did it slowly, stopping every so often to look at him, to listen to him, to make sure he was still asleep. When I felt him tense too much, I stopped and went back to the kisses, to the slow tongue over the tip. I wanted it to last. I wanted to stay there, in that night that seemed to have no end, discovering myself through him.

But his body had its own clock. I felt it harden in a different way, pulse against my tongue, and I knew it wouldn’t be long.

Until, finally, he came.

***

The first spurt hit my mouth, warm and sudden, and it startled me so much that I pulled back without meaning to. The rest spilled all over himself: over the uniform, over his abdomen, over the half-lowered trousers, over the school sweater. It was all stained, and he didn’t even open his eyes. He only let out a long sigh and sank a little deeper into the pillow.

I stayed still for a moment, heart racing and a new taste on my tongue. Moonlight came through the window and made the whole scene visible: the boy I loved, spent and satisfied without knowing it, and me naked beside him, having made him happy even inside a dream he wouldn’t remember.

I felt strangely complete. Fulfilled. As if at last I had understood something about myself that had been waiting for years to come out. It wasn’t only desire. It was the certainty that caring for him, pleasing him, being his woman in every possible sense, was exactly who I wanted to be.

I stayed like that a while longer, sitting back on my heels, watching him sleep with his breathing calm again. Outside, a dog barked in the distance and a car crossed the street, but inside the room the whole world had shrunk to the two of us. To his chest rising and falling, to my own heart taking time to settle, to that newly born secret I would never be able to give back.

***

I got up carefully and went to the bathroom. I took some tissue, wiped my face, and went back to the bed to clean him as best I could. I ran the paper over his abdomen, over the fabric, trying to erase the traces of what had happened. His member softened little by little in my hands, and all the while I kept breathing in his scent, as if I had taken him inside me forever.

I gave the tip one last kiss, tender, almost grateful. I pulled his trousers back up, arranged his sweater as best I could. Then I put my pajamas on again, lay down pressed against his back, and with his heat wrapping around me, I finally managed to fall asleep.

From that night on I adored the smell and taste of a man. That penetrating, salty, masculine smell, that hardness that yields to the tongue. Something had opened in me and it was never going to close again.

***

The next morning I stayed quiet. I watched him eat breakfast in his wrinkled uniform, talking to me about the console, about the game from the day before, about anything, with the least suspicion. I knew. I was the only one who knew what had happened between us in the middle of the night.

The stains had dried on the clothes, leaving those pale, stiff marks that betray where a man has come. But only his body and I knew the truth. We had loved each other in the most absolute intimacy, an intimacy that not even he shared with me.

I walked him to the door and kissed him like every morning. He smiled at me, unaware, perfect, and left. I stayed there leaning on the frame, watching him walk away down the street, keeping my secret the way one keeps a treasure.

That night he would come back. And I already knew exactly what I wanted to do when he fell asleep.