The key to the tower

The key to the tower

The north wind was pushing the horizontal rain against the scaffolding when Tomás Alarcón closed the oak door of the tower. He was forty-eight years old, his hands grey with lime powder and a fine scar on his left eyebrow that had left him a scaffold years ago. He had been restoring stones for almost three decades: cloisters, facades, cisterns. He could read the fatigue of a ashlar better than that of a human face. That night, however, his face mattered.

Elena Varela had just climbed the spiral staircase with a folder under her arm and dark hair glued to the temples. Municipal architect, forty-one years old, low voice and gaze that did not forgive an error of height. She had arrived that afternoon to supervise the dismantling of the vault on the third floor. The storm had closed the access road to the castle and the master of works, upon leaving, had left both the responsibility of not leaving the enclosure until it subsided.

"There is no cover," she said, leaning the folder on the drawing table. "And the generator has stayed in the shed below. We only have the flashlight and that gas stove.

Tomás lit the stove. The flame blue drew long shadows on the granite walls. The turret smelled of old moisture, treated wood and wet wool from his jacket. Elena took off her raincoat. Below she wore a grey wool sweater with her chest attached and dark jeans stained with plaster on her knees. She was not a woman of poses. She moved like the one who had learned to measure spaces with her body.

"There are two sleeping bags in the trunk," said Thomas. "And a bottle of wine that the pawn forgot. It is not a hotel, but it is not a dungeon either.

She smiled barely.

"I slept in worse places. Once, in a field, with real snakes and a colleague who snored like a tractor.

Tomás’ laughter came out badly, briefly. He liked the way in which she did not fake salon delicacy. He liked, above all, the way his shoulders relaxed by removing the weight of the raincoat. He looked at Elena’s neck when it turned to the narrow window: the clean line, the small mark of a mole under his ear, the hair picked up with a crooked clamp. I wish grown up, without a rush of a boy. A desire that knew the value of waiting and still clenched under the diaphragm.

They spoke first of the work. Of the chair of the fourteenth century, of the mortar too rich in lime that a previous team had misapplied, of the moisture filters. Tomás explained to him, pointing out the plane, why it was not appropriate to force the key of the vault until the atmospheric pressure lowered. Elena listened to him with her head slightly tilted, took notes, sometimes interrupted him with a precise technical objection. In those interruptions there was something intimate: it was not confrontation, it was attention. He felt how that attention warmed him up inside more than the stove.

When the wind hit a dry streak against the arrows, the bottle was already open. They drank in plastic glasses. The wine was a red table, rough, honest. Elena sat in the sleeping bag deployed on the platform and took off her boots. Wool socks let her see the arch of her foot. Thomas sat in front of her, with his back leaning on the cold wall.

"Do you always stay in the works when the time goes like this?" she asked.

"Only when there is no other choice, or when the stone asks for company.

• Does the stone ask for company?

“Old stones sweat memory. If you leave them alone in a storm, they sometimes complain.

Elena looked at him a second more than educated. “He didn’t laugh. He nodded, as one who recognizes a private language.

"I, as a child, believed that the buildings were breathing. Then I studied architecture and they told me that this was cheap poetry. I now monitor humiditys and the idea has not completely been taken away from me.

The conversation was softened. They talked about divorces without dramatism—his, twelve years ago; hers, six years ago—of children who were almost independent, of the habit of having dinner in front of plans. They talked about what is missed when one has spent half of his life measuring other people’s walls. At one point, Elena’s hand brushed over Thomas’s back when she reached the glass. She didn’t turn her fingers away immediately. He didn’t. He didn’t. The brush lasted long enough for both of them to register it as a decision and not as an accident.

"If I tell you that I want you to stay closer, are you going to take it as a precipitous piece of work?" asked Tomás, with a low voice, without theatricality.

Elena held her gaze.

"I'm going to take it as a question. And the answer is yes. I want you to come closer. I want you to touch me. And I want you to touch me. Calmly. And only if you want it at all.

"I want it," he said. "Integer."

He bowed. The first kiss did not look for spectacle: closed lips for an instant, the taste of wine, the warm surprise of another’s breath. Then she opened her mouth and he came in with a slow tongue, exploring the interior with the same precision as he was going through mortar joints. Thomas’ hand went up to Elena’s neck, felt the heat under her hair, the slight tremor when she squeezed softly. She approached on her knees over the sack, leaned both palms on his chest, felt the heartbeat under his flannel shirt.

He took off his shirt and passed her fingers through the gray hair of his chest, through the short scar under his rib, because of the still firm hardness of the shoulder from which he carries stones. Thomas lifted his sweater. The simple black bra let him see mature breasts, heavy in a beautiful way, dark nipples already hard. He took them in his hands as one who weighs something valuable. He lowered his head and licked the outline first, then the nipple, sucking slowly, listening to the sigh of it that broke in his throat.

"Thus," said Elena. "Don't stop yet.

He did not stop. He laid it on the sack, unbuttoned the cowboy, lowered it along with his underwear. The pubis hair, trimmed, dark; the lips already moist, abbreviated. Thomas settled between his thighs and sniffed before kissing: the smell of an adult woman, at desire without excessive perfume. He toured with his tongue the entire cleft, from the bottom up, stopping in the clitoris with circular pressure. Elena arched her back and put a hand on her head, not to push, but to guide the rhythm.

"There... a little slower... yes. Fuck, that's good.

Thomas licked with method and hunger. He inserted a finger, then two, curving them forward, looking for that inner roughness that caused her hips to rise up. He listened to her: the short groans, the short breath, the way she said her name — Thomas, Thomas — as if she needed to anchor. When the first orgasm came, Elena squeezed her thighs against her head and released a severe, not sharp, moaning of a woman who knows what she feels and does not disguise it. He kept licking soft until she pulled him away with a loving tug of hair.

"Come here," he asked. "I want your mouth in mine. And I want to feel you.

They kissed each other with the taste of it. Tomás took off his belt, his pants, his underpants. His cock protruded thick, deer, his head lustrous with pre-seminal fluid. Elena took it with her right hand, weighed the weight, slipped her thumb through the frenillo and looked him in the eyes while caressing him.

"You have been without this for a while," he said, not as a mockery, but as a constancy.

"I have not really wanted it for a long time," he admitted. "I really want it with you.

She bowed and took it in her mouth. It was not a spectacle of impossible depth: it was wet heat, flat tongue at the bottom, hand at the base, patient rhythm. Tomás watched his lips stretch around his thickness, how he sometimes looked up to check his gesture. The pleasure went up his back like a slow tide. When he was close to losing control, he touched his shoulder.

I want to finish you inside... if you want that.

"I want," she said, clean and clear. "Bring the condom. Or... do you have any?"

He looked in his backpack. “Yes, a couple, a habit of a man who does not trust chance. He put it with firm hands while she settled on her back, a raised knee. Tomás placed himself between his legs, rubbed his head against moisture, looked for his gaze one last time.

• Yeah?

• Yeah, come on in.

The warm narrowness wrapped it in an inch by an inch. Elena exhaled a long "fuck", her eyes squinted, her nails in her shoulder blades. When she was completely inside, she stood still for a second, feeling the pulse of the two, the rain away, the granite, the smell of gas from the stove and freshly opened sex. She began to move with deep, un frenzied attacks: she drew almost to the edge and went back to the bottom, rubbing that point that made her squeeze her jaw and let air out of her nose.

"Heighter now," Elena asked. "You will not break me.

He obeyed. The sound of hips against hips filled the torreon, humid, rhythmic. Sweat on Thomas’ forehead, Elena’s breasts moving at every onslaught, his hand coming down to rub the clitoris with his thumb to the beat. She ran again with a contained scream, the inner walls hugging him with pulses, and that contraction dragged him: the orgasm went up from his thighs, spilled dense inside the latex, a hoarse groan against her neck.

They were tied, breathing. He came out carefully, got rid of the condom, wrapped it. He lay back and she crossed over his chest, a leg between his. The wind was still, but it no longer seemed hostile.

"I didn't think this inspection would include an inventory of scars," she said, rubbing the mark on her side with her finger.

"The part of the work tomorrow is going to be interesting," he replied, and both laughed short.

It didn’t end there. Around one in the morning, when the stove had lowered a point and the cold bit his bare shoulders, Elena woke up again with her mouth in her chest and her hand going down until she found it again semiurus. She caressed it until it was completely thickened, strung her hands around, followed herself and reintroduced it—new condom, practical gesture, intact desire. This time the rhythm was marked by her: hips in circles, then up and down, her hands resting on his chest, her loose hair falling down on his face. Tomás held his hips, looked up at him, told him quietly how beautiful he was open on him, how he clenched him inside, how he liked to see his breasts that way. Vulgarity came clean, without garbage, as he named things by his name because he respected them.

"Your pussy is eating me whole," he whispered. "Don't stop.

"I am not going to stop," she said, gasping. "I love your dick. I love the way you look at me while I find it.

She ran first, trembling, leaning forward; he followed her seconds later, holding her against her chest, biting her shoulder without harm. Then, the silence was different: denser, sweeter. They shared the last drink of wine. They spoke, already in an almost confessional voice, of how strange it turns out to find suddenly someone who does not apologize for being hungry. As well as he feels he does not have to pretend twenty-five years.

At dawn, the rain had stopped. A strip of cold light entered through the saetera and crossed the irregular ground. Elena dressed herself with slow movements. Tomás helped her to zip up the raincoat. There were no swollen promises. Instead, there was an exchange of numbers, an accomplice smile in keeping the sacks, and the quiet agreement that the technical report of the vault would not mention the shaking of the hands at three o'clock in the morning.

They lowered the spiral staircase together. Below, the courtyard smelled of wet earth and iron. The master of works would arrive in an hour. Before separating to their respective cars — that of her, a utilitarian full of plans; that of him, a van with tools—, Elena stopped.

"The next damp inspection... can I ask you to go up to the tower?"

Tomás held his gaze, with the happy tiredness of the one who has fucked well and has spoken better.

"You can ask, and I can assure you that I will bring better wine.

She approached him and kissed him, this time in potential audience, a second right in the corner of her lips.

"Bring another stove too. Or not. The cold, in the end, didn't go so bad.

When the engine of it moved away along the flooded track, Tomás stayed for a moment looking at the tower. The stone no longer sweated old memory only. It sweated, too, the recent heat of two bodies that had decided not to lie. He passed his hand over his face, smiled for himself, and opened the work book. On the first line he wrote the date and state of the vault. On the second, with smaller letter, a note that no one else would read: Full inventory. Without new fissures. Yes, instead, a controlled opening.

During the following week, they exchanged sober messages at first—photos of meetings, mortar doubts—that were turning to the personal: a restaurant recommendation, a joke about the pawn and the bottle, a photo of the clean sky over the castle sent at dusk. On Thursday, Elena called.

"I've got phase two assigned to me. I'm going to need the catering equipment to be available on the weekend. Do you still have a sleeping bag?

"I have a sack," said Thomas. "And I have a bed in my house, forty minutes away. In case the tower stays small.

There was a pause, then the laughter comes down from her.

"I like the way you think in phases. I accept the bed. And I accept that we eat first. I want to see your face with real light, not just with flashlight.

On Saturday he picked her up at the resort of the villa. She was without raincoat, with a long coat and loose hair. They had dinner in a table of rations, away from any romantic teatillo: croquettes, a lollipop to share, a decent red. They talked about work and her daughter, who studied in Salamanca; of a grandson Tomás had of his eldest son and who had taught him to play mus with innocent traps. Under the table, Elena’s knee touched his and did not withdraw.

In Tomás' house — a ground floor stone with a smell of coffee and wood — she stopped in front of a shelf full of stone books and crisp novels.

"You are more orderly than I expected.

• The mess I keep for when someone disarms it.

They kissed in the hallway, this time with the accumulated urgency of five days. The clothes fell towards the bedroom. In the large bed, with clean sheets and a window facing the garden, the sex was different from that of the turret: less rustic, just as explicit. He put it to four, slowly penetrated it looking at how it entered, how the lips opened around his cock; she asked for more depth, more hand in the clitoris. They lay on the side afterwards, he behind, a leg of her raised, fucking with short and deep movements as he spoke to his ear: how wet he was, how rich he felt that grip, how much he liked to be the man that made her cum that night. Elena came with a long tremor; he kept biting her shoulder and holding his chest with his open hand.

Later, naked under the blanket, she drew circles in her chest.

"I don't know what we're starting," he said.

"I don't either. I know what I don't want: I don't want it to be just the memory of a storm.

• Then don't be.

They slept like this, without solving the whole future, but with the present resolved in conscience: two adults, two bodies that had been told the truth, and a tower key that, in the pocket of Thomas' jacket, no longer opened only a stone door.

The next morning he made coffee. She went out into the garden wrapped in her flannel shirt. When she came back in, she had cold hands and clear eyes.

"Phase two is going to last months," he warned.

"Then we will have months," he replied. "And storms, and pieces of work with notes on the sidelines.

They kissed coffee with taste. Outside, the dry November sun dried up the last puddles of the way to the castle. Inside, the desire had not been extinguished: it had settled, like a well-sitting beam, able to withstand weight.

Thomas thought, as he cleaned a speck of crumb from the corner of Elena’s lips, that he had spent years listening to the stones. For the first time in a long time, someone returned the echo with the same seriousness and hunger. And that, in a man of forty-eight years, was not little restoration. It was simply an ongoing masterpiece, full-bodied, signed with sweat and consent, under a turret that would never again seem completely empty to him.