The room next to the service elevator

The room next to the service elevator

I'm telling you short, like you're in the next bed and the wall is out of paper, you don't have to say anything, just listen.

My name is Darius, I have thirty-seven, and I restore grand pianos. I don’t touch them in front of the audience; I open the box for them, I remove the dust from them for decades, I change the hammers, I return the voice. I work with my hands in the wood and the felt until my knuckles hurt. That week I had to deliver a Bechstein from 1928 at the Kursaal in San Sebastian. The reopening concert was suspended by a storm that entered the Cantabrico as if I wanted to take it all: waves, posters, plans. The hotel didn’t cancel my reservation. I didn’t cancel his reservation either, because I didn’t know it existed.

The Nava Hotel is a narrow building of grey stone, glued to a street that climbs up from the bay. It has a glass elevator for guests and another service, metallic, that smells of bleach and burnt coffee. My room was 412. Yours, 414. Between the two, the box of the service elevator: a hole that at night transmitted every touch, every choked laugh, every floor cart. I heard how someone—he—left the boots by the door, how he opened a bottle, how he showered too late.

I saw him for the first time at the breakfast of the second day of rain. Thirty-so many, wide shoulders of those who carry boxes, three-day beard half-carried, black shirt rolled up. Big hands, short nails, a recent cut on the knuckle of the forefinger. He served coffee alone and sat looking at the stained window. When he passed by my table, I smelled metal and glycerine soap. I don’t greet him. Neither did I. But when he left he left the newspaper bent on the corner of the next table and I did not want to read the handwritten note on the margin: maillo 3a octave grave — felt ash. Check escape.

Tuner.

In the afternoon the concierge told me that the Bechstein was in a living room on the first floor, brought under cover before the storm, and that the theatre tuner had also been trapped in the hotel. “It’s called Abel. If you need anything...” I went down. He was already there, on his knees in front of the open keyboard, with a front flashlight and a set of tune keys on a cloth. He looked up. We were the same age, more or less. His voice was serious, without haste.

• Are you the one in the box?

"That of the box and that of the 412," I said.

He smiled barely.

414. Then we are neighbors to the hole. Sorry if you heard the water last night. I shower when I cannot sleep.

"I heard it," I replied. "It didn't bother me.

We looked at each other for a second too much. The piano between the two was a perfect and absurd excuse. We talked about mallets, humidity, how the salt of the sea gets into the ropes if you leave the lid open near the port. He had a way of touching the dead keys —no sound, just to feel the escape— that removed my stomach. When he got up, I noticed the grease stain on his pants, the neck of his shirt a little crooked. He asked me if I was having dinner at the hotel. I said yes. We stayed at the bar on the ground floor at nine.

I am not going to lie to you with cheap modesty. Since I saw him on his knees in front of that Bechstein I knew he loved him. Not in a vague way: I wanted him naked, with those hands on my waist, the beard rubbing my stomach mouth, the dick hard against my thigh. I knew it with the clarity with which I know when an MRI box has an invisible crack. And I also knew that if he didn’t want the same thing, I would go to my room to masturbate hearing the water from his shower and point. I am an adult. I can ask and I can withdraw.

At nine the bar was almost empty. Only a German marriage in the background and the waiter drying glasses. Abel arrived with still wet hair, gray wool sweater, cowboys. He ordered a red wine from Rioja Alavesa. I, himself. We talked about jobs, cities, a concert in Utrecht where we had both been without crossing. He tuned for orchestras; I restored for collectors and theaters. We agreed in catalogues and never in corridors. The rain whipped the crystals. He looked at my mouth when I laughed for something silly — a bad joke about a Steinway that refused to keep tuning in a chalet with root-floor heating — and I felt the heat rise to my chest.

“Dario,” he said suddenly, without ornaments. “I’ve been hearing you move to the other side of the hole for two nights. “And this afternoon, when you ducked down to look at the escape, it got hard. I’m telling you so that you know what this is about, if you feel like it. If not, we keep talking about pianos and tomorrow each to his own.

My heart hit me dry. I swallowed saliva.

“I feel like it,” I replied. “I feel like it since breakfast. But I want it to be clear: I am not looking for a drama or a secret that later weighs. I’m looking for tonight. And I want you to say yes with your mouth, not just with my eyes.

"Yes," he said, and the word sounded clean. "With you. Now. In your room or mine. And if you ever want to stop, we stop.

• Okay.

We went up in the customer elevator, both standing, without touching us yet, the mirror returning our faces too serious for what we were going to do. In the corridor of the fourth, the silence was thick. I opened 412. He went in behind. I closed. I put the latch.

The room smelled like wet wood and an unopened minibar. The bed was large, white sheets, a wall lamp that I left in the lower position. Abel pulled off the sweater. Underneath he only had skin and a little dark hair on his chest, a mole near the left collarbone. I approached him. I touched his chest with open palm. He was hot. He grabbed my back and kissed me at last: full mouth, slow tongue, a low moan that vibrated my teeth. His beard scratched my chin. I bit his lower lip carefully and he squeezed his hand more into my hair.

"I want to see you," he said against my mouth.

I unbuttoned my shirt. He helped me with my belt. When he lowered my pants and my brief together, my cock jumped up, already hard, his head shiny. Abel looked, not with theatrical surprise, but with concrete hunger. He knelt on the carpet. He held my base with two fingers and licked me from the balls to the groove, slowly, savoring. I supported one hand on his shoulder and the other on the wall. He opened his mouth and swallowed me as far as he could, sunken cheeks, tongue working the frenzy. The wet sound filled the room. I gasped his name. He pulled aside a second, a thread of saliva joining his lower lip to my gland.

"Tell me if it slows down or goes deeper," he asked.

"Deeper," I answered. "And look at me.

He did. He looked me in the eyes while he was sucking me eagerly, without rushing to finish, just having me in his mouth. I caressed his hair, held his jaw when he wanted to come down at all, felt his throat close for a moment and then open up. The pleasure went up too fast. I warned him.

"Abel... if you keep it up, I'll run.

He turned away, gave me one last lick to the balls and stood up. He was hard inside the cowboy; the fabric marked a thick, crooked lump to the left. I opened the button and the zipper. His cock was a little shorter than mine, thicker, darker skin, marked veins, already wet head. I took it with my right hand and shook it slowly. He leaned his forehead on mine.

"I want to fuck you," he said, bluntly. "If you want to. I have condoms and lubrificant in the room. I brought them just in case. Not for you in particular. Just in case.

"Go get them," I whispered. "I shower quickly. And yes, I want you to fuck me.

He went out into the hallway in unbuttoned jeans. I went into the shower in the bathroom en suite, hot water, soap in the ass and cock, fingers cleaning with intent. When I got wrapped in the towel, he was already back, the door locked again, a little bag on the bedside table. He had taken off his shoes. We looked at each other and laughed a little, nervous and lit at the same time.

We lay down on the bed. We kissed more time, without hurry, hands touring back, ass, thighs. I sucked a nipple and he arched his back. He went down to kiss me through the abdomen until he took my dick back in my mouth, this time just for a while, just to moisten me. Then he asked me to put myself on four legs at the edge of the bed. I obeyed. I heard the click of the lubricant boat. His fingers, thick, cold at first, rounded my entrance. I asked permission once more.

• Shall I go on?

• Yeah, stick your finger in.

One finger came in. Then two. I opened patiently, looking for the angle, rubbing that point that made me release a hoarse moan against the sheet. I pushed back, asking for more. When I pulled out the fingers, I heard the plastic of the condom, the sound of the rubber as it unwrapped. The head of his cock pushed against me. It went in an inch to an inch. It burned and expanded and I breathed through his mouth, asking him not to stop. When he was completely inside, he stood still, his hands on my hips, his breathing slit.

• Fuck, Darío... you're so...

"Move," I said. "Fuck me.

It started slowly. Long busts that took my air out and returned it. The brush of their balls against mine. The click of the lubricant. I masturbated to the rhythm, my face side by side on the pillow, seeing our blurry reflection on the dark glass of the window: two bodies of man, one riding on the other, the rain behind like a curtain. He bowed on my back, bit my shoulder, spoke to my ear.

"I heard you move last night and it was my turn to think about this, to open you up, to run inside if you could, now I've got you.

"Stronger," I asked.

He accelerated. The bed hit the wall facing the elevator shaft. I didn’t care. Those on the top floor heard. They heard the carts. Each rammed came to the bottom and I groaned without taking care of myself, saying his name, saying more, like this, there. He grabbed my hair with one hand and lifted my torso, changing the angle; the other hand surrounded my chest. His cock went in and out with an obscene and beautiful sound. I felt his belly tense against my ass.

"I'm going to run," he warned.

• Do it. I want to feel you.

He pushed deep three times and was stuck, trembling, a long grunt against my neck as it drained into the condom. I ran away seconds later, squirting over the sheet and my own hand, loose legs, white eyes for a moment. He withdrew carefully, took off the condom, tied it and left it on a handkerchief. We fell aside, sweaty, sticky, laughing short of how strong it had been.

We drank tap water in the bathroom, from the hotel’s glass bottle. We cleaned ourselves with a wet towel. We went back to bed without dressing. We talked a while of nonsense and serious things: of a father who also tuned, of my habit of not sleeping the night before a delivery, of how rare it turns out to wish someone so accurately. He confessed to me that sometimes he gets excited with the noise of the keys to tune each other. I confessed to him that the smell of varnish and felt makes me half hard since I was twenty. We laughed. Then he crouched again and licked my belly, cleaning remains, going down to my still sensitive cock. I slept almost, and woke me up again, sucking me tenderly lasciva until I got hard again.

The second time it was I who fucked him. I wanted to keep him face up, his legs open, looking at my face. I prepared him with fingers and lubricant, I put the condom on him myself, I kissed him the inside of my thighs. When I entered him, Abel let go of a drowning that lit me whole. He was hot and narrow and looked at me without blinking. I pushed slowly at the beginning, then with more force when he asked me with his hands on my ass. His cock bounced between our belly; I masturbated it to the beat. The head of the bed hit the cast. He ran first, without him touching it just at the end, just with the friction and the angle; his semen splashed his chest and mine. I followed a few more intrudes and came with a groan that scratched my throat, deep inside him, seeing how his eyelashes trembled.

After that there was not much to say that we would not have said with the body. We showered together, this time without rushing to fuck, just soaping our backs, laughing when the water went cold for a second. We asked room service — at two o’clock in the morning, with a generous tip and an excuse of “we haven’t had dinner” — bread, cheese, anchovies and another bottle of red. We ate naked on the towel spread out in the bed, staining our fingers, kissing us with salt and wine flavor. Abel told me that the next day, if the temporal loosened, he had to tune up another piano in a backyard. I told him that the Bechstein was almost ready and that I could stay one more day.

"Stay," he said. "I don't tell you forever. I tell you tomorrow. And if we feel like it tomorrow, the day after.

"I'm staying," I answered.

We slept three or four hours, entangled. I woke up before dawn with my arm on my waist and warm breath on my back. The rain had passed into a thin drizzle. Through the window, the bay began to clear in grey. I got up slowly, put on my underwear alone, and opened the window a little to smell the sea. Behind me, the bed creaked.

"You're leaving?" he asked, a voice full of sleep.

"No way," I said. "I just watched if the world was still there.

Come on.

I came back. He drew me against his chest. His soft cock still rested against my thigh. We kissed without haste, knowing that we had the morning, knowing that the hallway was still empty, knowing that the service elevator would come down and climb outside of what we had done. I caressed his neck hair. He put his hand into my underwear just to have me, not to demand anything yet.

"Dario," he whispered.

• Tell me.

"Last night, when you came into me, I thought I was going to ask you to stay the week. I didn't because I didn't want to scare you.

“You don’t scare me,” I said. “Ask me whenever you want. I also know how to say yes. And I can say that slowly. Both things are worth it.

He smiled at my collarbone. “Outside, a seagull shouted. Inside, the radiator made a silly noise. We stayed like this for a long time, skin with skin, the semen dry on the sheets as a silly and beautiful proof that we had been honest.

In the middle of the morning we went down for breakfast. The German marriage was gone. The waiter asked nothing. Abel passed me the jam and his fingers rubbed mine a second too much. Under the table, his knee touched mine. We talked about the Bechstein, the farmhouse, a possible job in Bilbao for the coming month where we might meet again. We did not promise eternal love. We promised messages. We promised not to pretend that it had been just a nameless hotel fuck.

Before he went out to the farmhouse — the storm had opened a clearing — I asked him to go up to 412. I closed the door. I gently pushed him against her and knelt down. I opened his pants. I sucked his dick half hard until I left it shiny and tense, looking at him from below, one hand on his balls, the other on his hip. He ran into my mouth with a choked groan, the white knuckles against the wood of the door, and I swallowed it whole, salty and hot, without turning my eyes away. I got up. We kissed with his taste still in my tongue.

"So you don't forget the taste of the hallway," I said.

“Asshole,” he laughed, tender. “Write me when the piano sounds good.

• You write to me when you get to the farmhouse.

He left. I stood at the threshold for a second, still smelling his soap on my skin. Then I closed, showered, opened the Bechstein box in the living room on the first floor and worked with firm hands. Every hammer I touched returned the echo of his body. It was not a distraction: it was a fingerboard.

At night, only in 412, I heard the service elevator go up and down without it. I touched myself slowly, remembering the weight of his chest on my back, the way it said my name when it ran, the clean yes we gave ourselves before we took off our clothes. I ran with a low groan, the face on the pillow that still smelled at his neck. Then I opened the laptop and wrote him a short message, without flowers:

The escape is clean, the third grave no longer works, neither are you, good night, 414.

The answer came in three minutes:

I'll go back to Nava tomorrow. Book dinner and bed if you want.

I want to, I sent.

I turned off the light. The rain had stopped at all. Through the open window came a cold port air. I smiled alone, like a lucky idiot, and slept without strange dreams, only with the warm certainty that I had asked for what I wanted and received it with the same care with which an instrument is tuned: to hear, patiently, until it sounds exactly as it should.

If you ever go through the Nava, look in the corridor of the fourth. The service elevator shaft is still there, transmitting noises from others. We no longer. We learned to speak quietly and loudly, as needed. And to say yes when the body and head coincide.

That's all I confess to you for now. The rest — the other nights, the trip to Bilbao, the morning when we tuned a piano that wasn't owned by anyone to four hands — I'll tell you another day, if you want to get closer to the ear.

End of confession in room 412.