The silence of the 11th floor

The silence of the 11th floor

I tell you short, as if we were still in that room and you had to watch the volume so that the hallway doesn’t find out. I don’t look for absolution. I’m looking for someone to hear me say it the way I say it to myself when I turn off the light: I wanted it. He wanted it too. And for whole hours we pretended that we might not want it.

My name is Vera only for you. In real life I respond to another name, I sign budgets and correct typography until three in the morning. I am thirty-four years old, a small flat in Chamberí and a best friend named Laura. Laura is one of those people who know your stomach: she knows when I lie for education and when I am about to break something. She has been married to Mateo, the architect. Mateo, the one with low laughter and big hands. Mateo, whom I watched too long at Thursday dinners and then rebuked me in the taxi back home.

There was never an undue touch. Never a crooked phrase. Only that invisible touch of two people who measure themselves without permission. He asked me about my projects with a attention that does not give to anyone. I laughed at the mediocre jokes as if they were brilliant. Laura, in the middle, alien or pretending to be, and I hated myself a little each time he stood up to serve wine and I followed the movement of his back.

The design congress in Madrid was organized by my studio. Three days of presentations, stands and cocktails with people who speak of “brand Narratives” as if they were religion. They reserved rooms in a functional hotel near New Ministries: long corridors, grey carpet, doors that close with a dry click. Laura was not expecting it. I was in Lisbon closing a campaign. Mateo, instead, yes: his studio presented a rehabilitation project and we agreed on two round tables. When I saw him in the lobby with the cabin suitcase and that blue jacket that I knew about dinners, I felt the blow under the chest. It was no surprise. It was recognition.

"Look who appears," he said, and embraced me with the right brevity of the one who embraces his wife's friend.

He smelled of hotel soap and coffee. I hugged him back a second too much. He didn’t completely turn away. That was the first limit that moved without anyone naming him.

During the coffee breaks we talked about panels and deadlines. He told me that Laura had asked him to take care of me, to eat something hot, not to get drunk with the marketing ones. I laughed. He also. The laughter came out lower than necessary. At night, at the hotel bar, we agreed again. I wore the black dress that I wear when I want to look like someone who has control. He had taken off his jacket. The conversation led, without pushing it at all, to things that were not work: the fear of stagnating, the nights you lay next to the right person and still feel a hole. We did not mention Laura. Her name floated among us like a glass that we did not want to touch yet.

"We should go up," I said at one and a half, when the bar began to empty.

"Yes," he replied. "We should."

No one moved right away. When we finally did, the elevator left us on the same floor. Eleven. Our rooms were six doors away. He stopped in front of his. I was in front of mine. The hallway smelled like a cheap air freshener and a wet carpet.

• Good night, Vera.

• Good night, Mateo.

I went in, took off my shoes, washed my face. I looked in the mirror of the bathroom and said to myself, loudly to make it really sound, that I wasn’t going to knock on his door. That desire was one thing and betrayal another. That Laura deserved better. I brushed my teeth with rage. I put my sleep shirt on. I put myself into bed. I turned off the light. Five minutes. Ten. The ceiling didn’t say anything useful. I got up, I turned on the lamp on the bedside table and took the phone.

I didn't call Laura. I wrote a message to Mateo and deleted it.

Are you still awake?

I sent it before I could regret it, the answer came in less than a minute.

Yeah. Is something wrong?

I don't know, open up if you want, or not.

I stood in the middle of the room, feeling the pulse in my throat, until I heard the soft knuckles hit. I opened. He was in sweatpants and white shirt, the hair a little scrambled, the expression of someone who had also spent the last half hour arguing with himself.

"If I come in," he said, without crossing the threshold, "we can no longer pretend that this is just tired of congress.

• I know.

• Laura...

"I know, too. Come in alone if you really want it. If you doubt, turn around. I won't hate you for turning back.

He looked me in the eye the right time so that I could understand that doubt existed and that, even so, he would not win. He came in. I closed the door with the lock. The click sounded too loud.

At first we didn’t touch each other. We sat on the edge of the bed, like two teenagers who have left the house and don’t know where to start. We spoke softly of the obvious: of the guilt, of the unfair, of how much we liked ourselves without right. He confessed that he had wanted me in silence for two years, that he had pushed him down every time he went up, that sometimes he masturbated thinking in my mouth and then hated him. I told him that in more than one shower he had run imagining his hands and that then he called Laura to hear his voice and punish me normally.

"If we do," I said, "I want it to be because we both choose it now, not because alcohol or the hotel pushes us.

"I want to touch you. I want to fuck you. I want to hear how it sounds to you when you don't have to hide. And I know what I'm breaking by saying it. You?

"So am I. With you. Here. If at any time you say stop, stop. If I say so, stop."

• Okay.

Only then did he bow down and kiss me.

It was not a clumsy kiss. It was a kiss from someone who had been rehearsing it for too long inside. His mouth opened over mine with a contained hunger that disarmed me. I grabbed his back. He held my waist and drew me over his legs. I noticed his erection against my thigh through the cloth and a sound came out of my throat, low, shameful, sincere. His hands went up under his shirt. My breasts fit whole in his palms; he caressed them with thumbs until the nipples hardened and I arched my back looking for more pressure.

"Take it off," I asked.

He lifted her by the head and threw her into the chair. He looked at me naked from the waist up like he looked at a thing he didn’t think he could afford. He laid me down on the mattress and lowered his sweatshirt along with his underwear. His cock was thick, heavy, already completely hard, his head shiny. I wrapped it with my hand and he exhaled a tacosuave against my neck.

"Slow down," he muttered. "If you go this far, I will not endure what I want to endure with you."

I laughed against his mouth and relaxed my rhythm, going up and down with his palm open, feeling him beating against his fingers. He lowered my panties with a deliberate calm, as if every inch discovered deserved attention. When I was naked at all he stopped to look at me again. I opened on my knees without asking me. His gaze went down to my pussy and hardened his jaw.

"I can," he asked, close by, the warm breath inside my thigh.

• Yes, please, yes.

He licked me slowly, from the bottom up, opening me with his thumbs to get better to the clitoris. It was not an exhibition tongue; it was a patient work, circular, sometimes sucking softly, sometimes flattening his tongue to cover more. He stuck one finger, then another, curving them right where I need them to be curved. I covered my mouth with the back of my hand so as not to groan high. He turned it away from me.

"Let me hear you. No one else. But I do."

I ran like this, with his fingers inside and his mouth sealed to my pussy, his legs shaking on both sides of his head, orgasm rising from my belly in waves that left my eyes blurred. He did not stop at all until I pushed him with my hip, hypersensitive, laughing and cursing at the same time.

When I joined him I pushed him on my back and climbed on his lap. I rubbed my wet pussy along his cock without letting him in yet, enjoying the face he put every time the glans rubbed my entrance and didn’t pass. He grabbed my thighs hard enough to leave a mark.

"Look at me while I do," I said.

• I'm looking at you.

I guided myself with my hand and went in an inch by inch. The pressure opened me up with a delicious slowness; when I had it whole I stood still, breathing, feeling how it filled me to the bottom. He squeezed my teeth and said my name in a way that I had never heard: more severe, more broken. I started to move. First in short circles, then going up almost to take it out and coming down from a dry blow that ripped the air off both of us. His hands lifted me up to my breasts, tightened them to the rhythm of the onslaughts. I leaned on his chest and accelerated.

"Is that how you like it?" I asked, though the answer was in his face.

More like that, Vera, more.

He fucked me from the bottom when my thighs began to fail, holding my hip and pushing me up with a brutal precision. The sound of our skin, wet, obscene, filled the room. At one point he turned me without coming out at all, put me on all fours and penetrated me from behind a single treat. I yelled at the pillow. He bowed on my back, pulled my hair apart and spoke to my ear as I felt strong and deep:

"I've been imagining how you squeezed. It's not coming. You're better. Tell me if you want it to stop.

• Don't stop, don't stop.

He ran his hand to the clitoris and masturbated me with clumsy fingers in such a hurry, and the second orgasm came to me without warning, longer, dirtier, making me contract around his cock over and over again. He cursed, tried to stop, could not. He warned me with his voice strangled.

"Not inside," I said.

He came out in the last second and ran over the curve of my ass and the lower part of my back, hot, abundant, with a groan that seemed to me the most intimate sound that had been given me in years. He stood trembling against me. I stayed with my face sunk on the pillow, feeling his semen slip slowly on one side.

We showered together later, in the narrow bathtub of the hotel, washing us with a silence that was no longer shame but care. He soaped my back. I cleaned his chest. We kissed under the water with a tenderness that hurt more than the urgency of before. When we left we dried with rough towels and returned to bed, naked, without bothering to cover ourselves.

We talked about Laura. Not to get dirty anymore, but because not to do it would have been another cowardice. I said that I loved her and that what we had just done did not erase that, only complicated it until it became almost unbearable. He said that he would not ask me to keep an eternal secret, that he needed time to decide how to look him in the face, that he did not use me as an escape. We promised not to repeat the lie of “it was a mistake and already.” It had been a decision. Two decisions, in fact, colliding at once.

At four o’clock in the morning we touched each other again. Slower. He stepped on me, opened my legs with his knees and looked at me all the time as I walked in. He kissed my eyelids, the cut of my mouth, the hollow of his throat. I surrounded his waist with my legs and guided him to the angle that makes me lose the thread of the phrases. We fucked as if we had to memorize. When he approached me again he told me and this time, I asked him to do it again, over my belly. I saw him run with his mouth open and eyes fixed on mine, and something in my chest broke and it was mounted again in another way.

He slept an hour in my bed, with an arm pierced over my waist. I woke up before him and studied him: the beard of a day, the small scar on the eyebrow, the absurd relaxation of the one who has spent at all. I thought of Laura sleeping in a room in Lisbon. I thought of the breakfast coffee, in the hallways, in the emails that would continue to arrive as if the world had not twisted. I became nauseous and wished at the same time. I woke him up with a kiss on the shoulder.

"You have to leave before the hotel starts moving.

• I know.

He dressed silently. “At the door he stopped, his hand on the knob.”

"If you write to me, I will answer you. If you don't, I understand. And if you repent in the light of day, too.

"I do not regret having loved you inside. I regret the harm that may come from behind. It is not the same."

He nodded. “He went out. The hallway swallowed him with his gray carpet and his 11th floor silence.

I'm not going to tell you that the next day everything was easy, because it wasn't. We crossed a round table and talked about typography densities like two impeccable professionals. Inside I still felt it. Inside he avoided looking at me too long. In the evening he didn't call. Neither did I. I let the second day of the congress pass me over like a tide of business cards and fake smiles. On the third night, the closing night, I got a message from him at 12:00.

I'm at eleven, 1108, if you're coming, come because you want to, otherwise make it a good congressional end and nothing else.

I looked in the mirror. I put on the same black dress. I didn’t put on my panties. I took the key and went out into the hallway with my heart out of the open and my conscience awake at all. I knocked on his door with two knuckles. He opened right away. This time we didn’t talk so much. This time the consent was a clear “yes”, repeated, when he pushed me against the wall and lifted my dress; another “yes” when I asked him to fuck me without preambles; another when he put me on my knees and I opened his belt myself.

I knelt down on the carpet and sucked her cock with a relaxed mouth, looking at her from below, letting her hold my hair without getting hurt. I spit a little to wet her better and shoved her in until I noticed the nausea reflex, and yet I endured it because I liked the way her head was going backwards. He warned me when it was close and I got away, I got up, I led him to the bed and lay down on my side. He went into a spoon, deep, with one hand around my chest and the other between my legs. The rhythm was slow and heavy, almost lazy, and that’s why it was more intimate. I ran up against my clitoris. He ran shortly afterwards, this time with a condom that I had put between nervous laughter and kisses, because the night before we had crossed a limit that we didn’t want to improve again.

Then, lying down in front, we shared the mini bar: a hot machine chocolate and a mini gin that we took turns in sips. We talked less about Laura and more about us: what we were able to hold and what we didn’t. We didn’t get out of there with a perfect plan. We went out with the truth put on like a second skin. He had to go back to his home. I had to go to mine. The conversation with Laura would exist or not, but we could no longer pretend that the desire had been a corridor accident.

At dawn I got dressed. I kissed in the forehead, then in the mouth, then again in the mouth as if the extra time could be bought with lips. I went down to my room down the stairs to not coincide with anyone in the elevator. I showered. I packed. In the taxi to Atocha my hands were shaking and yet I felt strangely whole: not clean, not proud of the possible damage, but I did own what I had chosen to feel.

I leave the confession here, in this tone of hotel room and lights off. Not so that you judge me better or worse. Just so you know how the taboo sounds when two adults look at it face to face, name it, ask permission and, even with the guilt sitting on the edge of the bed, decide to cross. On the 11th floor the silence kept everything: the groans, the nos that did not arrive, the yeses that yes, the name of Laura hanging between us as a debt that we have not yet paid at all.

Sometimes when I travel alone and the hallway of the hotel looks too much like that, I close my eyes and hear his voice again asking me to say it clearly. And I, in my memory, say yes again. With fear. With hunger. With the exact and terrible freedom of those who know what they are doing.