The storm in 609 and the message I didn't erase

The storm in 609 and the message I didn't erase

I'm lying on my side in the bed at 609, with the sheet just up to my hip and ear glued to the silence of the hallway, and I talk to you as if you were here, with your mouth almost in your neck. It's not a letter. It's not a diary. It's a confession that slips out of my voice because if I say it loudly my voice breaks. Outside it still rains over San Sebastián with that porch of the Cantabrian that doesn't ask permission. The glass vibrates a little bit. The minibar makes an idiot click every certain time. And I, Vera from you when no one looks, I continue with the hot phone between my fingers even if there is nothing to send.

I'll tell you from the beginning, slowly, so you'll feel it the way I felt.

I arrived Tuesday afternoon with the small suitcase and the still wet hair of the taxi. Edition Congress, three papers, a courtesy dinner that bored me beforehand. I asked for the high room because I like to hear the rain closer and because, I confess it already, I knew that you were in the city. I had seen it in a story of someone, a crooked frame of the port, your shoulder with that gray jacket that I know you by memory. I did not write then. I punished myself a little. I told myself that it was chance and that the coincidences did not touch. I took a long shower, put on the white hotel shirt and sat on the edge of the bed to look at the black sea between buildings.

At two and twelve in the morning, with the congress already asleep and I sleepless, I wrote to you.

It wasn’t a “hello”. It was worse and better. It was a confession sent without a net. I told you that I had been waking up for months with my dry mouth to imagine your weight on top. I told you that I remembered the taste of your neck in that August of three years ago, when we could still touch without the calendar looking ugly. I told you that I was at 609 in the hotel in front of the bay, alone, with my legs open under the sheet and my hand still because I preferred to wait for you even if you didn’t come. I pressed to send before regret. The message went with that little buzz that looks like a sweet betrayal.

Three minutes, just three minutes.

Your answer was not an elegant phrase. It was: “Don’t move, I’ll get in a cab.” And then, as if the body were ahead of prudence: “Tell me you really want me to come in.”

I read that with my heart hitting my throat. I answered you yes. I answered you please. I told you that the door would be open and that if you heard doubts in my voice you could leave, but that I was not going to pretend that I did not want you. Clear, written, trembling consent. You answered with a simple “voy”, and that I will go to my wrists like a hot rope.

I waited.

I turned off the big light and left alone the flex of the desk, that amber light that puts the skin more golden than it is. I looked in the bathroom mirror: thirty-four years, the loose hair glued to the back of the head, the hotel shirt fastened only half, without a bra, the breathing already altered. I washed my teeth again by nerves. I opened the window a little so that the smell of rain and salitre could enter. And I sat on the chair, on the side, with crossed legs and pulse in the yolks.

When you knocked on the door, you didn't use your knuckles hard. Two low touches, almost embarrassing. I got up, crossed the room barefooted on the thick carpet and opened.

You were soaked. The dark hair stuck to the forehead, the jacket dripping on the threshold, the forgotten hand bag I don’t know where. You looked at me as you look at something that has been ordered in secret for too long. We didn’t go into the hallway talk. I gestured to you and you walked in. I closed. The latch sounded with a click that seemed obscenely intimate to me.

"If at any time you want me to stop," I said, because I needed to hear it out loud, "you say it and I stop.

"Same," you replied. "You too."

That was the contract, small, clean, adult.

I took off your wet jacket with both hands. I weighed it. I hung it on the back of the chair and felt the cold of the fabric against my forearms. Below you wore a dark shirt attached to your chest. Your fingers were a little shaking when you touched my waist, above my shirt, as if you still didn’t think you were inside. I approached your mouth without kissing it at all: we brushed lips, breaths, the rain you brought from the street. You told me my name against the lower corner and my knees softened.

Then I kissed you for real. Without haste and without modesty. I opened my mouth and you came in with your tongue warm, exploring, remembering. Your hands went up my back under my shirt and I noticed the whole palm against my bare skin, the heat contrasting with the cold that you still had from outside. I pressed to you and felt, through the fabric of your pants, that you were already hard. A dry blow of desire got me down to the belly.

"I've been wanting this since I read your message," you muttered.

"I've been writing it without sending it months," I confessed.

We moved towards the bed, tripping just over my suitcase. You sat on the edge and knelt between my knees. That image alone already deserved to be engraved: you, wet still on my shoulders, looking down at me, opening the buttons on the hotel shirt one by one with an almost cruel slowness. When the cloth fell, the air of the room brushed my breasts and hardened my nipples immediately. You looked at them as you looked at an offering. You brought your mouth and licked your right with your flat tongue, hot, and then you sucked it softly enough to rip out a sound that I could not hold. The free hand went up your rib to the other chest, you took it, you kneaded it with your thumb drawing circles.

I threw myself back over the elbows. You followed. You kissed down the middle of the chest, through the belly, to the edge of the black slip. You asked with your eyes. I nodded. You hooked your fingers and threw down. I lifted my hip for a second to help you and I was naked from the waist down, open before you, with the light of the flex painting my hair and the moisture that was already escaping.

"Fuck, how beautiful you are," you said, and it didn't sound like a phrase made.

You opened my legs with both hands firm on my thighs. The first contact of your mouth was a dry kiss just above the clitoris, and then the tongue, slow, separating, walking from the bottom up with a precision that made me arch my back. I gobbled your name. You put your hands under my ass and you brought me closer to your face, as if you wanted to drown there. You sucked, licked, entered with the tip of your tongue and came back to the swollen button to surround it without haste. I grabbed the sheet with one hand and your hair with the other. My legs trembled. The rain outside was rising and the noise mixed with the wet sound of your mouth working.

When you put a finger, then two, curved upwards looking for that point that you know me, I let go of a long whining. You fucked me with your fingers to the rhythm of my tongue and I felt the orgasm rise from my feet, tight, inevitable. I warned you with a broken voice: I go, I go, you don't stop. You didn't stop. I ran against your mouth with my hips raised and a choked scream on the pillow that I reached to bite. The contractions shook me whole. You kept licking me soft until I became too sensitive and I pulled you away with a trembling gesture.

You went up to bed. I took off your T-shirt in a hurry. Your chest against mine, the still fresh skin of the street. I opened your belt, zipped down, pulled out your hard, hot, already wet dick on the tip. I held it with my hand and looked you in the eyes while masturbating slowly.

"I want to feel you inside," I said. "Now. If you want to."

“I want,” you replied. “Condon in the purse. Wait.

You looked for it with clumsy hands of urgency. You opened it, you rolled it to the base while I looked at you without blinking. I lay down at all. You stood between my legs, you leaned on one forearm and with the other hand you guided. The head pushed, opened, entered slowly. I noticed every inch. The stretching pulled me out of the air. When you were deep at all, we stood still for a second, foreheads together, breathing the same breath.

You started to move. First slow, almost ceremonial, taking out almost everything and going back to the bottom. I would lift my hip to find you. The internal brush lit me again, deeper. You accelerated when I asked for it with your nails on your back. The sound of our bodies, skin against skin, wet, rhythmic, filled the room along with the rain. You spoke to me in the ear: how well it was, how much you had thought about this, how tight it was. Each sentence sent me current at the base of the column.

You turned me around without coming out at all. I put myself on all fours because I asked you to. You entered from behind and the new depth ripped out a more serious moan. Your hands on my waist, then one going up to grab my chest, pinching my nipple with your thumb and index to the rhythm of the attacks. I ran again like this, with my face against the mattress and my ass high, pressing you inside with force. You jaded and loosened the rhythm so you wouldn’t follow me right away.

We lay on the side, you behind, still inside, spooning wet. You kissed my shoulder, neck, ear. You told me that we could stop or follow, that the control was mine too. I laughed short, tired and lit at the same time, and I said that I wanted to see you run.

I put it on you again. I opened my legs more. I held your face with both hands as you pushed faster, more messy. Your eyes squinted. I squeezed your heels in the ass. When you arrived, I felt it all over your body: stiffness, trembling, severe moaning against my mouth. It stayed a while on top, heavy and sweet, as your heart went down with revolutions.

Then there was good silence. You came out carefully, got rid of the condom, went back to bed and pulled me against your chest. The flex was still on. The rain had loosened a little. I caressed your arm with the yolk of your fingers and confessed, still whispering:

"I was afraid that when I saw you at the door, courage would go away.

"I was afraid you'd come and changed your mind," you said.

We laughed short, that laugh of relief that only comes out when the body has already told the truth. We talked a time of necessary nonsense: of the congress, of the taxi that had cost you a fortune because of the storm, of how the receptionist had looked at you when you asked for 609 at 3:00 in the morning. You confessed that reading my message had made you hard in the lobby of the other hotel, and that you had had to go out into the street in the rain to get off a little before asking for the car. That image made me smile against your skin.

Later, around five o’clock, we touched again. Slower. Less urgency and more curiosity. I rode on, guided you back inside again—another condom, alwayss, the responsibility is also kissed—and I moved with my hands resting on your chest. You looked at my belly, breasts, face. You held my hips but you let me set the pace. I bowed forward so that you would suck my nipple as I went up and down. The clitoris rub against your pubis slowly led me to a third orgasm, longer, more dilute, which left me trembling and laughing at the same time because of the absurdity of so much intensity in one night.

You ran a little later, with your fingers stuck in my thighs and my name between your teeth.

When I woke up, you were looking at the roof with one hand under your head and the other on my back. You kissed my forehead. We talked about breakfast, whether we should go down together or separately, that the congress was waiting for me at ten o’clock and you a train at noon. No big promises. Just the honesty of two adults who had given themselves what they needed with the consent put forward as a light.

Before you got up at all, I asked you one last thing: to touch me a little more, without getting fucked, just hands and mouth, to take that sensation to the hall of events. You laughed and obeyed. You made me cum again with two fingers and thumb on the clitoris, looking me in the eyes, while I bit your shoulder so you wouldn’t scream. Then you showered. The smell of your gel was left in the bathroom when you came out with wet hair and the jacket still wet from the night before.

At the door, before opening, you told me in my ear exactly what I am repeating now against the silence of this room:

"If you ever write a message like that again, answer yes again."

You left. The latch sounded again. I stayed in bed with my legs together, the body marked with roses and the mouth swollen from so much kissing you.

And now I tell you everything again, by heart, as if I had my lips stuck to your ear in the dark. Because confession does not end when the door closes. It remains in the skin, in the smell of the pillow, in the glass that still keeps drops of that rain. It remains in the fact that I did not erase the message. I have it here, on the bedside table, and from time to time I open it only to read the hour — 2:12— and to remember how a cowardly and courageous phrase at the same time turned body, became your weight, became this sweet dampness that still remains between my legs when I close my eyes.

If you're actually hearing this, in a similar room, with another rain or none, you know what I'm asking you: don't answer with caution. Answer with the taxi. Answer with the soft knuckles at the door. Answer with the same yes that you gave me when I opened you naked of intention and trembling of desire.

I, for one, leave the door open another night, and I wait for you with the hotel shirt unbuttoned and the confession ready at the tip of the tongue, just in case you want to hear them all, one by one, until we run out of voice and only leave the body talking.

Until then, I keep your name in my mouth as you keep a secret that burns rich. And every time the rain hits this same crystal, my nipples harden and my memory opens exactly at the point where you entered, slowly, looking at me, asking without words if I could continue.

You could, you can, keep going.

End of confession this morning. Although, if I am honest at all, it never ends: it only pauses between one message and the next knock on the door.