The suite I didn't ask for and the storm I did.

The suite I didn't ask for and the storm I did.

I didn’t go looking for that. I say it now, with a low voice, as if I were still in that grey linen bed looking at the ceiling of moldings and the black sea outside of the glass. I went for work. A small publishing house, a report on hotels that is done without losing its soul, three nights paid in the Cantabrian and the notebook full of boring questions. I was thirty-six years old, the divorce already digested and the habit of sleeping on the left side of any bed even if no one occupied the right. My name is Irene Valdes and that night I stopped being just that.

The Great Miramar smelled of wet wood and lemon. The hall was tall, with low lamps that didn’t say the time. At reception a young girl gave me the key of 412 and, when checking the system, frowned.

"There is a last minute change, Miss Valdés. 412 has a leak due to the storm. We have passed you to Suite 510. Same views. More space.

I nodded. I did not argue gifts of chance. I went up with the small suitcase and the photographic equipment. The corridor on the fifth floor was narrow, carpet colored wine, varnished doors. When I turned the key I felt the soft click and the fresh air of empty room. Whole window. The sea was no longer seen: only dense rain and far-away lights from a pier. I left the coat on the couch, took off my boots and walked barefoot to the glass. My neck stood up only with the thermal contrast. I like that moment: when the body comes before the mind.

I had left the laptop on the table and opened the mail by inertia. Among the editorial messages was a new one from the architect of the project, signed A. Rivas. We had been crossing technical notes for weeks: lighting, preservation of moldings, how not to kill the character of the building. Never photos of it. Never voice. Only precise paragraphs and sometimes a phrase that went out of the professional tone, as if someone appeared a second from behind the screen.

«If you arrive before Friday, ask to be shown the restored tea room with the sunset light. It is worth it. A.R.

I smiled unintentionally. I answered that I was already there, that the storm had advanced everything and that the suite smelled like sea. I pressed send. Ten minutes later, a dry knock on the next door made me raise my head. Then another, softer, in mine.

I opened with the latch still on, only the width of the chain. A man of about forty, dark wet hair of rain, grey wool jacket and eyes that calculated distances. He carried a folder under his arm and the gesture of those who did not expect to find anyone awake.

"Irene Valdés," he said, without asking at all. "I am Adrian Rivas. I occupy 508. The janitor has told me that he has been brought up through the leak.

The voice was more serious than the one I had invented reading his emails. I removed the chain. I don’t know why. Maybe because the corridor smelled of his colony light and rain, and my body had already decided something that the head was still negotiating.

• Just a moment if you like. It's made into an impregnate.

He hesitated just enough for me to notice that he was also measuring. He walked in. He left the folder on the table. He didn’t take off his jacket immediately. I closed the door and felt the click as a minimal deal.

We spoke first of mouldings and filament bulbs. He dried his hair with his hand. I prepared two glasses of the minibar: gin tonic without theater, only ice and lemon slice that I found in the courtesy fruit maker. When I spread it, our fingers touched a second too much. The heat of his skin contrasted with the cold of the glass. I noticed the pull under the navel, that sweet alarm that I sometimes ignored for weeks.

"I thought I'd be older," I said, sincere.

"I thought you wouldn't come until Friday," he replied. "And that you would be more distant.

The phrase remained between the two. I sat on the arm of the armchair, he on the chair. The rain struck the glass insistently. I told of my work, of how I hate the imposted photos of hotels and prefer the ugly light of six o’clock in the morning. He spoke of why he had insisted on recovering the original appliques of 1928. As I spoke, I looked at his mouth more than necessary. When he shut up, the silence was not uncomfortable: it was dense.

"I can leave," he said at last, not moving.

"You can stay a while longer," I replied. "I'm not asking you for anything you don't want to give. And I'm not giving anything I don't want either.

He nodded only once, slow. “That clarity lit me more than any cheap compliment.”

I got up to put music low on the speaker of the mobile: something instrumental, without lyrics that competed. As I passed by him, I noticed his gaze on my neck. I touched my neck without dissimulation, a nervous gesture and at the same time deliberate. The left nipple hardened against the bra only with that attention. I breathed deep. I wanted him to see it.

"He's cold," he observed, soft.

• Not exactly.

He smiled barely. He finally took off his jacket. Underneath, white shirt rolled up. Forearms with dark hair. I liked the way he didn’t rush. I liked it even more when he approached me without touching me yet and asked, very close to my ear:

• May I?

“Yes,” I said. “But slowly. I want to notice everything.

His lips brushed first the corner of mine, not the center. An essay. gin tasted the same in his mouth and mine. When he finally kissed me, I opened my lips and let his tongue explore without haste. My hands went up to his chest, I felt the heartbeat. Mine was already ahead. The clitoris began to beat with a deaf, anticipatory pulse, as if the body had been preparing for hours and I just found out.

He led me to the bed without pushing. I sat on the edge. He knelt between my knees and, looking into my eyes, unbuttoned the first button of my blouse.

• Tell me if I stop.

• Don't stop.

Each button was a pause. When the blouse opened, the air of the room brushed my neckline. Adrián kissed the bra line, he did not skip it. His fingers climbed up my side to the edge of the fabric and waited. I was the one who lowered the zipper of the skirt and took it off. I stayed in black underwear, simple, chosen for comfort and not for conquest. He seemed to thank him.

"Beautiful," she muttered against my belly.

It was not a manual pyropus. It was a check. His lips went down to the edge of the panties and stopped. The warm breath made me arch my back a little bit. I noticed the moisture build up, that inner feeling of filling me without anyone touching me even where I needed it most. The nipples hurt so hard, rubbing the lace.

"I want to take this off," he said, gently pulling the elastic.

• Take it off.

The panties came down my thighs. The cold air reached my sex and I trembled. Adrian didn’t jump: he looked at me for a second, as if he respected a threshold, and then reached his mouth. The first touch of his tongue on the clitoris was so precise that I released a low, almost surprising sound. I circulated around, I didn’t crush. My fingers were hooked to his hair. I opened my legs more without asking me. Every passing time I raised a little more the temperature of the lower belly, a heat that spread towards the thighs and the coxis.

"So," I whispered. "Slower still."

He obeyed. And in that obedience I found a different pleasure, that of directing without shouting. When he introduced a finger, wet of me, I felt him walking the walls patiently, looking for the point that sometimes neither I was right to point out. He found it. The thumb did not need: his tongue and that curved finger were enough for my breath to break into short pieces. I tightened my neck. I put my head back and saw the blurred ceiling.

I didn't want to extend that rope until it hurt to taste.

I asked him to come up. He took off his shirt. Hot skin, a little hair on his chest, fine scar close to the rib that I touched curiously. I unbuttoned his pants myself. His erection tightened the cloth; when he released it, he weighed in my hand with a clean heat. I caressed him from base to glande, slowly, looking at his face to see when his gaze was cloudy. He did not push. He let me set the pace.

"Condom in the bag," I said, pointing to the bathroom. "I bring it."

I was naked in the room. I noticed his look on my back, in the movement of my hips. That consciousness dampened me more. I returned, put the condom with firm fingers and sat on my horse on it, without coming down at all. I rubbed my sex against his, the clitoris receiving direct, electrical pressure. I groaned without dramatism, only truth. When I finally impaled slowly, inch to inch, the filling ripped off a long sigh. I stood still for a moment, adapting, savoring the hot intrusion.

"Move whenever you want," he said, hands on my hips unforced.

I began to swing. I cut at first. The angle gave me constant friction back in the clitoris every time I went down. My breasts were moving close to his face; he took them with his mouth, one and then the other, sucking the nipple with the exact pressure that made me close my eyes. Each suction pulled an invisible thread to the lower belly. I accelerated. The bed creaked just. Outside, the storm was rushing and the glass vibrating.

I leaned forward, supported my hands in his chest and looked for the rhythm I needed. He raised my pelvis a little to find me. The wet sound of our bodies excited me almost as much as the brush. I felt orgasm near: not a sudden explosion, but a tide that went up my thighs, tightened my uterus, stole my air. I told him.

"I'm going to run. Don't stop exactly like this.

His hands tightened a little more. His pubis gave me right at the point. I squeezed around him, deliberately, and the pleasure overflowed in waves. I twined against his neck, the muscles of the abdomen shaking, the clitoris beating with almost painful force of so good. I kept moving over as I went down, squeezing every spasm. He endured without running yet, the jaw tense, beautiful in that effort.

When I was able to speak, I asked him to put me on my back. I wanted to feel it on top, the weight, the different depth. I settled on the pillows. He stood between my legs and entered again with a single full thrust. I screamed short. My nails marked his shoulders. He kissed my neck, the area just below the ear that melts me, and I began to climb again, surprised by the speed. The second orgasm was deafer, more internal, a deep contraction that made me stick my heels into the mattress.

Only then did I tell him that I could let go if I wanted to. He did it with a severe groan against my skin, the rigid body for an instant and then heavy, confident. I did not focus his climax; I received it as an echo of mine, pleasant, but the true story was mine: the tremor that still ran my thighs, the extreme sensitivity of the clitoris to the least friction, the way the air knew me different.

The rain did not stop. He withdrew carefully, got rid of the condom, returned and attracted me sideways. His hand opened in my belly. I put mine on top.

"I didn't expect this," I confessed to the ceiling.

"Neither do I," he said. "Do you want me to go to my room?"

I thought of the usual loneliness, on the empty right side. I refused with my head.

"Stay, at least until I camp, or until breakfast, we'll see.

He laughed short, a laugh that I felt in my chest. He kissed my shoulder. We didn’t talk about futures or post. We talked about the leak of 412, about whether the tea room really was worth the evening, about my mania photographing knobs of old doors. Between phrase and phrase, his hand came down again, slow, and he asked me with his fingers if there was still room for more. There was. This time it was me who guided his hand exactly where the pulse still demanded attention. He caressed my clitoris with two wet fingers, without haste, while kissing my mouth open. The third orgasm was small, localized, a sweet chill that left me soft and smiling.

I slept against his side. I woke up at five o’clock with the sea still invisible and the rain turned into drizzle. He slept. I woke up naked, I put on his shirt without asking and went to the window. The cold glass in the forearms. I felt his steps behind. He hugged me in the back, the morning erection barely leaning on my ass, without demanding.

"Good morning," he muttered in my hair.

"I still don't know if they are at all," I replied, turning in his arms. "But I don't want them to be over in five minutes.

He picked me up almost effortlessly and took me back to bed. This time the sex was more playful, more of contained laughter and to try angles. I got to four points because I felt like feeling the depth and the control of pushing me back. He went in and waited. I moved my hip, I looked, I found the glans rub at that inner point that makes me gasp. His hand surrounded my waist and went down to the clitoris again, drawing circles as I impaled at my pace. The pleasure went up dirty and clear. I ran face against the pillow, the suffocated sound, the loose knees. He held me. When I finished, he turned and asked me permission to finish in my hand. I gave him. I saw him come with the frown and the mouth abuzzer, and I liked the show without stealing the role.

After the shared bath — showering together, soap on our breasts, laughter when the water got cold for a second — we had breakfast in the suite with room service. Coffee, toast, bitter orange jam. He was wearing only the hotel bathrobe. I, his shirt still. We talked about the report. We were in that he would show me the tea room at the good time. We also found that that night, if I wanted, could be repeated or not: my decision.

I went down to the living room at dusk, as he had written in the mail days ago. The light was perfect: golden, oblique, caressing the moldings he had insisted on saving. I took pictures. Some came out blurred because I still had the body too present, too full of recent memory. I didn’t care.

At night I knocked at his door. Not with urgency of possession, but with the certainty of the one who has tried something and wants to taste it more calmly. I opened mine myself when he crossed the corridor. This time I asked him to speak to me in the ear while touching me: nothing dirty anymore, only descriptions of what I saw in me, of how it hardened him when I felt wet, of how beautiful it seemed to him the way he pressed his eyes as he approached me. His grave voice in my ear, his fingers inside, his thumb in the clitoris... they built a long orgasm, almost elegant, that left me trembling and laughing at the same time.

On the third day, the sun returned. I packed it calmly. At reception they asked nothing. Adrian waited for me in the hall with two coffees to take away and a folded note that I did not read until the train:

“If you ever need real light — not the one in the photos — you already know where I am. And if not, thank you for the suite you didn’t ask for. A.”

I kept the paper in the inside pocket of the jacket, near the chest. On the way I looked at the sea through the window and noticed, still, the physical memory: the soft pull in the lower belly, the sensitivity of the nipples when brushing the cloth, the invisible mark of his mouth on the neck. I smiled for me.

I don't know if there will be a second time. I know that that storm gave me back something that divorce and routines had turned me off: the ability to ask slowly, to feel every inch, to run without apologizing for late or wanting more. And to tell, in the ears of no one or anyone who knows how to hear, that sometimes a leak, a mail and a wrong key are enough to remind you that your body is still territory of its own, greedy and generous in equal parts.

When I got home, I left the suitcase undisturbed and showered with hot water to the full. I touched myself thinking of the Miramar window, in the rain, in the exact mouth. I ran standing, one hand in the tile, the other between the legs, without hurry, with the same agency that I had exercised there. Then I wrote a short mail:

«The tea room was worth it. The suite too. I.»

I did not ask for an immediate answer. I did not need it. The echo was enough: my breath was still a little altered, my neck was warm, my memory was clear of having been, for three nights, the full author of my own pleasure.

And that, more than any other person's orgasm, is what I take.

Sometimes, in later hotels, I ask for a high room with views even if I am not going to use them. I leave the chain on a minute before opening. I listen to the hallway. And I smile, because I know what my body is able to decide when the storm helps a little and I help the rest.