He Asked Me to Leave the Door Unlocked

All characters are 18 or older. Fiction.

The message comes at eleven: leave the door unlocked. Do not wait by the door. I read it four times. Then I get up and turn the latch and stand with my hand on it, feeling how easy it would be for anyone in the building to push it open.

I do not lock it again. That is the thing I keep coming back to. I do not lock it.

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The room is small and I have cleaned it, which is embarrassing, because he will not notice and because cleaning it means I have been thinking about it since Tuesday. The bed is made. The window is open because the night is hot and because I want to hear him coming up the stairs. The street below is doing its usual thing, a motorbike, a dog, somebody laughing on the corner, and every sound climbs the stairs and turns into him and then is not him.

I sit on the edge of the bed. I stand up. I drink water. I put the money on the table in a neat stack and then I move it to the shelf because the table is where the briefcase goes and I do not want to look like I am asking. Then I put it back on the table, because I am asking.

At twelve thirty I hear the outer door of the building. The stairs are tiled and the sound of a man coming up them is very specific. I know it is him by the fourth step, by the weight and the evenness of it, and my heart starts doing something stupid and animal. I sit down. I put my hands on my knees. The door is unlocked and I am sitting in the middle of the room like a man waiting for a doctor.

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He does not knock. That is the first thing. The handle turns and the door swings in and he is there with the briefcase in his hand, and he steps inside and closes it behind him with his heel and stands looking at me.

"Good," he says. "You left it."

"You told me to."

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"Yes." He sets the briefcase on the table. The sound of it, the flat heavy sound of leather on wood, goes through me like a hand. "If I knock, the neighbor looks. If the door is open, nobody looks. The angel of bogota enters like a man who lives here."

He says it in Spanish, the name, and it sounds less like a title and more like a thing he has decided to be. Then he takes off his jacket and folds it over the back of the chair. Gold band. Gray at the temple. The same smell of cardamom and rum coming across the room to me, and I realize I have been smelling it in my head for three days and that my body has already decided what it thinks about it.

"Stand up," he says.

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I stand. He comes to me and puts both hands on my shoulders and looks at my face for a long moment, and I look at his, at the lines around his eyes, at the small scar under his jaw. He is not handsome in the way I would have said I liked. He is something else. He is certain.

"You are nervous," he says.

"Yes."

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"Good. Nervous is honest." He slides one hand up to the side of my neck and holds it, thumb under my jaw, and I feel my pulse against his thumb. "You want this."

It is not a question either, but I answer it. "Yes."

"Say it in Spanish."

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"Quiero."

He smiles then, a small one, and it changes his whole face. "Bien."

The table

He turns me around and walks me two steps to the table and bends me over it, and my cheek is on the wood next to the money and the briefcase, and his hand is flat between my shoulder blades. I hear him open his belt. I hear the condom. His hand comes around my hip and finds me and I am already hard, have been hard since the fourth stair, and he takes me in his fist and strokes me slowly while he presses against me from behind, and I make a sound into the table.

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"Quiet," he says. "The neighbor."

It is the funniest thing anyone has ever said to me and I laugh, once, and he laughs too, low, and then his fingers are wet and inside me and I stop laughing.

He takes his time. He is a man who does not believe in rushing a thing he has paid for, or been paid for, I am still not sure which way the money runs in his head. Two fingers, then three, spreading, and my legs shake against the table leg. Then the head of him, blunt and thick, and the slow pressure that becomes a burn that becomes a kind of greed. He goes in an inch and waits. He goes in another inch and waits. By the time he is all the way in I have my forehead on the table and I am saying something into the wood.

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He starts to move. The table complains. He puts one hand on the small of my back and the other on my hip and he pulls me back into each push, and the curve of him finds that place and stays on it, patient, relentless, and I have to put my own hand over my mouth.

"Look at me," he says, and I turn my head and there is the phone on the shelf, the small red light, and behind it his face, watching me, not the lens. "Not the camera. Me."

I look at him. It is harder than it sounds. He holds my eyes while he fucks me, and something in my chest goes loose and hot and I have to look away, and he lets me.

Open the full Angel of Bogota episode → uncut angel of bogota journal, 18+

After

When it is over he pulls out slowly and I feel the absence of him like a step missing in the dark. He ties off the condom and puts it in a bag in his briefcase, which is a courtesy I would not have thought of. Then he sits on the edge of the bed and drinks the water I left out, without asking, and I lie on the floor because my legs will not hold me, and we are both quiet for a minute.

"You locked the door after," he says. "Last time. I heard it."

"Yes."

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"Tonight, do not. I leave first. Then you lock it." He puts the glass down. "That is the rule now."

He dresses. He picks up the briefcase. At the door he stops and looks back at me, on the floor, and for a second he is just a tired man in a doorway at half past midnight.

"Friday," he says, and then he is gone, and the door is open behind him, and I lie there listening to his steps go down the tile and out into the street, and I do not get up to lock it for a long time.

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When I finally do, I stand with my hand on the latch and think about how he asked. Not the money, not the camera. The unlocked door. He wanted to be a man who could walk into a room without being let in, and he wanted me to be the one who left it that way.

I have not locked it since. I am not sure I could. The angel of bogota does not ask twice.