The Night I Counted His Money Twice

All characters are 18 or older. Fiction.

The landlord gave me until Friday. It was Wednesday night and I had four hundred thousand pesos in a shoebox and a rent of nine hundred. I had sold the headphones already, and the pawn shop on Carrera 13 had looked at my watch the way you look at fruit going soft.

I found him the way you find anything at that hour. A message board, a photograph of a black briefcase on a table, a number, and under it, in lowercase, angel of bogota. No prices. No face. My first message was three words long and I rewrote it six times. The reply came in eleven minutes. "How old." No question mark. I wrote twenty four. Then, "When." Tonight, I wrote, and then I sat with my phone against my mouth.

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He gave me a street two blocks away and a time. The last message said: cash, count it before, door locked.

I counted the money at the kitchen table with the window open because the room was hot. Four hundred and forty thousand. I counted it twice. The first time to be sure it was all there, the second to be sure I was the kind of person who would do this. I was. I put the bills in an envelope, then took them out again, because the envelope felt like a confession, and put them in my jacket pocket.

At twelve twenty there was a knock, three soft ones, and when I opened the door he was already looking past me into the room, at the window, at the bed, at the door to the bathroom. Late thirties, maybe older, stocky, a body that had carried its own weight for a long time and did not apologize for it. Gray at the temples. A gold band on his left hand. He smelled of cardamom and cheap rum, the way a kitchen smells the morning after.

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"Buenas," he said. Then, in English, deliberately slow, "You are the one who wrote."

"Yes."

He came in and set the briefcase on the table and turned the lock on my door himself, and then he checked it with the flat of his hand, twice, the way I had counted my money twice.

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He opened the briefcase. A folded cloth, a bottle of lubricant, a roll of condoms, a phone on a gimbal, and nothing else. He set the phone on the shelf by the window and turned it until the little lens faced the bed. A small red light came on. I felt it on my skin before I had taken anything off.

"The camera," he said. "It pays more. For you." He took two bills out of his jacket and put them on the table, and pushed them toward me with two fingers. A hundred thousand. "You understand. Your face is fine. My face is not."

I looked at him. "Why?"

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He shrugged. "It is my rule." He said it in Spanish, and then in English, "My face is never."

I put the bills in my pocket with the rest. That is when I counted it all again, in my head, and the number did not match what we had agreed, and I understood that the extra was for the camera and that the arrangement had changed shape without either of us saying it out loud. He did not hurry me. The angel of bogota does not hurry.

"Take off your shirt," he said.

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I did it badly, the buttons, and he waited. When it was off he put one hand flat on my chest, not moving, just there, and with his thumb he found my nipple and pressed it once, and my whole body went thin and bright.

"Ah," he said. Not to me. To the room.

He kissed me then, not gentle and not rough, certain, the way a man kisses when he has decided something. Rum and cardamom and the faint salt of him. His hand went to the back of my neck and held it, and I let myself be held. I had not known I wanted that.

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The bed

He undressed without ceremony and folded his clothes on the chair, which I found more intimate than the undressing. Under the shirt he was thick through the chest and soft through the middle, hair going gray there too. His cock was already hard and it was thick, thicker than I had bargained for, uncut, and it curved up toward his stomach so plainly that I could see the shape of the curve from across the room. I looked at it too long. He let me.

"You have done this," he said.

"No."

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"With a man."

"No."

He nodded slowly, as if he had known and had decided to be patient about it. "Then we go slow. Slow is better." He picked up the lubricant. "On the bed. On your stomach first. You tell me if it is too much."

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I lay down. The sheet was still warm from the day. I heard the bottle open, and then his hand was on my lower back, and lower, and the cold made me flinch and he stopped and waited and went on. One finger, then two. It was like being told a secret in a language I almost spoke. He worked slowly, and by the time he was three fingers in I had my face in the pillow and my hips were moving without my permission.

"Turn over," he said. "I want to see."

I turned over. He knelt between my legs and rolled the condom down over that thick curved length, and my mouth went dry. He put the head of it against me and did not push. He waited there, pressing, just pressing, until I remembered how to breathe, and then he leaned his weight in, an inch, and stopped.

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

"Breathe out," he said. "Not in. Out."

I breathed out and he came in, and it burned, a deep wide burn that made my eyes water, and I grabbed his forearm and he held still until the burn turned into something else, a fullness that had an edge on it. Then he began to move. The curve did the work. Every push found the same small place inside me and pressed it, and pressed it, and I heard myself make a sound I have never made before, a kind of laugh, and he smiled down at me and did it again.

"Slow," he said, when I asked for faster. "Slow is the whole thing."

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He was not a talker. He said four things in all that time, mostly in Spanish, and one of them was my name, which sounded strange in his mouth. His hand closed around my cock and stroked it in time with his hips, and I understood that being good at this was work he took seriously. The camera light sat in the corner of my eye like a small red star.

I came first, hard, over his hand and my stomach, and he did not stop, he only changed the angle and went on, and the oversensitivity was almost unbearable and I held onto the sheets and let it happen. When he came he made almost no sound at all, just a long breath out and a stutter in his hips, and then he stayed there a moment, heavy, before pulling away.

After

He dealt with the condom in the bathroom and came back dressed. He checked the phone, looked at the little screen, at me on it, and I did not know what he saw. Then he put it in the briefcase and closed it.

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"Friday," he said. "You pay the rent."

"Yes."

"Good." He put a hand on my shoulder, once, and then he was at the door.

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"Wait," I said. "What is your name?"

The question sat in the room. He opened the door and stepped into the corridor and pulled it closed behind him, gently, so as not to wake anyone, and I lay in the dark with the money in my jacket and the smell of cardamom in the pillow and I counted the whole night over, twice, and it came out the same both times.