The Second Time He Called

All characters are 18 or older. Fiction.

Three weeks. I did not write to him once, which is a kind of writing, if you think about it. I looked at the number. I opened the conversation and read the last message, the one that said cash, count it before, door locked, and I closed it again. I went to work. I paid my rent on time for the first time in a year. I put the hundred thousand he had given me back for the camera in a drawer and did not spend it.

The angel of bogota does not call twice in one month. He calls when he is ready, and he expects you to be ready too. When the message came it was eleven fifty at night and I was watching something on my laptop with the sound off.

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"Tonight," it said. Not a question.

I looked at it for a full minute. Then I wrote, "I was about to go out," which was a lie so obvious that I was embarrassed while I was typing it. Then I got up and had a shower and changed my shirt twice and put the money in an envelope and then took it out and folded it into my jacket, and I sat on the edge of the bed with my heart going like a boy.

He wrote back: "I am outside."

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He was not outside. He was twenty minutes away, and I knew it, and I sat in the chair by the window with my jacket on and my phone in my hand and I told myself I was not waiting. I was waiting. I have never waited for anything the way I waited for that door.

The room

When he came in he looked at me and said, "You were going out."

"I changed my mind."

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"Because of me."

"Because it was raining," I said, and he smiled, a small one, and set the briefcase on the table, and I understood that he knew and that he was not going to make me say it.

He counted the money. I watched his hands. He has a way of counting that is almost tender, thumb and forefinger, the bills going down in a stack. Then he put it in the briefcase and closed it and said, "Sit down. I want to talk to you first."

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We sat. He asked me about my work. I told him about the call center, the quotas, the woman two desks over who brings her own tea. He listened. He has a way of listening that makes you think he is remembering it for later, and maybe he is; maybe that is the trick of the whole thing. He told me he had been in Medellin for a week, that his back hurt from a bad bed, that he was thinking of raising his price.

"Should I raise it?" he said.

"No."

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"No," he agreed. "Not for you."

I did not know what to do with that. I still do not.

The bed

He undressed me this time, which he had not done before. He took my jacket off and hung it up. He unbuttoned my shirt and pushed it back off my shoulders and put his mouth on the side of my neck and bit down, not hard, just enough that I felt it for an hour afterward. He knelt in front of me and pulled my trousers down and took me in his mouth, and I put my hand on the back of his head and then took it away because I did not know if I was allowed, and he took my hand and put it back.

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He was slow about it. He is always slow. He took me to the edge and then stopped and stood up and kissed me, and I could taste myself on him, and then he turned me around and bent me over the end of the bed.

The thing I remember is that he did not use his fingers first. He used his mouth. I have never had anyone do that. I stood there with my hands in the sheets and my face hot and his hands spreading me open and his tongue moving in slow circles, and I said something that was not a word, and he did not stop, and by the time he stood up and reached for the lubricant my legs were shaking.

He entered me slowly, the way he does, an inch and then a pause, and then the long steady push that ends with his hips against me and his breath coming out hard. The curve found the place immediately. It always does. I have thought about it since, about whether that is luck or skill or whether he simply knows his own body well enough to put it exactly where it needs to go. Probably all three.

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"Move," I said.

"You are not in charge," he said, but he moved.

He fucked me with long slow strokes for a while, and then he pulled me up by the chest until my back was against him and we were both kneeling on the bed, and he put one hand flat on my stomach and the other on my throat, not squeezing, just there, and he said, "Now you ride me," and I did, I moved on him with my knees wide and his hand on my stomach and his mouth against my ear, and it was the best thing that had happened to me in years.

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When I came it was on his hand and the sheet and my own chest, and he held me through it, and then he pushed me forward onto the bed and finished on top of me, hard and fast, the only time he has ever been fast, and I felt him come inside the condom with a deep shudder and a sound like a man who has been holding his breath.

Afterward he lay beside me for a minute, which he had never done. I could hear the building settling, the pipe in the wall, a car going by below. I put my hand flat on his chest and felt his heart slow down under it, and he let me keep it there, and I thought: this is not in the price. He turned his head and looked at me, and I looked back, and neither of us said anything, and then he sat up and reached for his trousers, and the minute was over.

He left at one forty. He always leaves before the questions. At the door he said, "Do not wait so long next time."

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

"Who says I was waiting?"

He looked at me. He had his hand on the doorframe and his briefcase in the other hand, and the corridor light was behind him, and he looked tired and amused and something else, something I could not name.

"The angel of bogota knows a waiting man," he said. "He sees them all night."

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Then he was gone. I stood in the doorway for a minute and then I locked the door, because he had not told me not to, and I sat down on the floor with my back against it, and I laughed, once, at nothing.

Three weeks. I am not going to pretend it was three weeks of not thinking about him. It was three weeks of thinking about him and calling it something else. But this is the part I will admit here, in this book, at one in the morning: when the message came, I had already put my shoes by the door.