Twelve Minutes in the Hallway

All characters are 18 or older. Fiction.

I am forty one years old and I have lived in this building for eleven of them. The corridor on the fifth floor has one light and it buzzes. I know this because I stood under it for twelve minutes and counted the buzzes the way I count things at work, in blocks, until the number stops being a number and becomes a kind of weather.

I live on the seventh floor of the same building. That is the part I have not told anyone. I did not have to take a taxi, I did not have to lie about where I was going, I only had to walk down two flights in my good shoes with a envelope in my jacket and stand outside apartment 502 like a man waiting to be told off.

Watch the uncut tape of this scene → uncut angel of bogota journal, 18+

I had seen him twice in the elevator. The first time he was carrying the briefcase and I thought he was a lawyer. The second time he was carrying the briefcase and a small phone on a stick, and he looked at me the way a man looks at a door he is deciding whether to open, and I went up to my floor and stood in my kitchen and drank a glass of water and thought, well.

The listing said angel of bogota. A friend of a friend sent it to me as a joke, I think, or maybe not as a joke. I wrote to the number at ten that night. He answered in nine minutes with a price and an address, and the address was mine.

I should say what I look like, because it matters to the story and because I am vain in a small way. Forty one, going gray at the sides, a stomach I have stopped arguing with, a face that people trust with their paperwork. Divorced. Two children who live with their mother in Chia. I am not a man who does this. That is what I told myself in the elevator, and then I got out on the fifth floor anyway.

See what the camera actually caught → uncut angel of bogota journal, 18+

The hallway

The corridor smells of somebody's onions and somebody else's cigarettes. There is a plastic chair by the window where the porter sits when he is pretending to be a porter, empty now. I stood by the wall and listened to the building: a television through a door, water in a pipe, a woman laughing somewhere above me with her whole chest.

I had the money in an envelope, and I took it out and counted it against my thigh, folded it, put it back. Then I took it out again. Six hundred thousand pesos. It is not a small amount and it is not a large amount and I could hear my ex wife's voice saying, six hundred thousand, for what, and I put the envelope away.

I did not knock.

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

I want to be clear that it was not fear. I have been afraid in my life, in a hospital corridor, in a lawyer's office, and this was not that. It was more like the moment before you sign something. The pen is in your hand and the room is quiet and you are aware of your own breathing and of the fact that after this there is a version of you who has signed and a version of you who has not, and both of them are going to have to live somewhere.

At the eleventh minute the door opened.

He stood in the doorway with his shirt untucked and his feet bare and looked at me without surprise. "You have been there for a while," he said.

Stream the uncut version (18+) → uncut angel of bogota journal, 18+

"Yes."

"Why."

I thought about lying and decided that a man who opens a door before you knock is not a man you lie to. "I was deciding."

The video behind this story → uncut angel of bogota journal, 18+

"And?"

"And I decided."

He stepped back and let me in. The apartment is not what I expected. It is rented by the month, furnished, the kind of place that has a sofa in a color nobody chose. The briefcase was on the table, open. The phone was on a shelf by the window with the little red light already on, and I looked at it and then at him and he said, "It is on. If you want it off, it is more."

See the hour the camera kept → uncut angel of bogota journal, 18+

"How much more?"

He told me. I paid it, in cash, out of the envelope, and he counted it in front of me, and then he put the extra in the briefcase and closed it. "Now it is only us," he said. "Better."

I have thought about that since. He did not offer me a discount to be filmed. He offered me a price to not be, and I paid it without hesitating, and I have wondered what that says about me. The angel of bogota does not judge. He only charges.

Watch the uncut tape of this scene → uncut angel of bogota journal, 18+

The room

He took my jacket and hung it up, which was strangely courteous, and then he put his hand on the back of my neck and kissed me, and he tasted of rum and cardamom and he kissed like a man who had already decided how the evening would go and was simply being thorough about it.

I had not been touched by anyone in two years. I want that in the record. Two years. When his hand went under my shirt I made a noise that embarrassed me, and he said, "Bien," against my mouth, and did it again.

We did it on the sofa first, because the bed was too far, or because he wanted to and I did not have it in me to want anything different. He sat down and pulled me onto his lap and I straddled him, still half dressed, and he opened me with his fingers while he watched my face, and I held onto his shoulders and let him. Then the condom, then his hands on my hips, and I lowered myself onto him and stopped halfway because he was thick and the angle was wrong and everything was too much.

See what the camera actually caught → uncut angel of bogota journal, 18+

"Slow," he said. "You are in charge of the speed. I am in charge of nothing."

I laughed at that, and then I moved, and the laugh turned into something else. He was thick and he curved, and once I found the angle that let him in all the way the curve pressed somewhere that made my eyes water, and I sat there for a moment with my forehead against his and breathed until I could move again. Then I rode him, slowly, then not slowly, and he let me, his hands on my hips, his thumb rubbing a small circle on my hip bone, his eyes on my face the whole time.

"You are beautiful," he said, in Spanish, and I did not believe him, and I came anyway, with his hand around me and his mouth on my throat, and he followed a few seconds later with a sound like a man setting down something heavy.

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

I sat on the sofa afterward with my shirt open and my heart going. He brought me water. He sat on the floor with his back against the sofa and drank his own, and we did not talk for a while, and it was not uncomfortable.

"Thursday," he said eventually. "Same time."

I could have said no. I want to be honest about the fact that I could have said no, and that instead I said, "I will be in the hallway."

Stream the uncut version (18+) → uncut angel of bogota journal, 18+

He looked up at me and smiled, and it was a tired smile, and for a moment I saw the whole thing from outside: two grown men in a rented apartment at midnight, one of them paying, both of them lonely in different directions.

"Do not stand there so long," he said. "It is bad for the carpet."