What I Told My Roommate

All characters are 18 or older. Fiction.

The lie is this: I told Andres I was at Marta's.

It came out of me before I had decided to say it. He was in the kitchen at nine this morning with his coffee and his hair standing up and he said, "You were out," and I said, "Marta's," and he nodded and said, "Finally," and went back to his phone. That was it. That was the whole conversation. I have been carrying it around all day like a stone in my shoe.

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I am not at Marta's. I have not been at Marta's since September, and the reason I have not been at Marta's is that Marta told me, kindly, that I was too much for her, which is a thing you can only hear once before you start to believe it. Andres does not know that. Andres thinks I am a person who goes to Marta's.

What I was doing was standing in a rented room on Calle 57 at midnight with my shirt in my hand, and the man I had paid was folding his trousers over the back of a chair. I had found him under a line of lowercase text, angel of bogota, and I had written to the number without telling a single person.

I cannot write his name here and I have decided not to. He told me not to say it to anybody, and this counts, even if nobody reads it. But I can write the rest. That is the point of this. The rest has to go somewhere and it cannot go into the kitchen.

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What happened

He was late. Twenty minutes. I sat on the bed with the money in an envelope and my heart going and I thought, he is not coming, this is a scam, this is the stupidest thing I have ever done, and then the door opened without a knock because he had told me to leave it unlocked, and he came in with the briefcase and set it on the table and said, "You are early."

"You are late," I said.

"I am exactly on time. You are early." He took off his jacket. "It is not the same thing."

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He is older. Late thirties, maybe forty, with gray coming in at the temples and a body like a man who lifts things for a living, and a gold ring on his left hand that I did not ask about, and a smell of cardamom and rum that I can still smell on my own collar if I put my face in it. He set the phone on the shelf with the little light on, and I had agreed to that, and I made myself not look at it.

He asked me if I had eaten. That is the thing I keep thinking about. Not the sex, not the money. He asked me if I had eaten, and I said no, and he took a pack of crackers out of the briefcase and put them on the table and said, "Eat. Then we start." I ate the crackers. He watched me eat them. Then he said, "Bien," and stood up, and I stood up, and he put his hand on the back of my neck and kissed me.

I have kissed people. I have never been kissed like that, like it was a thing being done to me rather than a thing we were doing together. His hand stayed on my neck the whole time. When he let me go I had to steady myself against the table.

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"Now," he said. "The bed. On your back. I want to see your face."

"Not the camera?"

"The camera sees what I see," he said. "Almost."

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He undressed and I watched him, and I am going to write this part honestly because if I do not write it honestly there is no reason to write it at all. He was thick. Uncut, heavy, standing up and curving toward his own stomach, and when he rolled the condom on I felt a flash of pure animal fear followed immediately by something that was not fear at all. He knelt between my legs and put his hand flat on my chest and said, "Breathe out," and I breathed out, and he pushed in.

It took a long time. He went slowly, and stopped when I made a sound, and started again, and said things in Spanish that I did not understand and did not need to. The curve of him found something and stayed on it, and by the time he was all the way inside me I had my heels on his back and my hands in the sheet and I was making a noise that I hope Andres never hears through a wall.

He fucked me slowly. That is the thing nobody tells you about. It was slow and it was deep and it went on for what felt like an hour, and he watched my face the whole time, and once he said, "There. You feel that," and I said yes, and he said, "That is what I am paid for," and I laughed and then I stopped laughing.

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He pulled out and turned me onto my side, and before I could ask what he was doing he was behind me with his hand under my knee, lifting my leg, and then he was inside me again at a different angle, and the different angle was worse and better, a deep ache on one side that made me grab his wrist. He held still and let me get used to it. "Okay," I said, and he began to move again, one arm under my shoulders, his hand flat on my chest, his mouth against the back of my neck. In that position I could feel his whole body along my back, the heat of it, the hair on his chest, the weight of him settling into each push. His hand slid down my stomach and found me and began to work me slowly, in the same rhythm, and I understood that he was not going to hurry this, that he had paid for the whole night and intended to use it.

I came on my own stomach with his hand around me and his mouth open against my throat. He came a few seconds later, quietly, the way he does everything. He stayed inside me for a moment afterward, breathing, and then he pulled out carefully and I felt the loss of him like a door closing in another room.

After

He brought me a glass of water and sat on the floor with his back against the bed while I drank it. We talked about nothing. The rain. The price of the room. His English, which is better than he lets on.

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Then he said, "Your friend. The one you live with. He asks where you go."

"He asked this morning."

"And you said?"

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I told him what I had said. He was quiet for a moment, and then he said, "A lie is a door. You have to remember which side you are on." He stood up and put on his shirt. "The angel of bogota does not need you to lie. But he understands it."

At the door he said, "Next Thursday," and I said yes, and then he was gone and I locked the door behind him and stood in the middle of the room with the taste of crackers and rum in my mouth.

Andres is asleep now. I can hear him breathing through the wall, and the cat is on the end of my bed, and it is three in the morning, and I have written all of it down, and none of it is going in the kitchen. That is the arrangement I have made with myself. The kitchen gets Marta. This gets the truth.

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