Chapter 3

The cold night air felt like it had frozen solid in my lungs as I closed the distance. Each step was a dull thud in my chest.

I knew that slope of the shoulders. I knew that way of leaning against the world, as if always waiting for the next blow.

“Hey…”

His voice came out dragged, thick.

“You looking to have some fun, handsome?”

He was altered. His body swayed slightly, his restless hands disappearing into the pockets of his worn hoodie. He looked like he was fighting his own skin,a clear sign of withdrawal or someone who needed a hit just to make it through the next minute.

When he grabbed the hood and pulled it back, the world around me simply stopped spinning.

Straight black hair, now messy, framed a face that, despite its sickly pallor, still carried the lines that had haunted me for thirteen years. And the eyes… those green eyes. It was him. But they no longer shone like before,they were deep wells of exhaustion and corruption.

It was Kyle.

I stood frozen, feeling the blood drain from my face. My mind screamed that it was impossible, that fate couldn’t be this cruel or this precise.

Kyle forced a smile, a commercial mask he must have used to survive on that sidewalk.

“That your car?”

He jerked his chin toward the gleaming black Mercedes under the streetlight.

“Nice. We can do it right here if you’re in a hurry.”

I tried to speak, but my throat was closed shut. I choked on my own air, the words “Kyle” and “I’m sorry” trapped in an impossible knot. He didn’t seem to recognize me. To him, I was just another expensive suit with money in his pocket and a fetish to be satisfied.

Kyle pressed on, taking a step closer. The smell of cold sweat and desperation reached me.

“You’ll like it, I promise. I’m good at what I do.”

My heart was pounding so hard I thought I might pass out. In a trance, driven by a shock that left me defenseless, I unlocked the car. My mind was foggy, a dense mist covering any logical thought. Kyle didn’t wait. He opened the passenger door and slid into the expensive leather as if it were his rightful place.

I got into the driver’s seat, my hands shaking so badly I could barely close the door. The silence inside the car was suffocating. I wanted to speak. I wanted to grab his shoulders and beg for forgiveness, to ask what had happened to him after that afternoon, but the knot in my throat only grew tighter.

“Relax.”

He murmured, his voice low, almost mechanical.

Before I could form a sentence, Kyle leaned toward me.

I was going to ask him to stop. I was going to say we needed to talk, but the paralysis of shock was stronger. With the frightening agility of someone who had done this a thousand times, he opened the button of my pants and pulled down the zipper.

I felt the touch of his hands,cold and rough,against my skin. And then he began.

The contact of his mouth, the sudden heat, and the familiar pressure hit me like lightning.

Thirteen years of emptiness, thirteen years of faking it and cheap performances with perfect women collapsed in a single second. For the first time in more than a decade, my body didn’t need to pretend. I didn’t need to act.

The pain of guilt mixed with a violent, overwhelming pleasure, something that struck me with the force of a punch to the stomach. I didn’t need effort, didn’t need mental fantasies or to close my eyes pretending I was somewhere else.

It was him. It was his mouth, his rhythm, the same raw, technical sensation that had somehow been engraved in my DNA since I was fifteen.

The pleasure shot up my spine like a high-voltage electric shock. My vision blurred, the city lights outside the car turning into colorful smudges. I gripped his hair tightly, feeling every muscle in my body lock up in immediate recognition.

The sensation was absurdly superior to anything I had ever tried in five-star hotel beds or silk sheets. It was the best blowjob of my life, and the irony was as sharp as a blade: the boy I had destroyed was the only one who held the map to my pleasure.

And then it happened.

Without warning, without control, and without any need for theatrical performance, I reached the edge. It was an explosive, visceral orgasm, the kind that makes the world disappear for a few seconds.

A pleasure I hadn’t achieved in thirteen years with any woman or anyone else. The last time I had felt this total loss of control, this absolute surrender of the senses, had been on that same fateful afternoon, in that abandoned building, with this same Kyle.