ANGEL AND JOAQUIN 4

Ángel’s moan still vibrated in the air of the room when Joaquín released his hips and pulled away. The sudden absence of heat left a cold mark on Ángel’s skin, as if a layer had been torn off him. He remained hanging from the chain, arms stretched out, the tips of his toes brushing the floor. Semen slid down his thigh, slow, thick, and he didn’t know whether the tremor running through his body was from pleasure, cold, or fear.

Joaquín picked up the phone from the bedside table. The screen lit up and projected a pale rectangle onto his face. He ran his finger over the surface with a slowness that was not accidental. He was reading something. Ángel couldn’t see what.

“You have fans,” Joaquín said, without looking up.

He said nothing else. He let the silence settle, grow, fill the room the way water fills a glass. The only sound was Ángel’s breathing, still uneven, and the brush of Joaquín’s finger on the phone glass. Tap. Tap. Tap.

“What… what are they saying?” Ángel asked.

The question hung in the air. Joaquín did not answer. He kept sliding his finger, reading, ignoring him. Fifteen seconds passed. Thirty. A minute.

“I asked,” Ángel said, his voice firmer.

Joaquín raised his head. He said nothing. He just stared at him, his face neutral, his eyes unblinking. And he smiled. Not a smile of satisfaction or mockery. A small smile, almost kind, like the one given to a child who has accidentally said something funny.

“I know,” he said.

And he looked back at the phone.

Ángel felt humiliation in a different way. It wasn’t physical pain, it wasn’t exposure. It was irrelevance. The absolute certainty that, in that moment, whatever he said did not matter enough to deserve an immediate response. Joaquín did not need to answer him. He could make him wait. He could ignore him. And nothing happened, because Ángel couldn’t leave, couldn’t cover himself, couldn’t stop being naked and tied up and full of semen while the silence grew.

The phone sounded. A notification. A short, metallic chime, like a microwave finishing. Then another. Then another. Joaquín read them all without changing expression, then turned the screen toward Ángel.

It was a photo. Ángel took a couple of seconds to understand what he was seeing: himself, from the angle of the ceiling camera, arms stretched upward, the chain taut, the black collar. But the photo had been cropped, framed, with a filter that lightened the skin tones and saturated the blue of the sheets. It looked like a catalog image. A product.

“A subscriber uploaded it to his profile,” Joaquín said. “He titled it ‘Wednesday with the New Fag.’ It has twelve likes.”

Ángel felt something freeze inside him. It wasn’t the humiliation of knowing he had been seen. It was the normality with which that stranger had turned his body into just an...