THE INMATE: The handkerchief test (Chapter 3)

The awakening the next morning had the bitter, pasty taste of defeat. Guillermo lay motionless in the narrow bed of the small room, eyes fixed on an almost imperceptible crack in the ceiling. Hours passed and his body did not want to move from the room.
His jaw hurt, a dull pain that reminded him of the relentless pressure of Viktor's cock, and his throat felt irritated, as if the echo of the previous day's gagging had been tattooed on his inner walls. He ran a hand over his lips, discovering they were still slightly chapped.

The attic, his refuge of glass and Scandinavian order, felt like a prison with better lighting. He heard the muffled murmur of Vik's snoring at the end of the hallway, steady, deep.

Guille sat up slowly, leaning his back against the bare wall. The silence of the house allowed him to sink into the heaviness of his own thoughts. How had he gotten to this? He, the perfect son of the Madrid bourgeoisie, the brilliant student with a future designed to the millimeter by his mother's expectations, was trapped in his own home by a convict who had just dismantled his life in forty-eight hours.

The truth, however, was much darker and more humiliating. The armor of cleanliness and control that Guillermo had worn since adolescence was nothing more than a facade to protect his most guarded secret. His homosexuality had never left the walls of his mind. He had grown up in an environment where being different was a tolerable eccentricity in others, but an unacceptable stain on the firstborn of the family. So he learned to shut himself away. His sex life was reduced to encrypted folders on the computer, to porn sessions in incognito mode erased with trembling fingers before leaving the room, and to fleeting, guilt-ridden glances at the boys at the university gym. At twenty-six, the confession he had blurted out to Vik in one go was still burning in his chest: he was a virgin. He had never touched a man. He had preferred the suffocating chastity of the closet to risking breaking the bubble of perfection his parents had financed for him.

But then Vik arrived.

Guille headed toward the kitchen with feline steps, avoiding making noise. As he crossed the hallway and reached the living room, he saw the giant. Vik was already standing by the window, completely naked except for a pair of gray sweatpants so low they defied gravity, revealing the beginning of his pubic hair, a huge bulge that would still taste of Guille's saliva, and the powerful curve of his buttocks.

Vik had no conflicts, no labels, no closets. For him, desire was a biological function as simple as hunger: he felt, executed, and dominated. His cocky, prison-like hypermasculinity was not damaged by fucking men; on the contrary, it was an extension of his power in the yard. He consumed male bodies with the same indifference with which he drank milk from the carton, imposing his law without apologizing or explaining himself to a...