18+ · For adults only.
I almost didn’t go. Three months after a breakup, the most social thing I’d done was argue with my landlord about the hot water. But my friend Caro had been saying for weeks that her cousin’s Halloween party in Guápulo was “the good one,” and on the afternoon of the 31st she showed up at my door with a black lace mask and a look that said she wasn’t leaving without me.
“One rule,” she said, tying the ribbon behind my head. “Masks stay on until midnight. No names, no jobs, no exes. Nobody is anybody.”
That sounded perfect.
The house on the hill
Guápulo at night is like falling into a postcard. The streets drop so steeply that the taxi driver crossed himself, and at the bottom of it all the old church glows white against the dark, with the lights of the valley scattered beyond it.
The house was old and crooked and packed: wooden floors, string lights, cumbia bleeding into reggaetón, forty people in masks pretending not to know each other. I had a canelazo in my hand within a minute and lost Caro within two.
He found me on the terrace.
The stranger
I’d gone out for air. He was already there, leaning on the railing in a plain dark suit and the simplest mask at the party, just a black domino over his eyes. He held up two glasses, as if he’d been expecting someone.
“Is one of those for me?” I asked.
“It is now.”
We talked the way you can only talk to someone who doesn’t know who you are. About the church below us and whether it was haunted. About the worst Halloween costume either of us had ever worn. About how Quito looks better from above, at night, when you can’t see the traffic. He listened like it was his job. When I said something stupid, he laughed, and it was a low, warm laugh I felt somewhere under my ribs.
At one point I said I’d kill for a coffee instead of another canelazo.
“Black,” he said. “No sugar. Too strong for anyone else.”
I stared at him. “How do you know that?”
He just smiled under the mask. “Lucky guess.”
The dance
Inside, someone put on a slow song, the kind that empties a dance floor or fills it. He held out his hand without saying anything. I took it.
He danced properly, a hand at the small of my back, steady, not pushy, close enough that I could smell rain and something like cedar. Halfway through I realized I’d stopped thinking about anything at all: the breakup, the hot water, the whole of my careful little life. There was just the warmth of his hand and the music and the fact that he hadn’t once tried to look under my mask.
“Can I tell you something?” he said against my ear.
“No names. Those are the rules.”
“Not my name. Something true.” He pulled back just enough to look at me. “I’ve wanted to dance with you for a long time.”
My heart was going so fast I was sure he could feel it. “You don’t know me.”
“I know a little.”
Midnight
At midnight the whole house counted down like it was New Year’s. Masks went flying, people shrieked and laughed and kissed, and someone dropped a tray of glasses. We stayed on the terrace, just the two of us, the church glowing below.
“Your turn,” I said.
“Yours first,” he said quietly. “Only if you want to.”
I did. He reached behind my head, and when he asked, “Okay?” I nodded. He untied the ribbon slowly, as if he had all the time in the world. Then he took off his own.
I knew him. Not well, not really. He was the man from the third floor of my building. The one who held the lift door every morning and said buenos días and nothing else. The one who’d seen me, I realized, at the corner café every day for a year, ordering the same black coffee, no sugar, too strong for anyone else.
“You,” I said.
“Me,” he said, and looked a little terrified. “I didn’t know you’d be here. I swear. When I saw you on the terrace, I almost left. Then you asked about the drink.”
I should have been embarrassed. Instead I laughed until I had to hold the railing, and then I took his face in my hands and kissed him, the way you can only kiss someone after a year of saying buenos días in a lift.
After
We walked part of the way home, up streets so steep we had to stop to catch our breath, which was a good excuse to stop and kiss again. At the door of my building he asked, “Your floor or mine?” and I said, “Does it matter? It’s the same lift.”
What happened next stays between me, him and the third floor. I’ll say this much: he asked before every single thing, and I said yes to all of it, and at some point I stopped hearing the city altogether.
In the morning he made coffee. Black, no sugar. Too strong for anyone else. We drank it at my window with the two masks lying on the sill between us, and the clouds coming down off Pichincha like they had nowhere better to be.
We still say buenos días in the lift. It just takes us a lot longer now.
Names and identifying details changed. Reader stories may be edited and dramatized.
Got a story that still makes you blush? Send it to us at sex@moodchillin.com or through our Share Your Confession page. Every story is read by an editor, stays anonymous, and is in the running for our monthly best-story prize. Adults only, consenting adults only, and change the names.
Not applicable (reader fiction; dramatized).