Dan’s trip to the steam room was more than just hot and sweaty fun.
I’d never been to a sauna like that before, and I was amazed. When I was getting my entrance ticket I was told that the place had a 24 hour bar and simple cabins with beds that you could rent, and that people stayed there for days. But the actual steam room was the darkest I had ever encountered. It had one glass door leading into it and I remember hanging up my towel on the hook outside, stepping in naked and slowly adjusting to the atmosphere. The room had almost no light, just pale dim spotlights in the walls emitting a faint glow. The air was so thick with hot mist that you couldn’t really make out where you were going, just faint circles of light barely denoting the edges of the room.
I closed the door behind me and took several steps into the mist until I could vaguely make out one or two dark shapes lying on benches along the walls. I made my way to an empty corner and when I reached it I laid down on my back, like some big cat resting deep in what I imagined was a thick tropical rainforest, waiting for something to happen. The soaking heat was intense and very comforting. I lay there and almost forgot where I was. Some time later, I noticed a vague shadow approaching. It moved slowly. It came to sit on the bench next to my feet. It waited. Waited for me to respond. I lay quite still and completely unafraid. I couldn’t see anything. Just a shadow. Moments later it moved away and disappeared.
I was happy just to lie there. Looking back I realise that this was the moment when I found what I had been searching for for years: sexual contact at its most basic. No fuss, No courtship. No words exchanged. Complete anonymity. In a place like this, you could end up sucking off your dad or being fisted by your bank manager’s wife, or fucking a terrorist the night before he planned to blow himself up. No one would care. No one need know.
But then sometime later someone new came over. I didn’t see him enter the room. I only sensed another shadow moving slowly towards me. He moved in slow and close and I was aware of him near me, crouching, and then an arm reaching up and then his hand against my leg, the touch of anonymous fingers and the gentle strokes of a stranger’s hand moving slowly up my thigh. He ended up sucking me off. We had sex with each other before we’d spoken a word, before we even knew what we looked like.
If I hadn’t held the back of his shaved head as he sucked me, I wouldn’t have felt a small lump just behind his left ear. And when I saw him in a bar a couple of days later, serving drinks, and noticed the lump as he reached over to put my beer down, I wouldn’t have wondered if he was the guy from the steam room.
I wouldn’t have had the courage to strike up a conversation and would not have found out that it was him. And we wouldn’t have become lovers. So what I’m saying is that it was a kind of irony, us meeting in a place like that.
