The Bus Stop Arrangement

All characters are 18 or older. Fiction.

The 18 does not run after eleven on a Sunday. I knew that. I stood under the shelter on the Carrera with my bag between my feet anyway, because the alternative was a forty minute walk through streets I did not know well, and I was nineteen and had convinced myself that waiting was a kind of plan.

I am nineteen and I study accounting, which my father thinks is a decision and which is actually a default. That Sunday I had been at my aunt's for lunch in Suba and stayed too long, and by twenty past eleven the road was empty and the rain was coming down in that thin way that gets you wet without ever looking like weather. The car that eventually stopped was not a bus. It belonged to a man they call the angel of Bogota, who buys hours from boys for cash and films them, and I had heard the name before I ever saw his face.

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The car pulled up at the kerb about a metre past the shelter, and the window came down. Late thirties, wide in the shoulders, a gold ring, and a smell that reached me through the rain: cardamom and something sweet and cheap.

"You are waiting for the 18," he said. "It stopped at eleven."

"I know."

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"Then get in and stop pretending." He reached across and pushed the passenger door open. "I am going to Chapinero. I will drop you where you are going and you will tell me the address, and I am not a taxi, so there is no meter and no fare."

I got in. I am not going to pretend I did not know what the name meant. Everybody in Suba knows the man with the case and the camera, and the things they say about him are said quietly and with a certain amount of respect, the way you talk about weather that has already passed.

He drove for a while without talking. The heater was on. He had the radio off, and when I reached for it he said, "No," not sharply, and I put my hand back in my lap.

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"Where do you live," he said.

I told him, and he nodded, and then he drove past the turning. I watched it go by. He drove another three streets and turned into a yard behind a print shop with a metal gate that he opened with a remote, and the gate came down behind us, and my heart was going in a way I could hear.

"I have one stop to make," he said. "It will take half an hour. You can wait in the car, or you can come in and I will pay you for the half hour. Forty thousand. Seventy if the camera sees you."

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He turned the engine off and looked at me. He has a way of looking at you that makes the car feel smaller and warmer than it is.

"I have never," I said.

"I know." He said it without mockery. "That is not a problem. That is a price."

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The back office of the print shop had a desk, a safe, a shelf of ledgers and a smell of ink and dust. He put the case on the desk and took the phone off the gimbal and set it on the shelf between two folders, and the red light came on, and I stood in the middle of the room with my bag still on my shoulder.

"Put the bag down," he said. "And take your time. If you want to leave at any point, you say so, and I will drive you home, and you keep whatever I have already given you. That is not generosity. It is a rule, and I have had it for years."

He counted seventy thousand onto the desk. Then he took off his jacket and folded it over the chair, and came and stood in front of me and took my face in both hands and kissed me, and it was not a gentle kiss. It was the kind that answers a question I had not asked.

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The half hour

He undressed me down to my shirt, which he left on, and put me on the desk on my back with the ledgers under my shoulder. Then he went down on his knees on the floor of that office, which I did not expect from a man of his age and size, and took me in his mouth, one hand on my thigh, and I put my forearm over my eyes and felt the whole room tilt.

He knows what he is doing in a way that is almost unfair. He brought me to the edge and then stopped, and stood up, and undid his trousers. Thick, uncut, curved up hard against his stomach, and I looked at it and then at him and he said, "Yes. Look at it. That is what you are here for."

He put a condom on, slowly, watching me watch him, and then pulled me off the desk and turned me round and bent me over it with my cheek on the wood. His fingers first, and a bottle from the case, and he talked the whole time in that low voice, telling me to breathe, telling me to relax, and it worked, which surprised me. When he pushed in I made a sound like I had been hit, and he held still with one hand flat between my shoulder blades and said, "There. That is the worst of it. Now it is only this."

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And it was only that. He moved slowly and steadily, and the edge of the desk dug into my hip and I did not care, and the camera was on the shelf and I did not care about that either. I came with his hand around me and my forehead on a ledger, and he followed soon after, pulling out and finishing on the back of my shirt with a groan that seemed to come from much deeper than his chest.

He gave me a towel from a drawer. He dressed. He looked at the phone for a moment, then put it away, and I noticed for the first time that the safe was open and that there was a paper in it with my name on it, which he did not take out and I did not ask about.

In the car he was quiet until we turned into my street. Then he said, "You missed your stop tonight."

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"I know."

"Next Sunday the 18 still does not run after eleven." He stopped at my corner. "Think about whether you want to be standing there."

I got out and he drove away and I stood in the rain with seventy thousand pesos in my bag and the taste of him still in my mouth, and the thing I keep coming back to is not the office or the desk or the film. It is that he knew my name before I told him. They call him the angel of Bogota in Suba, and I have decided that a man who knows your name before you give it to him is not an angel at all. He is something older, and he will be at that stop again on Sunday, and so, I think, will I.

Open the full Angel of Bogota episode → uncut angel of bogota stories, 18+