My Boss Gave Me an Order, and I Obeyed in Silence

I wrote this story years ago, when I still thought I was a simple, predictable woman. I’m still married to Martín, and since then a lot of things have happened, most of them kept quiet. But I can’t keep this one quiet, because it was the exact day something inside me made a dry sound, like a latch opening, and I discovered a part of myself I would have preferred not to know. I’m not sorry. Only a little guilty, just enough for the memory to keep its edge.

I was twenty-nine and had a body people still talked about in the street. We never had children, so I kept my waist, my firm, perky tits, that way of walking that made heads turn without my meaning to. I say it without vanity, because later I understood my body wasn’t what ruined me. It was something else, something deeper and more shameful to admit.

A year and a half earlier they had cut Martín’s salary at his company, one of those restructurings that use elegant words to describe the same old precarity. We decided I would work. A friend got me a job as a secretary in a rehabilitation center where three specialists worked. I promised myself I would protect that job with claws and teeth. I learned the schedules, the bills, the patients’ names. I became indispensable in three weeks.

The one who really ran things there was Dr. Raúl Vidal. Forty-eight years old, gray hair cropped close, the hands of someone used to having things done his way. He never shouted. He didn’t need to. He lowered his voice and people leaned in to hear him. I treated him with the distant respect you give a boss, and he treated me with a courtesy whose dark undercurrent I took too long to notice.

—You did well, Mariana —he would tell me when I left him a neat report, and he would rest two fingers on the paper, not on my hand, but so close the gesture meant the same thing.

It’s nothing. You’re imagining things.

I repeated that to myself every night, in bed beside sleeping Martín, while a warm wetness rose between my legs that had nothing to do with my husband. And every morning I went back to that white-walled reception desk with a mix of nerves and something I didn’t dare name.

***

The morning everything changed, I arrived an hour early to finish an overdue billing. The center was silent, with that particular stillness of places not yet open, where you can hear the hum of the lights and your own heart. I thought I was alone. I went into the small changing room in back to swap my blazer for the uniform jacket, took off my blouse, and for a moment stood in front of the mirror in my bra and skirt, fixing my hair.

I heard the door. Nobody knocked. It just opened, slowly, and in the mirror’s reflection there he was. Dr. Vidal, still in his office scrubs, looking at me without a trace of surprise, as if he had known exactly what he would find.

—Sorry, Mariana —he said, without apologizing at all—. I finished a long session and came out all wound up. I heard you come in and thought about you. I’ve been thinking about you for a long time.

I folded my arms over my chest. My voice came out thin, almost a whisper.

—Doctor, you know I’m married. I respect my husband. If you want, I can make you some tea.

I said it like someone extending a rope, an escape for both of us. He didn’t even look at it. He took a step forward. He still didn’t touch me. He stayed behind me, close enough that I could feel the heat of his body on my back, and he spoke against my nape in that low voice he used to make people obey.

—Lower your arms.

It was an order. Clean, without plea, without question. And the most unbearable thing, what I still struggle to confess, is that I obeyed. My arms dropped to my sides on their own, before my head had decided anything. I stood there, exposed in front of the mirror, looking at my face undone by something that wasn’t fear, and I saw him smile faintly, satisfied, like someone confirming a suspicion. In the reflection my nipples were standing hard against the lace of my bra, betraying me before I even opened my mouth.

—That’s it —he murmured—. I knew this was in you. Look at your tits, Mariana. They stand up all on their own and I haven’t even touched you yet.

***

He placed his hands on my shoulders and slid them slowly down my arms, leaving my skin prickling in their wake. He brushed my hair aside and kissed my neck, just below the ear, a slow, wet kiss, with the tip of his tongue, that made my knees go weak. I was still staring at the mirror, watching another woman occupy my body, a woman who closed her eyes and tipped her head back.

His hands came around from the front and gripped my tits over my bra, squeezing them with a firmness that wasn’t caress, but possession. He yanked one cup of lace aside and my nipple sprang out, swollen and pink. He pinched it between thumb and forefinger, rolling it slowly, and a moan tore out of me and bounced off the mirror.

—Please —I said, and even I didn’t know whether I was asking him to stop or to keep going.

—You don’t decide now —he answered against my skin—. Now you only listen. And you spread your legs when I tell you to.

His hands slid down my waist and slipped under my skirt. I felt them climbing my thighs wrapped in the sheer stockings I always wore, that lingerie I put on every morning without thinking who it was for. The brush of his fingers over the fabric made a faint sound in the room’s silence, a whisper that seemed like the loudest thing in the world. When he reached the waistband of my panties, he slipped his fingers underneath without asking and shoved them aside.

—Look how soft —he said, running his hands over my ass through the stocking—. And look how you’re trembling. You’re not made of ice, Mariana. I knew that the first day. You’re soaking. It’s running down your thighs.

He slid two fingers along the cleft of my pussy, from back to front, and lifted them to mirror height so I could see them shine. He ran them over my lips, wetting them with my own moisture, and then put them in my mouth. I sucked them. I did it without thinking, and that was the first time I understood there was no turning back.

I tried to answer something dignified and nothing came out. He turned me by the shoulders with firm, not rough, hands so I faced him. He held my eyes for a long moment, waiting, and I understood he was waiting for my permission disguised as silence. I didn’t say no. That was my betrayal, the real one: not my mouth, but my silence.

***

He sat me on the edge of the unused treatment table against the wall, one of those old ones they no longer used. He opened my legs with both hands, slowly, and stood there a moment looking at me without touching me, still dressed while I was half undressed and trembling. The difference in power was there, exposed, and I discovered that was exactly what turned me on: that he had total control and all I had to do was let myself be taken.

—Ask me —he said.

—No.

—Ask me nicely.

I closed my eyes. Shame and desire mixed in my throat until I could no longer tell them apart.

—Please —I whispered.

—Please what. Say it with the words people use.

—Please, eat me out. Eat my pussy.

Something in him relaxed, like a hunter finally lowering his weapon because the prey stopped running. He knelt on the cold tiled floor and bent down and kissed the inside of one thigh, then the other, coming up unhurriedly, punishing me with slowness. I felt his hot breath climbing my skin and my hands were shaking, hanging at the sides of the treatment table.

When he got to where I was already dripping, he kissed me over my panties first, feeling me through the fabric, and the heat of his mouth tore a sound from me I didn’t recognize as mine. Then he yanked the fabric aside, opened my pussy with two fingers, and ran his whole tongue over me, bottom to top, slowly, tasting me like someone trying something for the first time and deciding he likes it.

—Tasty —he murmured against my flesh—. I knew you’d be tasty.

He licked me slowly, tracing my clit with the tip of his tongue, sucking it softly between his lips, letting it go when I started trembling too much. He slid two fingers inside and curved them there, searching for that spot I had never even dared to find properly myself, while he kept sucking me. I held onto his shoulders and dug my nails in, head thrown back, biting my lips so I wouldn’t scream in the center’s silence.

—Don’t stop —I begged him, and heard myself say it and hated myself a little—. Please don’t stop.

He didn’t stop, but he didn’t let me come either. When he felt me at the edge, with my legs rigid and my pussy clamping around his fingers, he pulled away abruptly. He looked up at me from below, lips wet with me, smiling faintly.

—Not yet. You come when I say so.

I thought of Martín in flashes, brief lightning strikes of guilt that went out almost immediately. Stronger was the other thing, the absurd relief of not having to decide anything, of having a man tell me what to do and me only having to obey.

***

He took my hand and guided it beneath his scrubs. I felt how hard he was, ready, and I stroked him first over the fabric and then pulled down his pants and set him free. He had a thick, long cock, more than Martín had ever made me know. He put it in my hand and made me move it slowly, teaching me the rhythm he liked, never letting go of my wrist.

—Suck me —he said—. I want to see that secretary mouth with my cock inside it.

I slid off the table and knelt in front of him, on the same floor where he had been a minute earlier. I took his cock with both hands, kissed the tip first and then took it into my mouth. At first only the head, sucking it slowly, wetting it with saliva. He grabbed my hair with one hand, not to force me, only to guide me, and started pushing my head deeper.

—That’s it, all the way —he gasped—. That’s it, Mariana, come on, to the back of your throat.

I felt it hit the back of my throat and my eyes filled with tears. He pulled it out, let me breathe, shoved it back in. I sucked him with hunger, surprised by myself, listening to him growl with every pump. I licked his balls, sucked them one by one, went back to the tip and ran my tongue under the crown until he yanked my hair to pull me off.

We looked at each other. In his eyes there was no tenderness, only a calm certainty, the certainty of someone who knows he has already won. And I liked that certainty more than any caress.

—Turn around —he ordered—. Lean on the table.

I obeyed. He hiked my skirt up to my waist, pulled my stockings and panties down to mid-thigh, leaving me half naked, not quite taking anything off, as if being half clothed was part of the game. He pressed one hand to my back between the shoulder blades and with that single hand held me folded over, motionless, waiting. With the other he spread my ass cheeks and looked at me in silence long enough for me to feel the cool air where it shouldn’t be.

—Still —he said, though I wasn’t moving—. I want you to feel that I’m the one in charge.

He ran the tip of his cock along the cleft of my pussy, up and down, wetting it with my slick, without slipping inside. I pushed my hips back, looking for it, and he gave my ass a sharp slap that cracked through the room like a whip.

—No. I say when.

He lined himself up at my entrance and drove into me in one thrust, all the way to the hilt, tearing a scream from me that I muffled against the table’s vinyl top. I ran out of breath. He was filling me in a way Martín never had, pushing against a place I hadn’t even known I had until then.

He started fucking me slowly, pulling almost all the way out and sliding back in with calm precision, like someone measuring. Then he increased the pace. He held me by the hip with one hand and the nape of my neck with the other, controlling my whole rhythm, deciding himself when to go slow and when to go deep. I clung to the edge of the table and let him do it. The sound of his hips hitting my ass joined the sound of my boots against the wall, a dry, repeated thud in the silence of the empty center. The wet sounds of his cock entering and leaving my pussy got inside my head and filled me with a shame that was also another form of pleasure.

—Say you like it —he demanded.

—I like it —I admitted, and the word came out broken, because it was true, a truth that changed me forever.

—Say it all. Say what you like.

—I like it when you fuck me —I moaned—. I like your cock inside me. Don’t stop.

He yanked my hair until I straightened, back arched, and slid his free hand around to the front to grab a tit, squeezing it while he kept fucking me from behind. With his fingers he found my clit and rubbed it in circles, never stopping his thrusts. I was coming apart. I felt a shiver rise from the backs of my knees, gather in my lower belly, and explode as I clenched around his cock in spasms that left me voiceless. I bit my forearm so I wouldn’t wake the whole building.

—That’s it —he panted in my ear, still fucking me while I came—. Come for me. All wet, just like that.

***

It didn’t last much longer, and it didn’t need to. I felt him tense, his fingers digging into my hip, and a restrained groan against my back as he yanked out at the last second and unloaded the whole orgasm over my ass and the small of my back. I felt the hot stream hit my skin, sliding down, and he pressed himself against my slit again to squeeze out the very last drop, smearing my pussy hair with cum.

He stayed still for a moment, breathing hard, with his hand still on my nape, and only then did he let go and let me straighten up. He took some tissues from a box on the table and wiped me himself, slowly, my back, my ass, between my legs, like someone cleaning up what he himself had left behind. The gesture was more intimate than everything before, and it made me tremble again.

What shook me wasn’t the body. It was discovering, at twenty-nine, standing half dressed in a little room in a rehabilitation center, with my boss’s load running down my thighs, that I liked obeying.

We dressed in silence. He washed his hands, straightened his scrubs, and looked at me in the mirror while I fumbled with the buttons of my uniform jacket.

—You worked very well today —he said, in that same cordial voice as always, and the double-edged line ran down my spine like an icy hand.

We opened the center on time. The patients came, the other doctors, the normal day with its phone buzz. Nobody noticed anything. I handled people, billed, smiled, feeling between my legs the sting of having been used and the wetness that still hadn’t finished drying. Inside, I was someone else.

***

Since that morning he’s treated me like a queen. Gifts I could justify, a salary that disguised what it really was. Dr. Vidal never again asked permission with words. A glance was enough, a minimal order tossed off as he passed—“stay after closing,” “come to my office”—and I went, docile, feeling with every step that mix of guilt and desire that had already become part of me. I learned to kneel on the rug in his office, to open my mouth when he unzipped himself without saying a word, to bend over his desk with the papers underneath while he shoved his cock into me and took calls with one hand.

I’m writing it now to lift a little of that weight off me, though I know writing it won’t remove it, only arrange it. I’m still married to Martín. I’m still, to the outside world, a simple and predictable woman. But that morning I learned something I could never unlearn: that inside me lives someone who only needs the right voice to tell her, in just the right tone, what she has to do. And that part of me, no matter how much guilt it carries, never wanted to be silent again.