The Night My Father Offered Me to His Friends

I’m thirty now, and I still struggle to say out loud what I was for nearly a decade. I’m not looking for anyone to understand me. I’m writing it because some things weigh less once they’re out of you, and because I’d be lying if I said all of it was only punishment. There was pain, yes. But there was also a part of me that learned to need it.

My father, Damián, was never a good man. I say that without bitterness, because over the years he changed and so did I. But back then he was a hard man, with big hands and long silences, smelling of tobacco and cheap beer almost every night. My mother left when I was eighteen, and in that empty house the line between what a father is supposed to be and what he decided we would be slowly disappeared, without me fully understanding when I had crossed the threshold.

By the time I turned twenty-one, I had already spent three years being something else for him. I don’t have a clean word for it. He kept me up late, waiting, and whenever he felt like it—at two, at three in the morning—I would go downstairs and do what he wanted. I learned to read his mood by the sound of the door. I learned it was easier to yield than to resist, and somewhere along the way I stopped knowing whether I yielded out of fear or because my own body had already learned how to respond.

—Come here —he would say, nothing more. And I would go.

That’s the part people never forgive: that I didn’t always hate him. That there were dawns when I waited for him with my stomach tight around something that wasn’t only disgust.

***

Damián had a circle of friends from the neighborhood, men his age or older, forty- and fifty-somethings with calloused hands who came over to drink on Fridays. There were four regulars. I served them, brought them ice, listened to them laugh louder and louder as the night went on, and felt their eyes stick to my back whenever I turned toward the kitchen. They never said anything in front of him. But I knew how to look, and I knew what those looks held.

One winter night the four of them drank more than they should have. Outside, rain was falling with that stubbornness that never lets up, and my father, who was less drunk than they were that time, said they should stay until dawn.

—Anyway, with this storm nobody’s driving —he said, and nobody argued.

He settled them in the living room, on the sofa and two mattresses we brought down from the attic. I went to my room thinking that, at least that night, he would leave me alone. I was wrong.

I heard him come in. The mattress dipped beside me and his hand found me under the sheet with that familiarity that no longer surprised me. I told him no, not tonight, there were people in the house.

—They’re asleep like logs —he murmured against the back of my neck—. They won’t even notice.

And I gave in, like almost always. We started in silence, me biting my lip so I wouldn’t make a sound, him heavy and slow on top of me. I felt his hand slide between my legs, parting me with an old certainty, as if he already knew exactly how far to open me to make me tremble. He yanked my underwear down and the cold air brushed my wet skin, leaving me exposed before he covered me again with his body.

He opened me in one brutal movement, burying his head between my thighs with a sudden hunger. His tongue was not soft; it was insistent, messy, direct, licking me from top to bottom, pressing the tip against my clit until it tore a muffled moan from me that I had to swallow. He held my hips with both hands so I wouldn’t move and I felt myself getting wetter, heat climbing up my abdomen and leaving me undefended. When he shoved two fingers, thick and hard, into my cunt, I arched my back on pure reflex.

—That’s it —he murmured—. That’s how I like you.

I clenched my teeth. I wanted to hate him, but in the dark pleasure betrayed me. He filled my mouth with a clumsy, wet kiss, and I felt his tongue pressing in, mixing with my ragged breathing while his fingers opened me wider, pumping inside with filthy patience. I came before I wanted to, in a hot jolt that left me tense, trembling on the mattress. He smiled against my neck, satisfied, and settled over me with his hard cock brushing my entrance.

I didn’t know when the door opened.

***

One of them had gotten up to use the bathroom, which was past the bedroom, and on the way back he saw the door ajar. Then another came in. And another. By the time I realized it, all four were standing there in the half-light, jolted awake by what they were seeing, with that crooked smile men wear when they’ve just discovered a secret they can use.

I felt the blood drain from my body down to my feet. I wanted to cover myself. My father, instead, didn’t even flinch. He lifted his head, looked at them, and said something that still echoes in me to this day.

—What are you looking at? If you want, there’s enough for everyone.

He said it like someone offering another round of beer. I grabbed his arm, dug my nails in, whispered no, that he was crazy. He held my face with one hand and looked at me straight on.

—Don’t you like feeling desired? —he said softly, only for me—. Look at the way they’re looking at you.

And that was the worst part of all: that he was right. That in the middle of fear, the idea lit something in my belly that I didn’t know how to turn off. You shouldn’t want this, I told myself. But I could already feel them coming closer.

***

There were five men for me alone. My father and his four friends.

The first sat on the edge of the bed and turned my face toward him. He smelled of alcohol and of the rain he had brought in on his clothes. He didn’t kiss me; men like that don’t kiss. He pushed my head down with a firm hand on the back of my neck while another pried my knees apart. I shut my eyes and breathed deeply, trying to go somewhere else, but my body wouldn’t let me leave: every rough caress, every new hand on my skin, anchored me to the present. One of them took my breasts in both hands, squeezing until I gasped, and another ran his palm over my pussy, soaking it in me as if he wanted proof the wetness was real. The mattress shuddered under so many bodies and the air in the room turned thick, smelling of sweat, alcohol, and sex just being kicked loose.

Two of them were bigger than the rest and they knew it. They lifted me and slid me to the center of the bed, away from my father, and began taking turns with cruel patience. One sank in while the other waited, and when I thought I might get a breath, the next one came. They opened me with their fingers before each thrust, spitting into their hands to rub my hole or push their cock in more easily, and I writhed, feeling myself filled again and again, until every jolt tore a louder moan from me than the last. One grabbed my wrists and pinned them to the sheet; another made me lift my hips to get in deeper from behind, slamming into my cunt until my legs shook. I clutched the sheets with both hands and bit the pillow so my screams wouldn’t get out, though by then I no longer knew if they were from pain or from something else.

—Say you like it —one of them ordered, his hoarse voice at my ear.

I didn’t answer. He insisted, harder, and then I said it, and saying it made me feel them all ignite, letting out obscenities that in any other context would have embarrassed me and that, that dawn, drove me deeper into the vertigo. They called me a whore, said I was made for this, said I looked soaked, that I opened myself up on my own. Every word brushed my skin like a dirty slap, and I hated how much it turned me on.

At some point I felt my father settle behind me. I barely lifted my gaze and found him looking for my eyes, as if asking without words whether I was still all there. I held his stare for a second. I didn’t tell him to stop. That was my answer, and the two of us understood it.

He pulled me away from the man fucking me from behind, arranged me face down, and lifted my hips with his big hands, driving his cock into me with a cruel slowness that made me cry from sheer relief and sheer disgust at the same time. He spoke into my ear, his deep voice mixed with the others’ gasps, telling me to breathe, to loosen up, to let myself break. And I did. Every thrust from him made my whole body bounce against the mattress, while up front another man took my face, forced my mouth open, and pushed two fingers smeared with my own saliva inside so he could make me suck them afterward, as if he wanted to remind them all that I was still his in that way too.

***

What happened after that I remember in pieces, like a badly cut film. Hands everywhere. Bodies that weighed, that sweated, that laughed. The bed creaking under the weight of six people. My own voice, unrecognizable, asking for things I would never have asked for in daylight.

One of them got behind me and started from the back, while the two big ones kept working me from the front, taking turns. I tried to ask them to be careful, to take care, but they covered my mouth with a hand and the sentence fell apart between a stranger’s fingers. I was completely overwhelmed, so wet it ran down my thighs, and that wetness betrayed what my pride didn’t want to admit. There were fingers going in and out of my cunt to open me wider, mouths sucking my nipples until they were hard and sore, hands squeezing my ass, prying it open and leaving me exposed in a way that made me writhe. They moved me around like I weighed nothing: on my back, on my side, on my knees, face buried in a pillow while they fucked me from behind and in front at the same time. I felt every blow to my pelvis, every rough brush, every rocking hip, and each time one of them came on my body I was left burning, drenched, with warm semen sliding over my skin while they kept using my body as if it belonged to everyone.

My father was the last of that round. When the others eased off, he took me by the hips and came in with that years-long familiarity, thrusting slowly at first and then without mercy, whispering the same filthy things they had but in his voice, the only one I knew in the dark. He split me in two and I let him, trembling, emptied and full at the same time. When he bent me over the edge of the bed, he pried me wider with his hand and punished my ass with slaps before driving in again, the sound of flesh slapping flesh mixing with the others’ heavy breathing. One of the friends held my jaw open while another licked my neck, leaving my skin wet, and I could no longer tell where one mouth ended and the next began. I came again around my father’s cock, with a violent shudder that shot up my legs and left me moaning without air, while he kept driving into me until he emptied inside me with a low grunt that made me shut my eyes tight.

They finished one after another. I ended up on my back in the middle of that rumpled bed, staring at the ceiling, my chest rising and falling as if I had run miles. Nobody spoke. They got up one by one, searching for their clothes in the half-dark, and by the time the sky began to lighten at the window, they were already snoring again in the living room as if nothing had happened.

***

That wasn’t the only time. It was many times, for a long while. Fridays stopped being just about beer. I learned who liked what, learned the names none of them used with me by day, learned to desire and to hate Friday night in equal measure. I kept telling myself I had no way out, that I was a prisoner of the house and of the man who had raised me. And in part that was true. But it’s also true that, when I finally had the chance to leave, I took longer than I should have to take it, and that delay still haunts me.

Today I live far away. My father and I hardly speak, and when we do it’s about small things, the weather, his health, like two strangers who share a surname. He softened with age. I learned to look at what we were without my throat closing all the way up.

I’m not writing this so you’ll absolve me. I’m writing it because for years I was the secret of five men in a house with the curtains drawn, and because only now, telling it, am I beginning to understand what part of it was a cage and what part was me, choosing to stay. Maybe I’ll never fully separate them. Maybe that is the real sentence, in the end.