The Russian Who Subdued Us Both

That session was the last one I saw in its entirety. After that, there was no longer any distinction between watching and participating, and once that boundary is crossed, there is no way to rebuild it.

Dimitri had been in the neighborhood for three years when my mother met him. He had a leather-clothing shop on the ground floor of our building, spoke Spanish with an accent nobody could quite place, and had that kind of presence that fills a space before the body itself has even arrived to fill it. My mother’s name was Sara. Forty-three years old, dark brown hair, hazel eyes, and a way of moving around the house that had always conveyed authority. That authority disappeared the day Dimitri entered her life.

I never knew exactly when it all began. I only noticed the changes: she came home late, had dark circles under her eyes, sometimes I caught her staring into space with an expression I didn’t recognize. Until that afternoon when I got back from school earlier than expected and found the bedroom door half open.

What I saw on the other side left me breathless for a full minute.

My mother was on her knees, naked except for a pair of black stockings Dimitri must have made her put on, her mouth open and his thick cock buried all the way down her throat. Her cheeks were hollowed by the suction, saliva dripped from her chin in thick strings and ran between her breasts. Dimitri had her by the hair with both hands and was moving her head to his rhythm, shoving it down to the balls again and again, giving her no respite. You could hear the wet smacks, my mother’s muffled gagging, and his deep voice spitting obscenities in his own language mixed with Spanish.

—Like that, slut, all the way down. Swallow me whole. Show your son how his mother sucks cock.

He yanked his cock out abruptly. A strand of spit still linked the head of his glans to her swollen lips. My mother was breathing in ragged gasps, eyes teary, lipstick smeared all down her chin. He dragged his cock across her face, wetting her cheeks, and she opened her mouth again as if she no longer knew how to do anything else.

That session was the last one I witnessed from the outside.

***

Dimitri beckoned me from across the room. When my name came out of his mouth, my mother tensed her shoulders. She didn’t want to look at me. I saw it in the stiffness of her neck, in the way her fingers clenched against her thigh.

—Look at him —said Dimitri.

It wasn’t a request.

She took several seconds. But she raised her eyes. Slowly, without lifting her chin, with her gaze weighed down by something I couldn’t name at the time. Shame, yes. But also something darker and harder to pin down.

—Listen to me carefully, Pablo —Dimitri began, never taking his eyes off her—. This boy has shown he’s already a man. And men have needs. From now on, when he calls you, you’ll service him. Understood?

My mother didn’t answer right away.

—Understood? —he repeated, in that voice that allowed no silence.

—Yes —she murmured.

—Louder.

—Yes.

—Say it all. Tell him what you’ll do to your son when he calls you.

She swallowed. Her lower lip was trembling.

—When you call me... I’ll suck you off. I’ll suck your cock until you come in my mouth. I’ll do whatever you ask me to do.

I was frozen in the doorway. I could feel my cock hardening against the fabric of my pants without having touched it. I don’t know exactly what I felt. It was too much, too contradictory, too loaded with layers I couldn’t separate in that moment. That woman who had raised me, who kept my school photos in a shoebox under her bed, kneeling like that, with her tits out, with her knees apart so her wet cunt could be seen, looking at me like that.

—Now you know —said Dimitri, finally looking at me with that irritating calm of his—. You’ve got someone serving you at home.

***

The weeks that followed were the strangest of my life.

When I got back from school, I called her. And she came. Without any visible protest, without meeting my eyes more than necessary. She just came. She went into the bedroom, closed the door behind her, and knelt on the rug before I’d even said anything. She pulled my pants and underwear down with both hands, took out my already hard cock, and put it in her mouth whole without any preamble. With that submission Dimitri had installed in her the way a habit is installed: slowly, and then all at once.

The first time I fucked her was on an October afternoon. I’d called her and told her, without looking at her, to undress and get on all fours on the bed. She obeyed in silence. I saw her back tense when I spread her ass cheeks and ran two fingers through her cunt. She was wet. I hadn’t even touched her before and she was already dripping. That detail made me lose the little control I had left.

I shoved into her in one thrust. She let out a muffled moan, half protest and half something else, and I grabbed her hips and started fucking her without thinking. You could hear the slapping, flesh hitting flesh, my ragged breathing against her nape. I pulled her hair the way I’d seen Dimitri do it, and she moaned louder, throwing her head back.

—Tell me you like it —I begged, my voice broken.

She took time to answer. I drove my cock to the hilt, held it there for a full second, and repeated the question against her ear.

—I like it —she whispered—. I like it, son. Fuck me harder.

I came inside her a minute later. It was a long, thick load that filled her cunt until it started dripping down her thighs when I pulled my cock out. She stayed on all fours, panting, without turning to look at me. I sat on the edge of the bed, watching my cum seep out between her legs, not knowing whether I wanted to vomit or start again.

There were afternoons when I stopped before calling her. I’d sit on the edge of the bed, staring at the closed door, wondering when exactly I had become that. But the question always came too late, when desire had already won the argument.

There were other afternoons when I took her to the bedroom and spent long stretches exploring her body with a meticulousness that held something of revenge and something of desperation. I’d spread her legs and eat her cunt until she came against my mouth, gripping my hair, biting the back of her hand so she wouldn’t scream. I sucked her nipples until they were swollen and red. I straddled her over me and told her to move herself, to fuck herself on my cock while I watched her tits bounce. She went wild. She closed her eyes, threw her head back, and came on me in spasms that clenched my cock inside her until I came too. And in those moments she no longer looked at me the way a mother looks at her son. She looked at me like a woman who has crossed a line and no longer remembers exactly why that line existed.

That disturbed me more than anything else.

It was a murky time. Very murky. And I lived in it as if it were normal, because when something happens every day, it stops seeming extraordinary.

***

Valeria existed in a completely different world.

I’d met her months earlier in the neighborhood library, where we both went to study on Tuesday afternoons. She studied law. She had long black hair, a broad, direct laugh, and the habit of underlining her notes in three different colors depending on how important the paragraph was. I thought that habit was funny. Then I thought it was charming. Then I realized I was thinking about her when I wasn’t with her.

For weeks, we were just two people who crossed paths at the same old table. Then we started talking. Then we went out for drinks. The movies, the occasional concert, long afternoons in the parks the neighborhood people had stopped going to.

She was the opposite of everything in my house.

One Tuesday in October, in the old park behind the library, she took my hand without warning. She looked at me with that straightforwardness that was so typical of her and said:

—I know you like me. I’ve known for a while. And I like you too. But you’re a disaster when it comes to taking the initiative, so I’m going to make the first move.

—You’re going to make the first move? —I asked, though I already knew where this was going.

—Pablo, do you want to be my boyfriend?

I stayed silent for a second that seemed endless. I felt, all at once, like the luckiest man in the world and the most miserable.

—Has a cat got your tongue, or do you not want to? —she asked, smiling.

—No! No... I mean yes. Of course I do.

—Hahaha.

Her laugh was broad and clear and broke my heart in the best possible way. I knew that girl was what I needed. What I lacked. The push that could turn me into someone different from what I was becoming at home.

***

What happened next should not have surprised me, even though it did.

With Valeria, all my supposed experience disappeared. The first time we were together, it was in her room, one afternoon when her parents weren’t home. We undressed slowly, kissing, and when I had her lying beneath me, legs open and her pink, shaved pussy on display, with those small, firm breasts rising and falling with her quick breathing, I realized my hands were shaking. I put the tip of my cock at her entrance and pushed in only a couple of centimeters. She sighed against my neck.

I came right there. Without even starting. I felt my load spill out in spurts against her belly and the sheet, unable to stop it, and I stayed on top of her with my face buried in the pillow, wishing I could disappear.

I was dying of shame. She looked at me with a calm smile, as if she knew that wasn’t really me, cleaned me up with a towel she had on the nightstand, and told me not to stress about it.

It happened again. Every time, the same thing. Four thrusts and I’d empty myself inside her. Sometimes two. Sometimes just from seeing her undress. She would suck my cock trying to calm me down and I’d come in her mouth in less than a minute, my face burning with shame.

I started thinking that if I’d spent some time with my mother before seeing Valeria, maybe I’d arrive emptier and last longer. I tried it. I fucked my mother on the sofa an hour before, emptied myself inside her twice in a row, left the house still smelling of sex, and even so, with Valeria, my body betrayed me within seconds. It didn’t work in any way. It was enough to get inside Valeria and my body would betray me within seconds, as if with her everything were too real, too important, too loaded with something I didn’t know how to handle.

I could tell Valeria was starting to be less patient. She didn’t say it. But there was something in the way she looked at me afterward that hadn’t been there before.

And me, knowing I was disappointing her, got more nervous. And the more nervous I got, the worse it was. It was a loop with no visible exit.

***

I kept everything compartmentalized. Valeria in her world. My mother and Dimitri in another. The two worlds were never supposed to touch. That was the only rule I cared about keeping.

But Thursdays are usually the day everything breaks.

That Thursday I stayed home studying longer than I should have. I forgot to check my phone. When I did, forty minutes had gone by since I was supposed to meet Valeria on the street corner, where we always met because I had never given her my exact address. That house was off-limits. Valeria was something I had to keep completely safe from everything related to my family.

I rushed to the door.

But my mother beat me to it. She got to the entryway before I did, opened the door, and found Valeria on the other side. Valeria was wearing a short green skirt, a sleeveless top, and black ankle boots. She was gorgeous. And at that moment, at the worst possible moment, she was standing in the doorway of my house looking at my mother with curiosity.

—Come in —said my mother.

The two most expensive words I have ever heard.

I entered the living room just as they were finishing introducing themselves. And then Dimitri’s voice came from the kitchen.

He came into the living room slowly. Always slowly, like someone who knows he has all the time in the world because nobody will move until he allows it. He approached Valeria as though he had known her all his life, kissed her twice, bringing his body closer than necessary, and held her gaze with that fixed stare I had already seen before. He ran a hand over her waist as if by accident, sliding it for just an instant over the fabric of her skirt, and she didn’t pull away.

I had seen this process before. I had seen it with my mother.

Valeria didn’t look away from him.

—I didn’t know our Pablo had such interesting friends —said Dimitri, with that smile that wasn’t exactly a smile.

—Well, he’s very private about his life —Valeria replied. And her voice sounded different. Softer than usual.

—I’ve got a shop right down below. Leather clothes, bags, nice things. Come by anytime. I’ll set something special aside for you.

—Sure —she said—. I will.

I managed to get her out of there. We went down the three floors in the elevator in silence. When we got to the street, I took her hands and looked straight into her eyes.

—Valeria. What I’m about to tell you is going to sound weird. But I need you to listen to me without me explaining why right now.

—What’s going on? —she asked, frowning.

—That man. The one who was at my house. Don’t come back here, and don’t go to his shop. Stay away from him.

She processed my words for a long moment.

—Why?

—Trust me.

She nodded. Slowly, with that expression she had when something didn’t quite add up for her but she decided not to push. And I thought that was enough. I needed to believe it was enough.

***

Ten days passed. Eleven. Twelve. Things seemed to be settling back into place. Valeria didn’t ask any more about Dimitri. I started breathing a little easier.

That Monday I woke up with a slight fever. I called the school and stayed home until noon. When I felt better, I went out for a short walk to clear my head.

I passed Dimitri’s shop without thinking, because it was on my street and impossible to avoid.

The shutter was halfway down.

And at that moment, from the dark interior of the shop, Valeria came out.

She was straightening her short skirt with both hands, tugging it down. Her hair was mussed, her lips swollen and dull, and there was a red mark on her neck that was visible even from across the street. She was smiling. He was behind her in the doorway, just finishing buckling his belt with that smile I knew too well. He gave her a hard slap on the ass before she left, and she laughed under her breath, without protest. Their eyes met one last time before she turned in the direction of the school.

She didn’t see me.

I stood frozen on the sidewalk until both of them were gone. I felt something physical, not just emotional: a weight in the center of my chest that made breathing difficult, as if something inside had tightened there with no intention of letting go.

I knew in that moment that I had lost everything.

Valeria, who was the only clean thing I had.

My mother, in a different sense but just as final, because what existed between us was nothing that deserved that name.

And somewhere between those two losses, I had lost myself too.

The only thing still burning clearly, the only emotion with no layers or contradictions, was the hatred I felt for that man.

Dimitri had to disappear from our lives.