The Treatment I Begged for at That Clinic

Valverde Clinic was out on the outskirts, far from anything that resembled a city. It was a low gray-concrete building, with long corridors and fluorescent lights that hummed all night, as if the whole place breathed through them. Mariana had been admitted there three weeks earlier, and from the very first night she knew she was not going to be cured of anything.

She was twenty-two and had a diagnosis that sounded serious in the reports: “sexual compulsion, risk to self.” To her, it seemed like an elegant way of saying she wanted too much and without asking permission. They had locked her up after a couple of episodes at university — a professor in an empty classroom, a stranger in the parking lot that same afternoon — and the rest of her family had signed the papers in relief.

What no one wrote in any file was the simplest truth: for Mariana, this had never been an illness. It was the only thing that made her feel awake.

That night she had given in again. In the dark, on the hard mattress in her room, she had let her fingers slide slowly down her stomach to the heat between her legs. With the other hand she gripped her throat, chasing that moment when the air grows scarce and everything else disappears. She breathed softly so no one would hear her.

It did no good. They always heard her.

The door flew open and the orderly’s flashlight cut through the dark. Tobías, the biggest of them all, the one who smelled of tobacco and bleach.

“Again,” he said, without surprise, almost impatiently. “Get up.”

He grabbed her by the arm and dragged her out. Mariana pretended to resist, let her heels strike the cold floor, let her half-dressed body writhe against the huge hand holding her. But the struggle was a lie and they both knew it. With every tug her skin prickled.

The corridor seemed never to end. When the exam-room door finally opened, the white light made her close her eyes.

***

It was a sterile room, with a metal gurney in the center and the smell of disinfectant seeping into her throat. Sitting in a chair, immaculate in his white coat with a file on his knees, was Dr. Solana. Mid-forties, hard jaw, hands that did not look like a doctor’s but like someone used to being obeyed.

He looked up slowly, as if she had interrupted him.

“Mariana,” he said, drawing out the syllables. “How many times are we going to have this conversation?”

She stayed on her knees on the floor, panting, her chest rising and falling. Her underwear clung to her skin, soaked, outlining everything she was trying to hide.

“It’s not something I decide, Doctor,” she replied, her voice coming out rougher than she intended. “It’s like a fire. If I don’t put it out, it burns me from the inside.”

The doctor set the file on the gurney. He stood unhurriedly and walked toward her, and the sound of his shoes on the floor was the only thing heard for several seconds. He crouched to her level and took her chin between his fingers, forcing her to meet his gaze.

“Of course you decide,” he said quietly. “You choose to give in every time. Last week it was a patient in the cafeteria. Before that, a nurse. And now you look at me that way. How many do you need to calm down?”

Mariana trembled under his hand. Not from fear.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “That’s why I’m here, isn’t it?”

Behind her, Tobías let out a deep laugh.

“Abstinence doesn’t do anything to her, Doc. She doesn’t even pretend to be sorry.”

The doctor straightened. Something changed in his eyes, a dark glint Mariana recognized at once, because it was the same one that lived inside her.

“You’re right,” he said. “Denying her pleasure is like denying her breath. What she needs is the opposite. She needs us to give it to her until she can’t ask for more.”

He turned back to her.

“I’m going to make you an offer, Mariana. From now on, you don’t decide. We do. When, how, and how much. And if at any point you want it to stop, you say ‘Valverde’ and everything ends. Do you understand?”

The name of the clinic as an emergency brake. Mariana understood perfectly. And above all, she understood that she did not plan to use it.

“I understand,” she whispered.

“Then let’s begin. You’re fine on your knees. Ask for it.”

She swallowed. The fire between her legs was unbearable.

“Please,” she said, looking up at him. “Let me. I need it.”

“Clearer.”

“Please, Doctor. Let me have it in my mouth. I need something to fill this emptiness.”

***

Tobías stood behind her and brushed the hair away from the nape of her neck with a gentleness that did not match his hands.

“Good girl,” he murmured. “But don’t forget about me. I’m the one who drags you down these corridors every night.”

The doctor unfastened his belt with measured slowness, as if every movement were part of the treatment. When he freed himself, Mariana opened her mouth without being told. She took him deep, slowly at first and then with a hunger that surprised even her, her tongue working, her throat yielding. The doctor buried his fingers in her hair and set the rhythm.

“That’s it,” he said, voice taut. “As if you depended on this. Because right now, you do.”

Tobías did not want to wait his turn. He unfastened his pants and pressed himself against her cheek.

“Now me. Alternate. Show me you can handle both of us.”

Mariana obeyed, going from one to the other, her hands lifting to stroke them as she did. The taste, the heat, the weight of each against her tongue: all of it pushed her farther from herself. It had been weeks since she had felt so much in command of something, precisely at the moment she stopped being the one in charge.

“Enough,” the doctor cut in suddenly. “Lift her up. To the gurney.”

Tobías lifted her as if she weighed nothing and laid her on the metal surface. The cold steel against her back drew a gasp from her. Before she could settle, the orderly yanked off her last garment and left her completely exposed beneath the white light.

“Look at her,” he said, parting her knees with both hands. “Ready the moment she walked through the door.”

The doctor came closer and studied her like a clinical case, head tilted.

“First, the punishment,” he said. “There’s no pleasure without something to balance it. And you know that too, don’t you?”

Tobías’s hand came down on her ass with a sharp crack. Mariana cried out, but the sting almost instantly turned into a wave of heat climbing up her spine.

“Count,” he ordered. “And say thank you.”

“One,” she gasped. “Thank you.”

Another blow.

“Two. Thank you.”

They continued until she lost count, until her skin burned and every impact hit her straight at the center, where desire had become a different kind of pain. She writhed on the gurney, arching to receive the next one, begging for more in a voice she no longer recognized as her own.

“Please,” she repeated. “It hurts good. Don’t stop.”

The doctor ran a hand over her reddened back, almost tenderly.

“Now the real treatment. We’re going to fill you until you forget your own name.”

***

Tobías stood behind her. Mariana felt the pressure against a tighter, more difficult opening, and she tensed instinctively.

“Relax,” he said, still not moving. “Or don’t. I like it when you fight.”

He pushed slowly, giving her time, and the sharp burn melted into something deeper as she yielded. Mariana closed her eyes and breathed through her mouth, letting her body open millimeter by millimeter until it took him all in.

“It’s too much,” she moaned, but she did not say the word. Not even close.

“I know,” Tobías answered, and began to move with a slow, firm rhythm.

The doctor climbed onto the gurney in front of her. He lifted her hips, found her soaked entrance, and entered in one thrust. Mariana threw her head back and a long sound slipped from her throat.

Then the two of them found the beat. One pulled out while the other pushed in, and she was trapped between them, filled from one side and the other, with not a single gap left for thought.

“Is this what you wanted?” the doctor asked in her ear, his hand closing just slightly around her throat, just enough to narrow the world. “For someone else to decide for you?”

“Yes,” she begged, moving her hips to meet them. “Harder. Use me.”

The first orgasm hit her like a wave she never saw coming and made her clench around both of them at once. The second, almost on top of it, was deeper and left her trembling. When she began to feel the third rising, she could no longer tell where one ended and the other began, or whether the moans filling the room were hers or theirs.

Tobías sped up, his breathing turning ragged against the back of her neck.

“I’m going to come,” he growled. “Take it all.”

“Me too,” said the doctor, driving in deeper, his voice finally losing the control he had held all night.

They finished almost at the same time, and Mariana felt the heat flooding her from within while a final shiver ran through her from head to toe. She lay sprawled on the cold metal, exhausted, with a smile she could not erase.

“More,” she murmured, almost voiceless. “Don’t stop.”

The doctor stepped away and began to rearrange his coat, calm again, once more the man from the file.

“This is only the beginning,” he said. “Tomorrow you’ll break the rules again. And we’ll correct you again.”

She closed her eyes, her body still throbbing with echoes. In the dimness of Valverde Clinic, with her skin marked and her throat dry, Mariana knew one thing with absolute certainty: for nothing in the world did she intend to be cured.