When the Master of My House Met My Girlfriend

Nikolaj arrived in October, when the leaves in the park had already turned the color of rust and the cold was beginning to settle into our bones. My mother, Renata, brought him home the way someone brings home a problem they actually consider a solution.

He was Serbian. Forty-two years old, with hair that was almost silver despite not yet being old, a square jaw, and a way of occupying space that made everyone else in the room feel superfluous. He owned a shop on the ground floor of the building: leather goods, handbags, belts, the occasional leather jacket. A modest business that he ran with quiet efficiency. My mother met him while going downstairs to buy bread one Tuesday morning. Fifteen days later, he was sleeping in her bed. Two months later, the dynamics of our home had changed in a way I still didn’t know how to name.

It wasn’t violence. There was never any violence. It was something else: the way Nikolaj looked at my mother when she talked too much, and she would close her mouth halfway through a sentence. The way he told her what she should wear before going out, what she should cook, what she could and couldn’t say when there were visitors. The way Renata received those instructions with a docility that was completely unrecognizable to me.

The woman who had raised me had disappeared. In her place was someone who nodded a lot and spoke little, who lowered her eyes when he entered a room and moved around him with the caution of someone who knew the consequences of making a mistake all too well.

I hated him with an intensity I found difficult to sustain. But Nikolaj had a way of disabling hatred before it could turn into action. It was like trying to fight smoke.

***

The change in my own situation happened gradually and deliberately.

Nikolaj began involving me. Not with threats, not abruptly. He did it with an overwhelming logic that presented everything as inevitable: things were simply going to happen anyway, and resisting was a waste of energy. That was his doctrine, implicit in every conversation, every glance.

One night, when I was nineteen and had spent four months watching that man dismantle my mother piece by piece, he called me into the living room. Renata was kneeling in front of him, naked from the waist up, her tits exposed and her nipples already hard. He made her raise her eyes and look at me, and there was no shame in that look but something more complicated: acceptance.

—From now on, there are two men in this house —Nikolaj said calmly—. When this boy comes home and needs your attention, you give it to him. No arguments. Your mouth, your cunt, your ass, whatever he wants. Understood?

My mother nodded without saying a word.

—Say it out loud.

—Understood —she said, in a voice I didn’t recognize.

That same night, Renata came into my room with that new docility. She didn’t knock. She slipped in like a shadow, closed the door behind her with a care that seemed rehearsed, and stood at the foot of the bed waiting for an order. She was wearing a thin robe, with nothing underneath. Her nipples showed through the fabric, and I realized I had spent half my life without looking at her the way I was looking at her then.

She knelt without anyone telling her to. She brought her hands to the robe’s tie and undid it slowly, letting the fabric fall open to her waist. Her tits were heavier than I remembered, round, with dark nipples already hard from the cold or fear or something else I didn’t dare name. She looked at me with eyes that were no longer my mother’s, but those of someone who had completely accepted her place in that hierarchy.

—Come here —I said, and my voice sounded hoarse, alien.

She obeyed. She crawled forward on her knees until she was between my legs and lowered her hands to my waistband without asking. She undid my pants with precise fingers, without fumbling, like someone who already knew what was expected of her. She pulled out my cock with a calmness that tightened my entire back: it was already hard, throbbing, pointing straight at the face of the woman who had given birth to me. She stared at it for a moment—just a moment—as if weighing a burden before accepting it. Then she lowered her head.

She licked the tip with her flat tongue, from bottom to top, and I clenched my teeth so I wouldn’t moan too loudly. She repeated the motion along its entire length, covering me in saliva, leaving me shiny and slippery. Her eyes never left mine for a single second. When she had wet my cock, she opened her mouth, licked her lips, and took me all the way in, to the hilt, until I felt it strike the back of her throat.

I put my hand on the back of her neck. It wasn’t a premeditated gesture—the body decided for me, as if that posture of surrender were asking exactly that of me. I grabbed the back of her neck with both hands, buried my fingers in her hair, and started moving her myself. Back and forth. I fucked her mouth slowly at first, gauging how much she could take, and she swallowed everything. Every time I pushed my cock all the way down, I heard a wet slapping sound, that raw and magnificent noise of deep oral sex, and she didn’t protest. Her eyes watered, her mascara ran in dark trails down her cheeks, and she didn’t protest.

I started moving her faster. I pushed her head down and held it there for a few seconds with my cock buried to the bottom, letting her gag for a moment before releasing her so she could breathe. When I let her go, she drew deep breaths through her nose, swallowed, and lowered herself again of her own accord, seeking my cock with her mouth open like someone searching for air. Drool hung from her chin and fell in thick drops onto her tits, which moved with every thrust.

—Look at me —I said, almost voicelessly.

She raised her eyes. And in those eyes I saw confirmation of what Nikolaj had built: that woman was no longer my mother. She was a mouth. She was a warm place to empty what I carried inside me.

I came without warning. I gripped the back of her neck hard and poured my entire load straight into her throat, in thick spurts that made her gag a little, and she swallowed—swallowed everything, with the discipline of someone who knew spitting it out wasn’t one of the options. When I finally let her go, she stayed pressed to my cock, licking away what remained on my lips and at the corners, cleaning me completely, without missing a drop of semen. I came with that mixture of shame and desire I couldn’t separate, and still don’t know whether I’ve ever fully resolved.

Over the following months, the house developed its own rules. Rules that only Nikolaj understood in their entirety. I would come home from university, call her, and she would come. She came naked or nearly naked, depending on how I had woken up that morning. She would kneel in the hallway if I felt like pulling it out right there, and suck my cock against the wall with the same thoroughness with which other mothers prepared breakfast. Other times she followed me to the bedroom without asking, climbed onto the bed on all fours, and waited with her ass raised. I fucked her from behind, gripping her hips, watching her back arch and her tits move underneath her while her cunt squeezed my cock with the practiced skill of a mature woman who knew how to use her body. She came more than once if I ran my hand over her clit while I penetrated her, and when she came she bit her forearm to keep from screaming too loudly, although the moan escaped anyway and reached the nape of my neck like a shock.

Other times I took her to the master bedroom, positioned her wherever I wanted, and spent long stretches making her respond until she could no longer hold herself up. I ate her pussy with my face buried between her legs, sucking her lips, pushing my tongue as deep as I could until she covered her mouth with the pillow so she wouldn’t scream. Then I penetrated her on her back, her legs over my shoulders, watching her tits bounce with every thrust. I put her on all fours and fucked her while pulling her hair until her neck arched. Once I put my thumb in her ass while I had her from the front, and she let out a moan so raw, so animal, that the entire house seemed to hear it. I came inside her, in her mouth, on her tits, on her back, in her ass. She received every load as if it were a prize and not a discharge. Nikolaj never appeared. He knew when I was with her. And within those rules, Renata and I were pieces he moved with the calm of someone who was never in a hurry because he knew time was working for him.

There came a point when Renata stopped seeing me as her son. She told me one night in a low voice, as if naming something she had been thinking about for a long time:

—You’re no longer the child I raised. That’s over.

Nikolaj, from the sofa, raised his eyes from his book. He looked at both of us with that neutral expression of his. Then he went back to reading, as if it were no more relevant than the weather report.

***

Clara was the complete opposite of that house.

I met her at university, on a boring October afternoon that suddenly stopped being boring. She was petite, with dark shoulder-length hair and the kind of energy some people have that makes the space around them seem more alive. Determined, direct, with a kind of courage that wasn’t recklessness but simply clarity: she knew what she wanted and had no problem saying so.

I liked her from the very first moment, and that was exactly what paralyzed me.

I spent weeks without making a move. It was ironic: I, who had learned to fuck the woman who gave birth to me whenever I felt like it, was incapable of speaking clearly to a girl I was simply attracted to. We met up with a group of friends, then alone, in the abandoned park where people from the university went to talk without being interrupted. We sat there for hours. She told me real things. I told her filtered versions of myself.

She was the one who made the first move, one cloudy afternoon in December.

She took my hand, looked me in the eyes with that depth of hers, and said:

—I know you like me. And I know you won’t say anything because you’re indecisive. So I’ll say it. Do you want to be my boyfriend?

At the same time, I felt like the luckiest man in the world and the least deserving of being so. That emotional roller coaster hit me all at once, cracking something that had been fragile for a long time.

—Yes —I said—. I do.

She smiled in that broad, open way of hers, and something inside me clenched hard.

***

I kept her completely separate from my home life. It was a decision I made on the first day, and I guarded it with a vigilance bordering on paranoia.

We met on the corner of the building, never near the entrance. Clara knew nothing about Nikolaj. She knew nothing about Renata or what happened inside that apartment when the door closed. I needed that clean space, that place where I was simply Adrián, a nineteen-year-old boy going out with a girl he liked.

The problem was that this separation came at a cost I hadn’t calculated.

With Clara, I was awkward in a way I couldn’t understand. I had experience, acquired in a way I would never tell anyone about, under circumstances I would never repeat. And yet with her it was as if I were starting from zero. Every time things became intimate, my body didn’t respond as it should. The first time was in her bedroom, with the house empty; she sat on top of me with her skirt hiked up and her panties pulled to one side, searched for my cock with her hand, and found something soft and dead that didn’t react even when she bent down, took it entirely into her mouth, and began sucking me slowly, with her tongue and lips, with that careful tenderness that was worse than any reproach. She spent entire minutes sucking me without result. The second time was the same: I stripped her completely on the bed, licked her tits until I turned them red, kissed her pussy until I felt her tremble and arch against my mouth, and when the moment came to put it inside her, there was nothing to put in. She lay on her back staring at the ceiling and waited for me to get over it without saying anything. The third time was the same.

I convinced myself that if I arrived at our dates having released all the tension beforehand, the problem would disappear. I tried exactly that several times. I fucked Renata until I had emptied myself completely, came inside her, in her mouth, on her tits, and then went out to see Clara with my body apparently calm, thinking that now, finally, I’d be able to fuck her the way I wanted. It didn’t disappear. It was psychological, I knew that: the weight of what I carried, showing up precisely at the only moment when I was trying to be truly present.

Clara was beginning to notice. She didn’t say anything, but I could see it in the way she breathed afterward, in the silence that lasted a few seconds longer than usual before she said something kind. And I knew that she knew, which made everything worse. The distance between us was becoming tangible, a thing with a weight of its own that neither of us named.

***

The fateful Thursday began like any other.

I was in my room studying, my phone on silent for some reason I wouldn’t remember afterward. I was supposed to meet Clara on the corner at six. When I checked the time, I was forty minutes late. I got up from my chair.

I heard the doorbell before I reached my bedroom door. Then I heard Renata’s voice as she opened it.

—Come in.

I stepped into the hallway just as Clara crossed the threshold into the living room. She was wearing a short dark skirt, black ankle boots, and a camisole. She looked around the apartment with the natural curiosity of someone entering a place for the first time, while Renata watched her with that new expression of hers: calculating, neither warm nor hostile.

—Are you Adrián’s friend? —Renata asked.

—His girlfriend —Clara said, completely naturally.

I entered the living room, trying to control my expression. Trying to calculate how long we had before he appeared.

I had no time to calculate anything.

Nikolaj’s voice came from the kitchen before his body did.

—Company?

And he crossed the living room slowly. I watched him do what he always did: assess the room in less than three seconds. His gaze moved from me to Renata and then stopped on Clara with a particular attention that chilled my blood.

Clara looked at him too. It was inevitable. Nikolaj had that effect: he drew attention without asking for it, like a magnetic field that didn’t announce itself but was felt immediately.

He approached her without hurrying. He leaned in to kiss her on both cheeks, and I saw what always happened with him: that first physical contact he administered with a precision that was never accidental. The proximity of his body, the heat he generated, the way his presence settled in before the other person had time to process anything.

—I didn’t know Adrián had such a beautiful friend —he said. The words were banal. The way he said them wasn’t.

Clara held his gaze with that courage of hers that I normally loved and that terrified me at that moment. She didn’t step back. She didn’t lower her eyes. She stood completely still, looking at him, and Nikolaj smiled faintly, like someone recognizing something familiar.

I was standing in the entrance to the living room, completely paralyzed, watching the only clean space in my life become contaminated before my eyes without being able to do anything to stop it.

—I have the shop right downstairs —he said—. Leather goods. If you ever want to see something beautiful, stop by. I’ll reserve something special for you.

—Thank you —Clara said.

—We have to go —I said.

***

We went out into the street. Clara walked beside me in silence for a few yards.

—What a strange man —she said at last.

I stopped.

—Clara. I need to ask you something. I know it’s going to sound exaggerated, but it isn’t. Don’t ever come back to my house. And don’t go to that shop. Ever. Can you do that for me?

She studied me with the expression of someone trying to decipher what they weren’t being told.

—Are you all right?

—Yes. Just do me this favor.

She nodded. She took my hand, and we kept walking. I tried to convince myself that the boundary was still holding, that nothing fundamental had changed.

***

The following Monday, I left university in the middle of the day. Feverish, my head heavy as if my brain weighed twice what it normally did. I walked toward the building thinking only of getting there, lying down, closing my eyes.

I was halfway down the street when I saw the shutter of Nikolaj’s shop rising.

And I saw Clara come out.

She emerged with that smile of hers, the smile of someone who had found a conversation interesting. She headed in the opposite direction without looking toward where I was, completely unaware that I was standing there watching her.

I stood motionless on the sidewalk for an amount of time I couldn’t measure.

I didn’t feel anger yet. What I felt was something colder and deeper, like opening a door expecting to find a familiar room and discovering that you no longer recognized anything inside it.

The only space I had managed to keep clean had just been exposed.

And the conclusion was as simple as it was inevitable: this couldn’t go on. None of it could go on.