I Let Him In One Afternoon and Lost Everything in an Hour

Camila left school at one o’clock sharp, like every midday, with Sofía and Bruno hanging from her hands. Ten years old, one and the other eight, both talking at the same time to tell her what had happened at recess. She listened halfheartedly, nodded a lot, and inside thought about the lunch list and the stack of notebooks she still had to grade that afternoon.

She was a happy woman. Anyone looking at her from the outside would have said so. Married to Mateo for twelve years, two healthy children, a house in a quiet neighborhood, and a teaching job that left her afternoons free. Nothing spectacular, but she lacked nothing either. That noon, while serving noodles with meat sauce and listening to Bruno explain an entire chapter of a Japanese anime she didn’t even pretend to understand, she felt, once again, grateful.

When the kids finished eating and went off to their rooms to do homework, her cell phone rang on the counter. It was Mateo.

“Hi, love,” she said, drying her hands on the dish towel.

“How are my three favorite people?”

“Good. They’re eating ice cream, I’m finishing up the dishes. I was thinking of going for a jog for a while before grading notebooks.”

There was a brief pause. Then Mateo’s voice dropped a shade and became that cautious thing she had known for four months.

“Are you going to see him?”

“No, Mateo. I swear on our children. What happened with Damián was a horrible mistake, one afternoon, and it’s over. I don’t have his number, I never want to see him again. You decided to forgive me and I’ll be grateful to you for the rest of my life.”

“Then why don’t you stay home with them?”

“Because I need to move around for a bit. Turn on the locator if you want. You’ll see I’ll be on the move the whole time, and at five I’ll be back.”

“All right. Sorry. It’s just that it still hurts.”

“I know. And that’s why tonight I’m going to show you again that you’re the only thing I want. I have a surprise for you.”

She hung up and stood there for a while staring at the cell phone on the counter. Her heart was pounding in her throat. It wasn’t fear. It was the other thing, the thing she had spent months trying to kill and never managed to let die completely. Down between her legs, without asking permission, she was already starting to get wet just thinking about Damián’s mouth.

***

Damián Robles lived in a weekend house on the edge of the lake, twenty minutes by car from downtown. She had driven there only once, in February, after a party where he had cornered her against the garden fence and whispered in her ear, slowly, exactly what he planned to do to her if she let him in. He had told her he was going to rip her panties off with his teeth, fuck her ass until she cried, fill her mouth with cum and make her swallow it all while looking him in the eye. That night she had gone home trembling, her panties soaked and stuck to the lips of her cunt, her legs still weak from cumming twice on his cock. The next day, in a burst of stupid honesty, she told Mateo. She told him about the fence, about the whispering, about the two hours in Damián’s bed, how he had fucked her in four different positions, how she had sucked his cock down to the back of her throat and how she had let him finish inside her without protection. Mateo shut himself in the guest room for three days and then came out saying he forgave her, once, and never again.

That noon, while changing out of her running clothes into the blue dress she only wore for him, she promised herself this was truly the last time. One hour. A formal goodbye. She needed to tell him to his face, with the door closed and the bed in the background, so that the strength of not sleeping with him would be worth something. It was a logic that didn’t hold up and she knew it perfectly well, but she still grabbed the car keys. She put on a black lace panty and no bra, because deep down she knew perfectly well what she was dressing for.

Before leaving, she stuck her head into Sofía’s room.

“I’ll be back in an hour. Mom’s going running. Don’t open the door to anyone.”

“Okay,” the girl answered, not looking up from her notebook.

Bruno, from the room next door, asked her for a glass of milk later. Camila told him she’d leave it on the counter. She did. She locked the front door with two turns of the key. The last thing she saw was Sofía’s fringe bent over the graph paper.

***

Damián was waiting at the door, barefoot, wearing an open shirt and that smile she already knew. He didn’t let her speak. He took her by the nape as soon as she crossed the threshold and kissed her like he’d been planning it for weeks, shoving his tongue deep into her mouth while with his other hand he squeezed one breast over the blue dress. She tried to say something, to tell him she had come to end it, but he had already slid his hand under her skirt and was running two fingers over the lace of her panty, feeling how soaked she was.

“Look at how you came, you whore,” he told her in her ear, pressing his whole palm against her pussy. “You came to say goodbye and your cunt’s already leaking.”

Camila tried to answer but he pulled her panty to the side and shoved two fingers inside her with one thrust. She arched her back against the door and dug her nails into his shoulders. The blue dress was lying in the hallway a minute later. The black lace panty, in shreds, on the kitchen floor. The bracelet, farther on. Damián kept pushing her naked through the living room to the sofa, never stopping moving his fingers inside her, and when he sat her down with a yank he spread her legs wide and dropped to her cunt with his mouth open.

He sucked her lips one by one, slowly, savoring her, while she gripped the back of the sofa with both hands and begged him not to stop. He drove his tongue between the folds, brought it up to her clit and left it there, sucking with his lips and flicking the tip with his tongue, until Camila started shaking. Then he slid in two fingers and kept sucking her clit at the same time, searching for the spot inside her with his fingertips, and she came in three minutes, moaning the way she hadn’t moaned in years, pressing his head against her cunt so he wouldn’t pull away.

“Damián, please,” she gasped, her belly still clenched, “we need to talk.”

“We’ll talk later.”

He stood in front of her, opened his jeans, and took out his cock, thick, hard, throbbing, pointing it at her face. Camila looked at it for a second and then did exactly what she knew she was going to do from the moment she got in the car. She leaned forward, took his cock with both hands, and shoved it into her mouth down to her throat. She sucked the head first, circling it with her tongue, then went down the whole shaft shaking her head, then licked his balls one by one while working his cock with her hand. Damián grabbed her hair and started setting the rhythm, fucking her mouth standing up, looking down at her from above.

“Like that, like that, swallow it all,” he said. “Look at how you suck it, teacher. If your students could see you.”

She looked up at him with eyes full of tears and saliva, and inside she hated herself and inside she didn’t want it to end ever. Damián pulled away before he came, lifted her from the sofa, turned her around, and shoved her face-down onto the living room rug. He lifted her ass with both hands, got himself behind her, and shoved all of him in at once, without warning. Camila screamed into the rug. He grabbed her hair with one hand and her waist with the other, and started fucking her from behind with long, deep thrusts, making her ass bounce against his pelvis, forcing her to arch.

“Tell me you’re my whore,” he said in her ear, yanking her hair back. “Say it.”

“I’m your whore,” she panted.

“Whose cunt is this?”

“Yours. It’s yours, Damián, it’s all yours.”

“And Mateo?”

“Mateo doesn’t get this. Mateo doesn’t.”

He drove his cock to the hilt as he said it and she came again, squeezing his cock with her cunt, biting her arm so she wouldn’t scream too loud. Damián turned her over on the rug, spread her legs until he could rest them on his shoulders, and dropped onto her. He shoved his cock in again, now face-to-face, and started moving slowly, pulling all the way out to shove all the way back in, looking into her eyes the whole time. He grabbed her tits with both hands, leaned down, and bit her nipples one by one while she dug her heels into his back so he wouldn’t stop.

He fucked her like that for a long twenty minutes, changing the rhythm, pulling out to drag the tip across her clit, shoving back in when she could no longer take it. He put her on her side, spooning, and lifted her leg to ram her from behind while rubbing her clit with two fingers. He sat her on top of him on the sofa and made her ride him, gripping her ass with both hands, burying his face between her tits. He laid her on her back on the rug and put her legs straight up, pressed together against his chest, and drove into her deeply while squeezing her ankles.

She came four more times. Lost count. At some point she asked, without any shame at all, for him to finish on her face, and he knelt her in front of the sofa again, shook his cock two inches from her open mouth, and emptied all his semen onto her, over her lips, over her tongue, over her cheeks and chin. Camila opened her eyes, looked up at him with her face dripping, and swallowed what had fallen into her mouth without taking her eyes off him.

When they were done, the two of them lay on their sides on the rug staring at the ceiling, and Damián ran a finger over her hip as if signing her.

“Stay until tonight,” he said.

“I can’t. The kids are alone.”

“One more hour.”

“Half.”

He gave her half. Then another half. In that half he fucked her again on her knees on the bathroom floor, both of them looking at themselves in the mirror, and she saw her face and neck covered in marks and still couldn’t stop. In the last half he ate her out all over again until he made her cum sitting on his face. When she looked at the living room clock it was 9:45 p.m., and she was still naked on his sofa, with semen drying in her hair. She dressed on shaky legs, rinsed her mouth in the bathroom, drove back with frozen hands on the wheel and eyes full of tears. The phone vibrated nonstop in her bag. She didn’t look at it once.

***

Three blocks from her house she heard the first siren. Two blocks away, the second. One block away she saw the smoke.

The front of her house was gone. Where the kitchen window had been, there was a black hole, and firefighters were dragging a hose across the neighbor’s yard. Camila got out of the car without fully braking. A policeman grabbed her arms before she could go in.

“My children! My children are inside! Let me through!”

What the firefighter told her after that, what the doctor told her when he sat her in the ambulance, what they told her the next day in the hospital when she woke up, she heard all of it as if it were happening underwater. Gas leak. Automatic water heater. Spark. Explosion at 9:56. No one had managed to get out. The two children, in their beds.

Mateo arrived at the hospital half an hour after her, white-faced, with his shirt collar still wrinkled from the trip. He looked at her from the doorway of the room and said nothing. Just looked. Camila began to tremble and did not stop for three days.

***

On the fourth day she went silent.

On the fifth, a woman showed up at the police station. She said her name was Renata Aguirre, said she had been Damián Robles’s lover for two years, and said she felt, in part, responsible. She told how Damián always chose married women, how he worked them for months, how he boasted about them with his friends, describing in vivid detail how he fucked them, what he did to each one, which was the sluttiest, which sucked his cock best. She told them about the February party. She told them what Damián had said about the blue dress, and the teacher’s cunt, and how he was going to fuck her that afternoon in the living room with the cuckold husband turning on the locator from his office. The chief called Mateo. Mateo listened for two straight hours without drinking water and without blinking, while on a screen the cameras from the nightclub played where Camila had let herself be cornered the first time, letting him slip his hand under her skirt against the garden fence.

When he left the station, he drove to a house in the outskirts where a brother-in-law had kept a pistol for years. He asked to borrow it, without explaining why. Then he drove to the lake.

Damián was no longer there. It took him three weeks to find him, in another city, in another house, eating on the sidewalk outside a bar at noon. Mateo crossed the street, stood behind him, and emptied the magazine into his back. Witnesses said he kept pulling the trigger for several seconds afterward, with no bullets left, with no one left to kill.

They gave him fifteen years. The judge did not accept the mitigating circumstance of emotional disturbance. Mateo did not appeal.

***

Camila never came back.

That is, her body kept breathing, eating when they brought the spoon close, walking when someone guided her by the hand. But the woman who had stepped out of the car in front of the burning house never appeared again. They admitted her to a neuropsychiatric hospital on the edge of the city, with a long diagnosis that Dr. Vergara, head of the service, tried to explain two years later to a Mateo who listened standing up, not sitting down, not taking off his jacket.

“Severe dissociative disorder,” the doctor said. “She lives inside a day that repeats itself. The day she believes she should have lived.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Look at this video.”

On the screen, Camila got up at 7:30 in the morning in a room in the ward. She dressed herself, went out into the corridor, entered an empty room where, with gestures, she woke two invisible children, gave them breakfast, took them by the hand down the hall as if escorting them to school. At eleven she went back to her room to cook an imaginary lunch. At one o’clock she sat down to eat with two empty chairs in front of her and laughed to herself, nodded, answered, scolded an invisible Bruno for talking with his mouth full.

“At three she goes out to the inner courtyard and jogs for twenty minutes,” the doctor went on. “At night she puts on a nightgown she made herself out of sheets, lies down, and says her husband is beside her. She talks to you. She asks your forgiveness. She promises you that tonight she’s going to give you something she never gave you. She opens the nightgown, touches her tits, opens her legs under the sheet, and masturbates calling your name, asking you to fuck her like you never fucked her before, promising you her ass, her mouth, everything she gave the other man. She comes crying, every night, alone. And then she falls asleep.”

Mateo didn’t say anything for a long while.

“When does she wake up?”

“At seven thirty. Again.”

“Every day.”

“Every day.”

“And if I bring her, if she sees me, would that get her out of the loop?”

“There’s a possibility. It’s the only one, really. That’s why I called you.”

Mateo stayed looking at the screen, where Camila was laughing with two children who weren’t there.

“I’m not coming, doctor,” he said at last, with an oddly serene voice. “Don’t worry. As long as she stays like this, I won’t touch her. But the day she heals, the day she opens her eyes and realizes where she is and what she did, I’m going to get out of prison and finish what I started with Damián. Let me know before then, if you can, so I don’t arrive by surprise.”

He shook the doctor’s hand and left.

***

Camila is still there. Every morning she gets up and prepares breakfast for two children who burned to death in a bed four years ago. Every afternoon she goes out to run twenty minutes in a courtyard fenced with wire. Every night she lies down with a husband serving a sentence two hundred kilometers away and begs his forgiveness with her whole body, spreads her legs beneath the sheet nightgown and comes by herself calling his name, promising him that tonight she’s going to give him something he hasn’t wanted for a long time anymore.

Mateo, in his cell, every night before sleeping, does exactly the same thing Dr. Vergara does: he asks God that his wife never heal. Because he still loves her, yes. But he already promised his children, and himself, how this story ends the day she comes back.