My nanny stayed the week my wife traveled

Lorena left on a Tuesday morning with her face puffy from crying. Her mother was having heart surgery the next day, and my mother-in-law was already there waiting for her, so she took the little one and a bag with just enough for a week, maybe two. I stood in the doorway watching the taxi turn the corner and felt, before anything else, a relief I shouldn’t have felt.

I work from home on the days I can, and that whole week I was going to be at the desk in the back. I thought I’d take the chance to sleep late, eat junk, blast music she doesn’t like at an indecent volume. Nothing more. I wasn’t planning the other thing. I’m thirty-six, I’ve been married nine years to a beautiful woman, one of those women who walk into a room and rearrange the air, and never, until that Wednesday, had I even seriously fantasized about cheating on her.

Camila showed up early Wednesday. We’d hired her a little over a year earlier to look after the little one Monday through Friday and help us around the house. Camila is twenty, studies international business on Saturdays at a private university downtown, and lives with two cousins in a studio apartment near the bus terminal. She’s skinny, dark-skinned, with black hair always tied back in a high ponytail, and when she laughs she gets two dimples. Until that Wednesday I saw her the way I see the girl at the corner kiosk: a young person doing her job, someone I greeted with a kiss on the cheek and texted happy birthday when the time came.

She rang the bell at nine. I was still in shorts and a T-shirt, unshaven, with the mate thermos in my hand.

—Hello, doctor —she said, laughing. She always called me “doctor” as a joke because she’d once seen me in pajamas with my glasses crooked.

—Hi, Cami. Come in. But I warn you, there isn’t much to do.

Lorena had called her the day before to ask her to help me out for a few days with cleaning and food, since I was going to be alone. Camila put her bag on the entry bench and started taking out products. She tied on the apron and began sweeping the living room as if the house were hers. I sat down in the dining room to answer emails, but every so often I looked up. I watched her bend down to gather dust from the baseboards, stretch up to dust the picture frames, and for the first time I consciously noticed the shape of her legs inside her gym pants, the split line of her ass clenched under the thin fabric, the way the pants rode up into her crack every time she leaned over. I got hard right there in the dining room, mate in hand, and had to cross my legs.

Midmorning I offered her a coffee. We sat at the long table and I asked her about university. She told me she was sitting two finals and that Marketing was giving her hell. I laughed because I’d studied the same thing fifteen years ago. I offered to help her with her notes that night, if she wanted, and saw her face light up.

—Really? I swear I’m desperate.

—Really. But let’s finish this first. Did Lorena tell you exactly what to do?

—Clean, cook, the usual.

—Forget it. There’s nobody to look after today and the house was cleaned four days ago. I’m taking you to lunch. After that I’ll take you back to the apartment, you’ll sleep a while, and tonight, if you want, you can come back with your notes.

She accepted with a shrug that was anything but innocent, though I didn’t understand it then. I told her to change if she wanted, that the apron didn’t suit the place we were going. She went to the bathroom and came back wearing a black skirt to the knee and a white blouse she’d left on top of her backpack that morning. She’d let her hair down. She was another person. Or the same one, finally seen.

***

The place I took her wasn’t for quick lunches. It was a grill with tables in the garden, where Lorena and I used to go when we had an anniversary. I ordered a bottle of malbec, and the waiter’s eyes, which knew me, asked me a thousand questions with one look. I held his gaze as if everything were in order.

Camila had tasted wine two or three times in her life, she said. By the second glass she was telling me about the boyfriend she’d left at eighteen because he cheated on her with her best friend. By the third she asked me what it was like to be married so long without getting bored. By the fourth I had taken her hand over the tablecloth and she hadn’t let go.

—Where are we going? —she asked when I paid the bill.

—Wherever you want.

—Take me to your house. And fuck me.

She said it without blinking, with wine-bright eyes and a barely there smile. And there I knew the decision had been hers long before mine.

***

We went upstairs without speaking. I locked the door with two turns, as if the whole neighborhood were spying on us. Camila took off her shoes in the entryway and walked barefoot to the middle of the living room. She turned and waited for me. I moved toward her with a slowness I didn’t remember in myself, pushed the hair off her neck, and kissed her right below the ear. She let out a short sigh, almost a laugh, and grabbed my shirt with both hands.

I kissed her mouth for the first time right there, standing in the middle of the living room, and it was an ugly kiss, with teeth, with full tongue, a kiss between two people who had been wanting to do it for months without knowing it. I slid my hand under her blouse and grabbed one breast over the bra. She grabbed my cock over my pants and squeezed, and I groaned like an idiot against her neck.

—You’re rock hard —she whispered—. A little while ago in the car I already wanted to suck you.

—Saying it like that kills me.

—I’ll suck you later. First take me to bed.

I picked her up and carried her to the bedroom. Not the guest room. To the marital bed, the one I’ve shared with Lorena for nearly a decade, with her perfume still on the pillow on the left side. I laid Camila on the right side, mine, and undid her blouse button by button. She had a gray sports bra, unpadded, and beneath it two small, firm breasts, with dark, hardened nipples. I ran my mouth over the fabric until she begged me to take it off. When I finally tore off the bra and buried my tongue in her nipple, she arched her back and dug her nails into my neck.

—Nobody’s touched me in a long time —she told me in my ear as I pulled down her skirt—. Nobody’s touched me seriously in a long time.

The difference with my wife hit me with the first touch. Lorena is tall, with wide hips and full breasts I know by heart. Camila was the opposite: light, angular, with skin the color of strong tea and a smell of white soap and something else, something young and animal, under her clothes. She didn’t shave her pubic hair. She had a dense triangle of black hair and the inner lips completely bare, perfectly outlined, dark. I opened her legs, my hands on the inner part of her thighs, and stared at her wet pussy, shining, with the lips already swollen from wanting.

—Don’t look so much —she said, and laughed nervously, covering her face with her arm.

—I’m going to look as much as I want.

I lowered my head and ran my tongue over her whole cunt, from bottom to top, from the asshole to the clit, and she stopped breathing for a full two seconds. Then she started moaning in short, sharp bursts, as if surprised each time. I licked her clit, first gently, then harder, while I slid two fingers inside her and searched for that spongy spot deep inside that makes women jump. When I found it, her whole body began to tremble. I hooked my free arm over her stomach to hold her still, because she was sliding off the bed, and drove my fingers deeper, curling them, while I kept licking her clit without mercy.

—I’m coming, I’m coming, I’m coming —she repeated three times, each one higher, and came screaming, with her legs closed around my head and her heels dug into the sheet.

When I lifted my face, my mouth and beard were soaked with her. Camila laughed with glassy eyes and beckoned me with one finger.

—Come here. Come here. Take everything off.

I knelt on the bed and took off my shirt, my pants, my briefs. My cock twitched when it sprang free, hard, the tip red and a drop of pre-cum hanging from it. Camila sat up, took it in both hands, and looked at it for a second like someone judging the size of a package.

—It’s bigger than that asshole I told you about —she said, and before I could laugh she took it all into her mouth.

I felt the back of her throat with the tip. Her eyes filled with tears but she didn’t pull away. She sucked slowly at first, lubricating it with saliva, and then started pumping with her hand while she sucked the head. I grabbed her high ponytail and used it like a handle. She moaned with her mouth full, approving. When I put my hand on her nape and pushed, she let me, and I slid in until the veins in her neck swelled.

—Enough, enough, I’m going to come —I told her, moving her hair aside.

She pulled off with a string of saliva hanging from her lower lip and smiled.

—Come fuck me. I can’t take it anymore.

I laid her on her back, spread her legs, and drove into her in one thrust. She was so wet there was no resistance. I felt her tight cunt squeezing me all the way, hot, pulsing around my cock, and that first time was quick. Too quick. I was so turned on I’d barely moved my hips five or six times when I already felt the lightning strike at the base of my back. I tried to pull out and she locked her legs around my waist.

—Inside. Come inside. I’m on the pill.

I came inside her with a guttural groan I didn’t recognize as mine, feeling every convulsion empty into her cunt, and collapsed on top of her apologizing like a teenager. She laughed, kissed my forehead, and told me we had all night. All week, really. I stayed inside until I went soft, and when I pulled out, a strand of semen and her juices dripped from my glans to the sheet. Camila looked at it, hooked her finger in it, put it in her mouth.

—Delicious —she said, and smiled at me with that bad-girl face that from that day on would no longer let me sleep in peace.

***

I’m not exaggerating when I say that in the seventy-two hours that followed we left the apartment only twice, and to buy food. Camila never went back to hers. She asked her cousins for permission under the excuse of a university project and brought a backpack with three changes of clothes, of which she used half. The other half of the time she was naked. She swept naked, cooked naked, replied to a voice message from her mother naked by the window. I worked with my laptop on the dining room table, in my underwear, and every twenty minutes she’d come up behind me, bite my neck, and drag me to the sofa, or the floor, or the kitchen.

Once I fucked her against the kitchen marble while the noodles boiled. I lifted her ass, spread her open with both hands, spit on her asshole, and drove into her cunt in one thrust. She held onto the sink and pushed back. Fucking standing up, bent over, with steam rising from the pot between us, skin sticky with heat, I saw her come all over in the microwave reflection: mouth open, small breasts bouncing every time I slammed into her, eyes half-closed. I put a finger in her ass while I kept fucking her and she clenched so hard I almost came right there. I pulled her hair, bent her further against the marble, and she came screaming my name while the noodle timer started going off. I pulled out and shot all over her back, a long stream that ran down her spine to the crease of her ass. We ate the overcooked noodles, laughing like two teenagers.

We got to nine times in one night. Then we stopped counting. I started doing things I’d never proposed with Lorena, not for lack of desire but because of some clumsy kind of respect. With Camila I asked without filters and she said yes to everything. She sucked me while looking me in the eye and swallowed everything I gave her. Once I asked her to take it all in her mouth without pulling off, and she held my gaze while her cheeks swelled, then swallowed and showed me her clean tongue and smiled. She let herself be turned over and let me enter her ass slowly, first one finger, then two, then all of me, with as much patience as I could gather. The first time I tore her ass open she had her face smashed into the pillow, complaining, and two minutes later she was asking for more, voice trembling, while she rubbed her clit with her lower hand. She came with my cock all the way in her ass, clamping down on me as if she didn’t want to let me out. Then she laughed into the pillow and asked me for water.

I discovered she liked dirty talk. That she liked being called a slut, liked being told she was mine, liked hearing horrible things in her ear while I fucked her. The worse I spoke to her, the wetter she got. I also discovered she liked watching herself. I put a long mirror leaning against the closet door and fucked her in front of it, both of us kneeling, her sitting on my cock, watching her breasts bounce, watching my cock go in and out of her hairy cunt, mouth open, hypnotized. “Look how I’m fucking you,” I told her. “Look how much of a whore you get,” and she came three times in a row, each one harder than the last, squeezing me so tightly she finally squeezed out everything I had inside.

One afternoon, while I was showering, she opened Lorena’s closet and tried on a blue lace set my wife kept for anniversaries. The cups were too big and the waist too small, ridiculous and obscene at the same time. She stood in the bathroom doorway with her hands on her hips and asked me what I thought. I thought I was being the worst man in the world. I thought it clearly, like a prayer written on the wall, and even so I grabbed her hair, turned her against the sink, and tore it off with my teeth. I ripped the lace panties in one pull, left them hanging from one ankle, and fucked her right there, with water still dripping off my body, seeing both of us in the medicine cabinet mirror. She gripped the sink with both hands and let herself get fucked standing up, on tiptoe, her tits swaying inside another woman’s bra.

—Tell me I’m better than she is —she begged, looking at me in the mirror, her voice breaking with every thrust.

I said it. I told her while looking her in the eye, while fucking her harder, while the blue bra of my wife slid down to her waist and her breasts were left out, red, nipples standing up. I dug my fingers into her hip and came inside her for the umpteenth time that week, my face against her neck, smelling her sweat mixed with Lorena’s perfume that had remained on the silk of the bra. When I pulled out, everything spilled down the insides of her thighs. She wiped herself with my towel and hung the set back in its place, wrinkled and used, without washing it.

***

Lorena called me every night. Her mother’s surgery had gone well, but recovery was slow and she was going to stay longer than expected. She asked me if I was eating, if I’d remembered to pay the electricity bill, if Camila had come to clean.

—Yes, she came a couple of times —I’d say with Camila’s hand on my thigh, under the table, moving up toward the open fly—. Then I sent her back to her town, there wasn’t much to do.

—You’re a sweetheart. Tell her I’ll pay her for the week anyway.

Camila would take me in her mouth while I talked to my wife, and she’d suck me slowly, without a sound, her eyes locked on mine, smiling every time my voice cracked. I’d hang up after three minutes and grab her head and push her all the way to the throat and come in her mouth without saying a word. She’d stand up, kiss me with her mouth still full, and pass my semen between her lips like it was a shared secret. Then I’d stay with my head buried between Camila’s small breasts for long minutes, in silence, feeling her pulse at the same time as mine.

On Saturday night we went to a Peruvian restaurant on the other side of town, where nobody knew us. We ate ceviche, drank pisco sours, and talked about life with the intimacy of two people who had known each other for ten years. Camila told me that when she was a kid she wanted to be a vet but she wasn’t any good at math. I told her things I’d never told Lorena: about the father who left when I was seven, about the absurd fear of going bald, about the feeling that adult life was one long office with good heating.

We got back by taxi holding hands. That night was different. Slower. Quieter. I undressed her slowly in the bedroom, laid her on her back, and spent a full hour tracing her with my mouth. I sucked each nipple one by one, ran my tongue over her belly button, bit the inner sides of her thighs until I left marks. I opened her cunt with two fingers and licked inside with the tip of my tongue, searching every fold. I sucked her clit until she came twice in a row against my mouth, grabbing my hair. Then I climbed on top of her slowly, kissed her to taste her, and slid in while looking her in the eyes. I pushed into her slowly, all the way, and stayed still inside for a long moment. Then I started moving slowly, very slowly, never pulling all the way out, feeling how her cunt tightened little by little each time I pushed to the bottom. She wrapped me in her legs and arms and looked at me the way no one had looked at me in years. We came together, almost without a sound, looking at each other, and for the first time in many years I wasn’t thinking of anything except the body under mine.

After that we stayed wrapped around each other, sweaty, not speaking. I kept my cock inside her until it softened and slipped out on its own, with a soft splash. She laughed quietly against my neck and called me a “son of a bitch” with a tenderness that split me in half.

***

The following Wednesday Lorena told me she was coming back Friday. Twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours to erase ten days.

Camila started washing everything as soon as she heard the news. Sheets, pillowcases, towels, tablecloths. She vacuumed every corner, washed the glasses from the dishwasher by hand, aired out the closets. I took care of the bathroom and of throwing away the wine bottles in the next block’s container. We worked in silence, efficient, as if we’d done it all our lives.

That same afternoon, though, when we were changing the pillowcases for the second time, she came up behind me with a pillowcase in her hand and put it around my neck, pulling gently, and whispered in my ear, “one more.” We fucked standing up against the bedroom window, looking out at the patio, with the blinds half lowered. I lifted her skirt and yanked off her panties in one pull, knelt, sucked her cunt until she began trembling, then stood her up, put her against the glass, and took her from behind. Fucked knowing it was the last time, or at least the last time in that bed, in that house like that, had something electric about it. She came biting the window frame, and I came in her ass, a stream that ran down her crack to the backs of her thighs. Then I cleaned her with a towel, we threw the towel away, threw away the last sheets, and washed everything from scratch again.

Thursday night we slept embracing each other without sex. Friday at six in the morning I left her at the terminal with a long kiss on the mouth and the stupid promise that we’d find a way. Lorena’s flight landed at ten.

I went to pick her up. I hugged her at the airport, kissed her forehead like I always did, grabbed the suitcase with both hands, and took her to the car. On the way she told me about the hospital, about her mother’s slow awakening, about the woman in the room next door who spent her time praying out loud. I nodded, asked the right questions, drove with only one detour of the heart every so often.

***

It’s been three months since then. Camila came back the following Monday, with her apron and high ponytail, and we greeted each other with a kiss on the cheek under Lorena’s distracted gaze. Since then we’ve looked at each other. We’ve learned to look at each other without it showing. When she goes out to the produce market, Camila slips into the study, closes the door, kneels between my legs, and gets me off in two minutes with her mouth, swallowing everything, wiping herself with the back of her hand, and going back to the living room before the key turns in the lock. Other times she lifts my T-shirt, sits on my lap in the desk chair, slides her panties to the side and lowers herself onto me on her own, silently, biting my shoulder so she won’t scream, moving only a little, until both of us come at the same time, eyes closed and ears alert to the sound of the door. Once a week, if we’re lucky, we manage forty minutes in a downtown hotel, and there we make up for everything: I strip her as soon as we walk in, throw her on the bed, fuck her in three or four positions, spit on her, open her up, put my fingers in her mouth, make her come two or three times, come on her face or her ass or her cunt depending on my mood, and then we shower in a hurry and go back to our lives with the smell still between our legs.

I don’t know how this will end. Sometimes I feel like the worst person on the planet and other times I think I’m more alive than ever. Lorena suspects nothing or, worse, suspects and doesn’t want to know. Camila is twenty and has her whole life ahead of her, and one day she’ll get tired of me and leave, and I’ll cry like an idiot on a park bench. In the meantime, when she leaves in the afternoon and that smell of white soap hangs in the air, I sit on the marital bed where everything began, look at the pillow on the left side, and finally understand what the word desire means when spoken in a low voice.