What the Nanny for My Youngest Son Cost Me

I always had a reputation for being a serious man. In the circles I moved in for thirty years, my surname conjured up an office with wood-paneled walls, contracts signed without witnesses, and favors collected in silence. I come from a modest family in the north. My father, an honest man to the point of pain, used to repeat words like decency and clean work. I escaped that world precisely because those ideas felt like a brake to me.

I studied law with the anger of someone who doesn’t want to go back to the village. I prospered defending businessmen who dodged taxes, construction firms that bribed inspectors, politicians who signed concessions in exchange for envelopes of cash. I was good at what I did and my fees went up every year. At thirty-two I married Beatriz, the youngest daughter of a Belgian textile industrialist who had settled in Madrid. We had four children: the marriage worked in the things it had to work for and failed at everything else.

Over the years, she and I learned to avoid each other in the hallways without making a sound, and that suited us both. The only thing that gave me real pleasure was making money and putting distance between myself and the vulgarity I came from. Clean money for me, dirty for anyone who looked at it too closely. While my clients closed deals in roadside brothels, I stayed in the office at nine at night drafting appeals to keep them from being convicted.

Sex was never a priority for me. I saw it as a distraction other people could afford, not me. Beatriz and I fucked twice a month, always in the same position, always with the lights off, and afterward she wiped herself with a tissue before turning her back to me. From those routine lay-ups came the kids in order: Mateo, the eldest; then Adrián; then Camila; and many years later, when we no longer expected it, Lucas arrived. The age difference with his siblings was enormous. I had already started going gray, she already had lines of fatigue around her eyes, and that pregnancy felt to us almost like an out-of-date joke. We did the math and decided to go ahead.

When Mateo was born, Beatriz took care of him herself. With the middle ones we hired an older woman who lived in a room at the back of the house, and when the boys grew up we let her go without much ceremony. I don’t even remember her name. For Lucas we had to find someone new. My wife handled that. One night, during a dinner where we barely spoke to each other, she announced between two spoonfuls of soup that she had already found a girl.

—She’s young, but the references are good —she said, without lifting her eyes from the plate.

—All right —I answered.

I didn’t ask anything else. The next day, when I got back from the office, I went up to Lucas’s room intending to give him a kiss before changing my jacket. I opened the door and found her there, sitting in the rocking chair beside the crib, my son asleep on her chest. She was stroking the back of his neck with her fingers as if she’d had him in her arms all her life.

—Good afternoon, sir —she said in a whisper.

—Good afternoon. What’s your name?

—Romina.

She must have been twenty-two or twenty-three. Brown hair pulled up in a messy bun, two loose strands falling over her ears. A white shirt tucked into a gray skirt that ended halfway down her thigh. Nothing flashy, nothing provocative. And yet, for years no woman had ever unsettled my pulse like that. I looked down at the boy, said some stupidity about how well she seemed to be taking care of him, and left the room feeling exposed. In the hallway I had half an erection just from looking at her cleavage over the baby’s head.

That night I dreamed about her. I dreamed I was fucking her against the wall of the baby’s room, with the gray skirt hiked up to her waist and the bun undone. I woke up with my cock so hard I had to go into the bathroom and jerk off standing over the sink, biting my forearm so I wouldn’t moan. I came in three hard pulls, with Beatriz snoring on the other side of the partition.

And the next day too.

Over the following weeks I kept looking for her all over the house. I waited for her on the stair landing, delayed going into the office on Saturdays so I’d run into her in the kitchen, invented excuses to go up to the baby’s room three times an afternoon. Romina noticed everything. Women always notice everything. And she started answering me with glances that lasted a second longer than necessary, with little smiles when she served me coffee, with the tip of her tongue peeking between her teeth when she bent down to pick up a toy and knew I was looking at her ass from the armchair. We never crossed a line that couldn’t have been repeated in front of my wife.

Until one Saturday in May.

***

Beatriz had left early with the three older kids. They were going to a horse fair on the outskirts and wouldn’t be back until dinner. I had announced, in a martyr’s tone, that I had to prepare a case for Monday. Lucas was napping and Romina was staying at the house in case he cried. I locked myself in the office with a stack of papers and opened the computer, but I didn’t read a single line. I’d been staring at the screen for fifteen minutes with a hard cock under my trousers when I got up, crossed the hall, and went up to the baby’s room.

She was there, sitting in the rocking chair, singing him a lullaby so softly it could barely be heard. Lucas slept with his mouth open and one fist near his cheek. Romina saw me come in, put a finger to her lips, and carefully got up to cover him with a blanket.

—Do you want me to make you something downstairs? —she asked in a very low voice, once we were in the hallway—. He hasn’t had anything to eat.

—That’s not your job, Romina.

—I don’t mind. A coffee? Tea?

—All right —I said—. I’ll come down with you.

I followed her down the stairs staring at her back and the way her skirt clung to her as she moved. You could make out the outline of her panties beneath the fabric and my mouth was watering. In the kitchen, she took two cups from the cabinet, put the coffeepot on the stove, and stood by the counter while I leaned against the doorway. We weren’t talking. Every time she lifted her eyes, she found me staring at her, and she’d lower them again with a smile she no longer bothered to hide.

—Why don’t we have it right here? —she asked.

—Whatever you prefer.

She poured the coffee into the cups. Her hand was trembling a little, or maybe it was my gaze that was trembling. When she leaned over to hand me mine, the coffeepot slipped from her fingers and the boiling stream spilled over her skirt, over her right thigh. She stepped back, set the pot on the marble, and gave a sharp exclamation.

—Are you all right?

—Yes, yes. It’s nothing.

—Let me see.

She braced herself on the counter, lifted her skirt with both hands to mid-hip, and showed me her leg. The fabric had absorbed almost all of it, but a red patch gleamed on the inside of her thigh, right where the skin was thinnest. I ran my fingers over it without thinking. The skin was hot, but the burn was slight. She didn’t move. She didn’t lower her skirt either. She lifted her eyes and looked straight at me, not smiling this time. I slid my hand two centimeters higher, until I brushed the edge of her white panties, and felt the heat of her cunt through the cotton.

All I had to do was take one step.

I took it.

***

I kissed her on the mouth like I hadn’t kissed anyone in fifteen years. She kissed me back, parting my lips with her tongue, pushing it all the way in, sucking on mine as if she’d been thinking about it for months. I grabbed her tits over her shirt and her nipples hardened instantly against my palm. Then she stopped being my son’s nanny and became something else. I lifted her up onto the counter, unbuttoned the first three buttons of her shirt, and yanked her tits out of her bra. They were small, firm, with dark, very hard nipples. I bent down to suck them one after the other, carefully biting the tip, and she dug her nails into my neck and arched her back against the tile.

—Fuck me, fuck me already —she panted—. I’ve been thinking about your cock for two months.

I finished hitching up her skirt and pushed her panties aside. She was soaked. Her cunt opened beneath the mass of brown hair, shiny, with swollen lips and a little stream of juice running down the inside of her thigh, right where the coffee had burned her. I ran two fingers through her slit and sank them in to the knuckle. She moaned with her mouth open against my shoulder. I pulled them out, shoved them back in, took out my two wet fingers and brought them to her lips. She sucked them while looking me straight in the eye, tongue out, like a professional slut.

I, still in my office shirt and trousers, loosened my belt with one hand. I unzipped my fly and pulled my cock out. The erection was that of a twenty-year-old boy, not a man who was already past fifty: hard all the way to my belly button, with the head swollen and a fat drop of pre-cum on the tip. That was the real surprise: discovering the body remembered. Romina grabbed it with her hand and took it into her mouth without even getting down from the counter. She leaned forward, opened her lips, and swallowed it to the root in one stroke. I felt it knock against the back of her throat. I had to brace both hands on the marble to keep from falling.

She sucked me for two or three minutes with a technique that didn’t belong to a twenty-three-year-old girl who took care of babies. She sucked, pulled back, licked the frenulum, slipped her tongue under the head, pushed her hair aside with one hand and squeezed my balls with the other. When she lifted her head, her cheeks were red and a strand of saliva hung from her chin to her nipple.

—Fuck me —she whispered in my ear, holding on to my shoulders—. Fuck me now. Put it in deep. Break me, fuck.

No woman had ever spoken to me like that. Beatriz, in fifteen years, had never used that word even as a joke. Romina repeated it three more times, through clenched teeth, while I grabbed her ass, pulled her to the edge of the counter, and drove my cock into her in one thrust. I felt her open around me, wet and burning, and let out a roar from the pit of my stomach. I shoved it in all the way, until my balls slapped the edge of the counter against her ass.

—Ah, shit —she panted—. It’s huge, sir, it’s really huge.

I started fucking her standing up, against the kitchen marble, with the coffeepot still dripping beside us. I held her by the waist with one hand and by the nape with the other, lifted her a little from the edge and let her drop back onto my cock. She dug her nails into my back under my shirt and tore off two buttons. Every time I buried myself in her, a muffled cry escaped her and her tits bounced against her chest. I grabbed one and twisted it without the slightest delicacy. She answered by biting my shoulder through my shirt.

—Turn me around —she asked—. Fuck me from behind, I want you to put it in from behind.

I lifted her down from the counter, turned her, and pressed her chest to the cold marble. I hoisted her skirt above her waist, ripped off her panties in one yank that left a red mark on her hip, and spread her legs apart with a knee. I grabbed her ass with both hands, pulled it apart, and drove it into her again to the hilt. I started fucking her from behind with all the force I had. Romina’s body bounced against the counter with every thrust, her nipples scraping the granite, her open hands searching for something to hold onto. I grabbed her hair, undoing her bun, and pulled her head back so I could hear her better.

—Like that, asshole, like that, keep going, don’t stop —she moaned—. Put it in more, deeper, tear my cunt apart.

I spat in the cleft of her ass and ran my thumb over her asshole, pressing just a little. She jerked and spread her legs wider. I sank my thumb in while still slamming into her with my cock. She let out a moan so deep it didn’t even sound like hers.

I forgot the contracts. I forgot Monday’s case. I forgot my wife at the horse fair, the three older kids eating sandwiches in the car, my partners, my crooked clients, the surname I had worked so hard to elevate. I only wanted to fuse myself to that girl, who was opening herself against the counter as if her life depended on it.

I lifted her, set her facing forward again, sat her on the edge, and fucked her in that position once more. She took my face in both hands and forced me to look at her while she bit her lower lip to keep from screaming. Her eyes were glassy and her pupils dilated. I rubbed her clit with my finger while I drove into her and she started trembling all over. I squeezed her throat with my left hand, not choking her, just holding it, and she closed her eyes and opened her mouth in an O.

She didn’t quite hold back. When she came, she moaned so loudly she woke Lucas upstairs. I felt her cunt clenching around my cock in three successive spasms, so strong they almost made me blow right then and there. I held back. I yanked out of her, grabbed my cock with my hand, and came over her tits, her belly, the patch of hair on her pubis. Thick hot spurts splashed up to her neck. She took two fingers of semen and brought them to her mouth, sucking them with half-closed eyes. We heard him through the ceiling, first a whimper, then full-on crying.

Romina stayed one more second wrapped around me, catching her breath, my semen sliding between her tits, and then she jumped down. She adjusted her skirt, wiped her stomach with a kitchen towel, buttoned her shirt, ran her hands through her hair, and went up the stairs two at a time. I stayed in the kitchen, fumbling with my belt with clumsy hands, my cock still dripping semen and juice over the open fly, staring at the coffee stain on the floor and the torn white panties by my feet as if they were evidence of a crime.

When she came back down ten minutes later, with Lucas in her arms, we were strangers again.

***

Two months later she waited for me at the office door. I was going out to lunch; she had come on foot from the house. I invited her for coffee at a discreet bar, and before the sugar arrived she told me she was pregnant.

I didn’t doubt it for a second. I didn’t try to talk her into anything either. There was no point tormenting myself over what we hadn’t done: a condom, pulling out, any textbook precaution that never even crossed our minds that Saturday in May. How could it have crossed our minds, when I had emptied my balls inside her like a kid. It had all been too beautiful to fix afterward. I asked her what she wanted to do and she said have it. I asked whether she wanted me to help her and she said yes, but in her own way.

I gave my surnames to the girl. Her name is Lucía and, at four years old, she is identical to me: the same high forehead, the same frown when she’s thinking. This, naturally, cost me my marriage. Beatriz did not break down or make a scene. She brought in her father’s lawyers and orchestrated a surgical divorce in which I lost the house, half the investments, and most of the firm I had built over twenty-five years. I didn’t complain. I knew who I was playing against.

I wanted to start a life with Romina. I suggested renting an apartment in another neighborhood, taking Lucía to school together, being something like a family. Romina smiled at me with an almost compassionate tenderness and said no, that it wouldn’t work, that things had happened as they were supposed to happen and that was that. Six months later she went to live with a Galician businessman, owner of three nightclubs on the coast, a forty-year-old guy with broad shoulders who parades her arm in arm through hotels I know too well. A pimp, in short.

Between Beatriz and Romina, between one set of lawyers and the other’s maintenance payments, they take my salary away by the spoonful. I accept it. I keep working, I keep defending the same kind of clients I defended before, I keep charging the same fees. The difference is that now, when I get home, no one is waiting for me, and Saturday afternoons have turned into a void.

Sometimes I think there’s no remedy for me. That I gambled my whole life on one fuck in a kitchen, with a nanny who didn’t even love me. And then I remember the coffeepot dripping, the reddened thigh, the taste of her nipples on my tongue, the way she sucked my fingers, her cunt gripping my cock, her voice asking me in my ear for what no one had ever asked me for before.

And I think yes, it was worth it.

What a fuck, Jesus.