Confession: I Was Obsessed with My Friend’s Father

I’d spent two months inventing excuses not to go to Valentina’s house. Pending exams, convenient headaches, nonexistent commitments. Any lie would do as long as I didn’t have to walk through that door and find myself face to face with him.

It wasn’t pride. It was pure fear dressed up as shame.

Mr. Herrera had seen me run out the day of the double dinner as if the apartment were on fire. Since that night, every time Valentina mentioned her father in any conversation, something in my chest shrank like wet paper. I couldn’t explain it in words. I only knew I missed him with an intensity I didn’t know how to categorize.

It wasn’t what I felt for an actor on a screen or some guy from college. It was heavier than that. More shameful. Something that settled inside me without asking permission and refused to leave. Every night, in my bed, I ended up with my hand under my underwear thinking about him, imagining that mouth opening my thighs, that deep voice whispering filthy things in my ear. I came biting the pillow so my mother wouldn’t hear me from the hallway, and then I hated myself for hours, my fingers still sticky with my own wetness.

On Wednesday of the week of my last exam, Valentina waited for me after training with that look of hers that meant she wasn’t going to accept no for an answer.

—You’re coming home with me today —she said, and took my bag without asking.

—Val, I’m sweaty and I smell awful, seriously…

—I don’t care. Let’s go.

I followed her because it was easier than arguing. And because in some cowardly corner of my head, part of me wanted to go.

When I saw the gray pickup parked beside the club gate, my feet froze to the asphalt. I recognized that vehicle with my eyes closed: it smelled like grown man cologne mixed with something clean I couldn’t describe. The same one that had taken me home so many times years ago when I hadn’t deserved it, the same one in which we had laughed until we cried more than once on the way out.

—No —I said—. Valentina, please. Don’t do this to me.

—Get in.

—I’m begging you. Another day, I swear another day…

She grabbed my wrist with a firmness I didn’t know she had and led me to the back door. She opened it. She looked at me. I had no words. I got in.

Mr. Herrera greeted us without turning fully, just a brief nod as he started the engine. Serious. Silent. As if I were nobody in particular, or as if I were too much to ignore completely. Six months earlier that same man would have asked me how my day had gone, would have looked for me in the rearview mirror with that smile of his.

I didn’t say anything during the ride. Valentina talked for the three of us, as always. I stared at the street through the window and felt heat in my cheeks even though the air conditioning was blasting. I felt something else too: my underwear soaked, my cunt throbbing against the seam of my pants every time the pickup hit a pothole. I pressed my thighs together discreetly. I wondered if he noticed too, if somehow he could smell from the driver’s seat that I was getting wet like a bitch for him. I decided he probably didn’t care.

***

At the house, we showered in turns while he cooked lunch. The smell of sautéed onion and spices drifted all the way to the second-floor hallway, just like always, just like before I’d ruined everything.

It was in the bathroom that something I hadn’t fully processed for months happened.

Valentina waited her turn sitting on the edge of the bathtub while I changed my shirt. We hadn’t been this close again since that afternoon when something between us had nearly broken the balance of everything. We never talked about it. We buried it under the habit of seeing each other every day without naming it, without even brushing against it.

She stood up slowly. Came closer than necessary.

I didn’t move. I didn’t say anything either.

She lifted a hand toward my face with a softness that stole my breath. Her fingers stopped inches from my cheek. I could smell the deodorant she used, the same one as always, and the sweat from two hours of training we still hadn’t fully washed off. My nipples hardened under my sports bra so fast it embarrassed me, and I felt my cunt grow even wetter just from looking at her mouth. Valentina ran her tongue over her lower lip, slowly, and I knew that if I opened my mouth she would kiss me, and that if she kissed me I would let her, and that if I let her I’d end up with my best friend’s hand between my legs.

Tell her no. Right now, tell her.

But the only thing that came into my head was her father down below, stirring a pot, not knowing that upstairs in the bathroom his daughter and I were that close, breathing the same air, about to do something that would never be taken back.

I turned my face away.

I wrapped my arms around her shoulders and hugged her hard, my forehead pressed to her neck. She hesitated for a second. Then she hugged me back without questions, without saying anything, her hands moving slowly down my back. That was how the moment ended. We didn’t name it. We never named it again.

***

Two weeks later I passed my final exams with grades I didn’t deserve on my own. Valentina had dragged me into studying, forced me to eat when I didn’t feel like it, brought me back to life little by little, with a patience I wouldn’t have had for anyone.

When Mr. Herrera invited us to dinner to celebrate, I accepted before my self-protective instinct could interfere.

That afternoon we went out together to find something for me to wear. I didn’t have clothes for that kind of place. I had never needed any.

We went into a store downtown that smelled like expensive fabric and display perfume. Valentina moved among the racks with a ease I admired and envied in equal measure. I trailed behind her, glancing at the prices and feeling completely out of place, as always whenever I stepped into her world.

It was she who found the dress, tucked away in a corner as if someone had hidden it on purpose. Black, fitted through the torso, with a skirt that fell halfway down the thigh and fine lace covering the shoulders and arms. It wasn’t something I would have dared to pick out on my own.

—Try it on —Valentina said, and it wasn’t a suggestion.

—I can’t afford it…

—Dad said we should treat ourselves. His exact words: “Buy them something nice and make sure Martina doesn’t get shy on me.”

I just looked at her, not knowing what to say.

—This dinner is in your honor, dummy.

I swallowed. Took the dress and went into the fitting room.

In front of the mirror, I needed a few seconds to recognize myself. The lace on my shoulders, the fabric hugging my body, the skirt moving when I turned. I had never seen myself like that. I thought maybe he would look at me differently. I thought maybe, if he looked long enough, he’d slip a hand under that skirt right there, in some corner of the restaurant, and make me come biting my knuckles so I wouldn’t scream. I hated myself a little for thinking it. I felt the heat drop from my stomach to my cunt in two seconds and had to brace myself against the fitting-room wall. I blinked quickly so nothing would show when I came out.

Valentina’s reaction from the other side of the door finished convincing me.

***

The night of the dinner came faster than I wanted.

Mr. Herrera was waiting for us in the living room when we came down the stairs. Valentina had insisted he not see us ahead of time, covering his eyes with her hands every time we crossed paths in the house during the last few hours. She made him walk blind through the rooms while she laughed and he complained in that deep, amused voice I’d missed against my will.

When I came down the last step and lifted my gaze, he was looking at me.

I stopped.

He was wearing a dark shirt and a jacket that fit his shoulders perfectly. His hair combed back, his jaw freshly shaved. Forty-something years carried with a calm that felt completely unfair to me. I gripped the banister harder than necessary. His eyes moved over me from the hem of the dress to my breasts, and there they lingered a fraction longer than they should have. I felt it as if he’d slipped his tongue between my nipples. The whole of my lower belly tightened, my cunt clenching in such a violent spasm that I almost had to sit down on the step.

Don’t look at him like that, Martina. Please, don’t look at him like that.

I couldn’t help it.

We got to the restaurant by taxi. It was the kind of place I had never been to: white tablecloths, live music at the back of the room, a view from the window designed to impress. We ordered without understanding half the menu. We toasted with pink champagne that Valentina kept under the table so we could share it secretly, hidden from the eyes of the other diners, as if we were three conspirators.

Mr. Herrera talked that night. Really talked, like he used to: advice no one had asked for, questions that showed he’d been paying attention, that way of listening he had that made you feel what you said mattered. Something loosened in my chest over dinner. A tension that had lived there for months, stored up like a knot I’d tied myself.

Toward the end of the night, when dessert arrived, he gave me one of those smiles he reserved for rare occasions. The one that made the corners of his eyes crease slightly.

I wondered whether Carmen saw it that way too. And whether Carmen would spread her legs for him that same night, whether he’d shove his cock into her to the hilt while I cried in my room with two fingers in my cunt thinking about them.

I don’t know where that thought came from. I shouldn’t have had it.

***

We walked along the seafront after dinner. The cold was bearable with the movement and the champagne still circulating through my blood. Valentina was on his right, I on his left. We talked about unimportant things and about things that did matter, and for the first time in months I felt part of something.

At one point, he took both our hands.

I didn’t think. I didn’t analyze it. I just felt it: his big hand closing over mine, the warmth of that palm, the weight of such a simple gesture. I closed my eyes for two seconds as we walked. I let myself be carried by the sound of the sea and the wind, by the feeling that for a moment everything was fine and everything was possible. I thought about that same hand sliding under my dress, moving up my thigh, pushing my underwear aside and sinking two fingers in to the knuckles. I thought about him pressing me against the railing of the promenade, lifting my skirt from behind and fucking me right there, with Valentina walking a few meters ahead, none the wiser. My cunt was throbbing so hard against my underwear I was sure I was going to stain the lining of the dress.

I wished that stretch of seafront would never end.

***

In the taxi back, Valentina sat in the middle.

We were riding in near silence when she let slip, with that carelessness of hers that never calculated consequences:

—Are you ready for your date tonight, Dad?

Mr. Herrera didn’t answer.

—Dad has a date —Valentina told me, turning toward me with bright eyes—. After twelve years as the neighborhood’s most wasted bachelor, someone finally convinced him.

I smiled. Or tried to smile. I’m not sure what face I made exactly.

—What’s her name? —Valentina insisted.

Silence.

—Dad…

—Carmen —he said, flatly, without taking his eyes off the street.

Valentina turned to me with a conspiratorial look. I nodded. Kept staring out the window.

Carmen.

I didn’t know her. I knew nothing about her. But in that moment I hated her with a precision that scared me.

I wondered what that woman had that I didn’t. Age, the most obvious thing. Experience. A history that wasn’t the one of his daughter’s young friend, the kid who came to his house to study and stayed for dinner and was treated by him with that mix of patience and affection that had confused me from the beginning. I imagined her sucking him off in the passenger seat of the very same pickup I was in now, her mouth full of his cock while he drove with one hand on the wheel and the other buried in her hair. I imagined her spreading her legs for him against the hallway wall, moaning filthy things in his ear while he shoved his tongue between her breasts. I thought of his cum filling another woman’s cunt and something inside me broke with a dry snap.

I pressed myself as close as I could to the taxi door. The streetlights slid past the glass and I counted them one by one so I wouldn’t have to think. So I wouldn’t imagine anything.

***

When the taxi stopped in front of my building, I said goodbye with the little voice I had left.

—Thank you for dinner —I told Mr. Herrera—. Truly.

He looked at me for a moment. Then he gave me that smile.

—It won’t be the last —he said.

I nodded. Got out. Valentina yelled something from the window, but I was already on the sidewalk and didn’t turn my head.

I went up to the apartment, went into my room, sat on the edge of the bed with the black dress still on. The lace on the shoulder brushed my neck. The apartment was completely silent.

I stayed there a long while, motionless, not crying yet.

Then I did cry. Quietly, without making a sound, my face buried in the pillow. I cried for Carmen, for Mr. Herrera’s forty-something years, for his hand closing around mine on the promenade, for that name spoken in that flat, final voice in the taxi. I cried too for the dress, which I had put on thinking of him without fully admitting it until that moment.

I cried because for a few hours that night I had let myself believe in something I knew perfectly well wasn’t real.

And in the middle of the crying, almost without realizing it, I hiked the dress up to my waist. Pushed my underwear to the side, soaked, sticky from so many hours getting wet for him. I shoved two fingers into my cunt all at once and muffled a groan into the pillow. I was so swollen they barely fit. I fucked myself with my hand imagining it was his, imagining he was the one opening my legs on top of the bedspread, that it was his mouth sucking my clit, that it was his cock sliding all the way in while he whispered in my ear how much of a whore I was for letting a man my father’s age fuck me with the dress half on. I rubbed my clit with the pad of my thumb in quick circles, biting my lower lip until I tasted blood, my other hand’s fingers going in and out of me, faster and faster, harder and harder, with a wet sound filling the silent room. I came crying, my cunt clenching in spasms around my own fingers, my face soaked with tears and spit and snot, and his name trapped between my teeth so I wouldn’t scream it. When I pulled my fingers out, they came out shining, dripping from me. I brought them to my mouth without thinking and sucked them, imagining it was him letting me taste my own flavor.

And I cried because I would do it again. That was the worst part of all. That the next day I would answer Valentina’s messages. That sooner or later I’d be in that house again. That he would be there, and I would look at him exactly the same way I had looked at him all night, with that mix of desire and shame I didn’t know how to switch off. That that night, and the next, and the next, it would end exactly like this, with my hand between my legs and his face in my head, coming alone in the dark because I didn’t dare do anything else.

Unable to stop myself. Not wanting to stop myself.