I Charged for Sex When Everything Broke Inside Me

Only one of my friends knows what I’m about to tell, and he found out by accident, not because I confessed it to him. There was a time in my life when I sank so low that I stopped recognizing myself in the mirror, and to get out of that hole I chose the strangest path I could think of. Charging to sleep with whoever asked me to. Men, women, older, married, whatever. I’m telling it now because time has let me digest it, but for a long time I lived with that wound, silently, inside me.

Before all that, I spent five years with Mariana. She was an intense woman, the kind who throws herself into sex with the same force with which she argues or cries. We had done everything, and I felt that with her I had found something that would hardly ever appear again. With Mariana I had fucked in a restaurant bathroom with my hand over her mouth so she wouldn’t scream, I had bent her over on top of her parents’ dining table, I had emptied my cock over her face while she looked at me with half-closed eyes and her tongue out. She loved it when I pulled her hair, when I called her a slut in her ear while I took her from behind, when she sucked me all the way to the back of her throat and swallowed without complaining. When she left me, I didn’t make a big deal of it in front of other people. I said it had been best for both of us, that we no longer made each other happy. I was lying. Inside, I was slowly going out.

What really opened the crack was a chance encounter. Three months had passed since the breakup when I walked into a bar downtown looking for a university friend. Mariana was at the counter, laughing with a guy I didn’t know, and without the slightest attempt to hide it she kissed him in the middle of a toast. It was like something was ripped out of my chest. I stood for a while leaning against a column, watching her, until I understood that she was happy and I wasn’t. That night I drank more than my body could handle.

I staggered out of there and, instead of going home, I let myself be carried by an impulse. I walked into a gay bar, one of those places I’d never once set foot in, and ordered another drink. I didn’t care about anything. I wanted to break myself a little more to see if that would stop the pain. An older man sat down beside me and started talking to me. I didn’t like him. He had a nasal voice and smelled like cheap cologne. Even so, when he invited me to his apartment, I said yes.

I remember very little of that night. I remember the elevator smelling of bleach, I remember the mirror in the foyer with its gold frame, I remember kneeling on the rug in the living room to suck him off because that was what was expected. He opened my zipper with thick fingers and pulled out my cock, already half hard, in front of his mouth. It was a short, thick cock, with a purplish head and a smell of cologne mixed with sweat that turned my stomach. He shoved it all the way into his mouth in one go, holding the back of my neck with both hands, and fucked my mouth without asking. I swallowed the gagging and let him do it, eyes watering and knees pressed into the floor. He came a first time over my tongue and made me swallow by clamping my jaw. Then he dragged me to the bedroom, ripped off my pants and briefs, and laid me face down. I asked him to penetrate me and he did, with hardly any lube, pushing with that thick cock until I felt something tear inside me. I screamed into the pillow. He held my hips and started fucking me in a dry, hard rhythm, slapping my ass and panting in my ear things I no longer remember. I tried not to think about Mariana and only thought about Mariana, about Mariana’s mouth laughing at that bar, while a stranger rammed me from behind and called me a cunt with that nasal voice. When he came again, this time inside the condom, I stayed there for a second face down, ass raised and semen sliding down my thigh outside the torn rubber. I dressed without saying anything and went down the stairs almost running. I vomited in the first doorway I found. A mix of alcohol and self-disgust.

***

I spent the following days on autopilot. I went to class, smiled when I had to, had dinner with my flatmate. But inside, something no longer fit. I decided that if nothing mattered to me, I was going to use it. And I came up with an idea that, in the cold light of day, sounds stupid and in the heat of the moment sounded logical. If I was going to sleep with strangers, at least let it serve some purpose. Let them pay. Let me not be the one swallowing his pride for free.

I opened a profile on a classifieds site and started charging. The first few weeks I had to learn a lot of things nobody explains to you. To ask for payment up front. To choose neutral ground. To recognize from someone’s voice on the phone which clients might be trouble. To keep my wallet and my phone in different places. And, above all, to put on a smile when the door opened and on the other side there was someone who looked nothing like what I had imagined.

Because that was the real shock. Fantasy and reality had nothing to do with each other. My clients were, for the most part, unattractive middle-aged men. Married men who had raised their children and suddenly discovered they wanted something different. Single men who had spent forty years never daring to come out of the closet. Discreet bisexuals who lied at home and needed a couple of hours to be themselves. There was everything. Some widower who only wanted me to hold him until he fell asleep. Some businessman who liked domination and whom I thought a ridiculous theater act, but I let him tie my wrists to the headboard and fuck my ass while he called me a bitch at the top of his lungs, because he paid double to do it without a condom inside and then lick his own load off my hole.

And also, on occasion, women. Almost all of them older, divorced, or bored with marriages that no longer looked at them. One took me to a huge house on the outskirts and made me shower before touching her, as if she wanted to wash off more than just the sweat from the trip. When I came out of the bathroom with the towel around my waist, she was waiting naked on the bed, legs open and her shaved pussy already glistening. She made me kneel between her thighs and eat her pussy until she came twice on my tongue, pulling my hair and grinding her cunt against my mouth with the impatience of someone who had gone years without anyone doing that to her. Then she climbed on top of me, took my cock all the way in, and rode me with her sagging tits bouncing in my face, until I grabbed her ass with both hands and emptied myself inside without her saying a word. Another one only wanted me to finger her while I whispered in her ear how much of a slut she was, while I shoved three fingers into her cunt and pressed my thumb against her clit until she came, soaking my hand; then she paid me double for leaving before the hour was up.

Out of that gray line-up, there was one encounter I remember differently. A girl called. Even now, when I think about it, I separate it from the rest. That meeting was different before it even began.

***

Her name was Lucía, or that’s what she told me, and her voice on the phone trembled so much I thought it was a joke. She had just turned twenty. She was a virgin and didn’t want to stay one. She explained to me, in short sentences and with many pauses, that she was very shy and that any interaction with a boy paralyzed her. That she preferred to pay someone who knew how to treat her, rather than risk her first time being with a college classmate and turning into a hallway joke. I told her yes, gave her an address, and hung up with the feeling that that afternoon was going to be anything but just another one.

She showed up twenty minutes late, in an oversized coat and with red eyes from crying on the way over. She was pretty, much more than her voice suggested. Short, dark-haired, with a round face and a nervous smile that kept escaping her every time she closed her mouth to look serious. I let her in and offered her tea instead of starting anywhere else. She laughed when I took out the box of tea bags. I think she had expected someone colder, more professional, more everything.

—You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to —I said to her—. If you want, you can drink your tea and leave. You’ve already paid me; you don’t owe me anything.

—I don’t want to leave —she answered, looking at the cup—. It’s just that I don’t know how to start.

—You don’t start —I told her—. You just get there.

So I sat down beside her on the sofa, but I didn’t touch her. We talked for almost an hour. About her degree, about a dog she’d lost in August, about a boy she liked in class and never dared say hello to. As she talked, I slowly stopped thinking about the fact that I was charging her. I listened to her the way you listen to a friend who takes a while to get to the point. When she finally fell silent, I asked her if she wanted me to kiss her and she said yes in a whisper.

I kissed her slowly. Very slowly. I held her face with both hands so she wouldn’t feel trapped, and when I felt her respond, I let her dig her fingers into the back of my neck. She trembled. She said it with her whole body. I brushed a lock of hair off her forehead and asked if she wanted me to take her to the bedroom. She nodded without opening her eyes.

I undressed her as if it were the first time for me too. One garment and one kiss, another garment and another kiss, unhurried. I unclasped her bra and two small white breasts fell free, with pink nipples stiffened by the cold and by fear. I bent down and sucked one slowly, circling the nipple with my tongue, while with the other hand I pinched the other one. A short gasp escaped her, the first. I pulled her panties down to her ankles and she took her feet out herself, her thighs pressed together with shame. Seeing her naked, I found nothing to distract me or flaw her. Her skin was pale, there were two moles near her navel, a triangle of dark hair between her legs, and a breath escaping from her open mouth. I kissed her neck, her shoulders, her ribs, her belly, her pubis. When I asked permission to use my tongue between her legs, she pressed her lips together, hesitated, and finally nodded.

I opened her thighs with my hands and settled between them. Her cunt was closed, shy, with small tight lips and only the faintest hint of wetness at the entrance. I ran my whole tongue along it, bottom to top, very slowly, and she jolted as if shocked. I repeated the movement again, and again, and again, until she began to open on her own. I found the clit with the tip of my tongue and stayed there. Gentle circles first. Then tighter circles. Then sucking, with my lips wrapped around it, while I slid the tip of my middle finger into her cunt with extreme care. She was so tight I could barely fit the first joint. It took a long time. I got to know her with my mouth before anything else. When I understood which movement made her breathe harder, I didn’t stop. I caressed her thighs with my free hand so she wouldn’t close her legs by pure reflex. The tongue never stopped, the finger went in and out millimeter by millimeter, and she was already soaking wet, so much that I could taste hot female on my whole mouth. When at last she felt what her friends had told her about a thousand times, a sound escaped her that didn’t seem like hers. A low, surprised, almost embarrassed moan, as if she were ashamed to come in my living room. Her cunt contracted around my finger in short spasms and her hips lifted off the mattress. I held her close to my mouth until she stopped trembling.

After that I took her hand to my cock, which was already hard and wet with my own fluid. I showed her how to hold it by the base, how to move the foreskin up and down without squeezing too hard, how to slow the rhythm when she felt me speed up. She learned fast. At one point, without me asking, she bent down and took me into her mouth. She did it carefully, almost respectfully, as if she were examining a fragile piece of something. She only dared take half of it, sucking the tip with tight lips and helping herself with her hand at the base. I gave her a few instructions between clenched teeth, told her to stick out her tongue and lick me underneath, to take one ball into her mouth and play with it, and I let her experiment at her own pace. When she lifted her face, her lips were shiny and a thread of saliva hung from her chin. She smiled, shyly, like someone who has just learned how to do something for the first time.

When I saw she was ready, I put the condom on in front of her, so she could see I was doing it. I kissed her forehead and told her I was going to go in very slowly and that she should stop me whenever she wanted. I laid her on her back, opened her legs with my knees, and placed the head of my cock against the entrance to her cunt. It was so tight that at first I thought it wouldn’t fit. I pushed in slowly, barely two centimeters, and she blew out a breath and arched her back. The new sensation startled her. I stopped, waited, stroked her face until she was breathing normally again, and moved once more. Another two centimeters. A small moan. I stopped. I licked a nipple to distract her, rubbed her clit with my thumb until I felt her cunt relax around me again. Another few centimeters. And so, handspan by handspan, waiting for a silent permission before each advance, until I felt that I was all the way inside, with my balls resting against her ass and her looking at me wide-eyed, not knowing whether it hurt or pleased her.

I started fucking her very slowly. In, out, in, out, with short, soft thrusts, never coming all the way out. Her cunt was hot and tight as a fist and it sucked my cock with every movement. It was a slow act, almost silly compared with what I usually did in other encounters. There were no twisted positions or dirty talk. Just two bodies looking for a way to fit together, her with her legs open and me going in and out of her newly broken virginity with whatever patience I had left. When she, without my expecting it, began moving against me for more, lifting her hips off the mattress so I could go deeper, I understood that she no longer needed me to guide her. I grabbed one ass cheek with my hand and sped up a little. She was moaning softly, her mouth against my shoulder, biting me without realizing it. I asked her what she wanted in the end, where, and she told me over her chest. I pulled out carefully, tore off the condom, jerked myself a couple of times over her, and came in hot spurts over her small breasts and her neck. I looked down at her, with my cock still dripping in my hand and her body soaked in my cum, and she smiled, her face flushed red, like a girl who has just gotten away with some mischief. I cleaned her myself, with a warm towel, while she laughed softly out of pure shame.

She lay there for a while in silence, one hand over her stomach and her gaze on the ceiling. Then she looked at me and said, almost without a voice:

—Thank you.

—You don’t have to thank me —I answered.

—Yes —she said—. For the way. For how you did it.

She got dressed slowly, gave me two kisses at the door, and left. I never heard from her again. Sometimes I think I crossed paths with her on some terrace, at some train station, and that she recognized me first and chose not to say hello. I wouldn’t blame her if that were so.

***

It wasn’t the most spectacular fuck of my life. But it was the most beautiful. That encounter was an oasis in the middle of a long desert, full of men who came to fulfill fantasies nobody in their everyday lives was going to fulfill for them. Married men who wanted me to do to them what they didn’t dare ask their wives for, who wanted me to eat their ass while they jerked off, who wanted to come in my mouth and force me to swallow. Businessmen who paid to be humiliated, to be pissed on or have their ass fucked with the belt still on. Family men who arrived crying and left smiling with a dry load in their beards. And from each of them, without meaning to, I learned something about the human condition that no class ever taught me.

I quit after a little over a year. Not because of a crisis, and not because someone found out. I quit because one day, while I was having breakfast, I realized I was hungry for normal things again. For passing a class. For calling my mother on Sundays. For going out with friends without measuring the time. The wound Mariana had opened, without my knowing it, had been closing between client and client, between cock and cock, between load and load.

Of all the people who passed through those rented rooms, the only one I sometimes truly remember is Lucía. Not for the sex. For the trust she placed in me, without knowing who I was, without asking me for any explanation other than patience. And because, without her knowing it, she gave me back a piece of the person I had been before I sank.

If she ever reads this and recognizes herself, I hope she understands that that afternoon was, for me too, a quiet way of starting over.