I Climbed the Fence for My Best Friend’s Father

As I made my way along those rain-soaked streets, my mind kept torturing me with the same poisonous refrain: “What made you think he could ever notice you? Did you really believe all those fantasies you’d built over the years, as if he had stayed untouched, waiting for you to reach a suitable age? Did you really forget that you’re his daughter’s best friend, and that he’s almost twice your age?” I had just turned nineteen and held a shiny diploma from my first semester of college, but at that moment I felt like the ridiculous fifteen-year-old who watched him from Julia’s sofa with her heart in her throat.

I had walked thousands of steps, clinging to the stubbornness that drove me toward him. A cowardly little voice whispered that I should turn around, go back to my room before something terrible happened, that I still had a scrap of dignity left to save. But my aching feet kept moving as if they didn’t belong to me.

The edges of my shoes had worn holes through my pantyhose until my heels were exposed. The fabric stuck to the blood, and every step became a burning penance. Even so, I didn’t slow down or change direction: I was blinded by the need to see him one last time, to hear from his own lips whether what I thought I’d sensed from him was real or merely the delirium of a girl who was too lonely. Meanwhile, an obscene bouquet of jealousy tormented me as I imagined him between the spread legs of some mature woman, burying his cock to the hilt in her cunt, making her moan like a bitch in heat with every hard thrust of his hips. I imagined her kneeling in front of him, sucking his cock, swallowing his cum in streams while he tugged her hair. Each image pierced me like a hot needle between my ribs.

Far away, I heard coded whistles, whispers drifting from the dark alleys and inviting me inside. I didn’t stop. I didn’t look. I saw only his broad jaw, his green eyes, and kept walking.

My head was working a second behind the real world. The liquor I’d stolen from my mother’s cabinet had my hands trailing through the air and my thoughts floating out of place.

At last I recognized the guards’ booth at the condominium where Mr. Alarcón lived. I had no reasonable excuse for being allowed inside, but in my deranged mind there was room for only one thing: reaching his door. When the guard stuck his face out and asked which house I was going to, I mumbled something incomprehensible. He turned to call the police, and I took advantage of the moment to move away from the light.

I crawled into the darkest corner of the fence. There was a wooden trellis for vines, flimsy but apparently sturdy enough, and I convinced myself it was a ladder. I began climbing clumsily, my body heavy and my legs trembling. My dress caught on every nail, and each tug tore away another piece. I reached the top by some miracle.

When I discovered the camera aimed at my face from barely a foot away and heard the guard shouting at me to come down, I knew I wouldn’t have time to descend cleanly on the other side. I closed my eyes and jumped toward a bush that looked soft. It wasn’t. I landed on my ass in a rosebush covered in thorns that drove into my thighs and lower back. I felt a knife stab my tailbone, but I got up and ran before my mind had finished processing the pain.

The dogs began barking, the automatic lights came on as I passed, and someone was shouting from the booth. I jumped a fence, dodged a swimming pool, fell twice, and kept going until I reached Mr. Alarcón’s door. I hammered the bell with suicidal insistence while blood ran down my calves into my shoes.

A huge guard seized my forearm as easily as someone snaps a dry twig and began dragging me backward.

“I just want to see him, let me see him!” I screamed out of my mind, digging my heels into the paving stones.

The door opened slowly, and a strip of warm light spilled across my face. For one second hope filled my chest, and I began whispering, softer and softer, “I just want to see him, one last time.”

Then came the knife twist: it wasn’t him who opened the door. It was a woman I didn’t know, voluptuous and dark-haired, wearing a short silk robe and holding a glass of wine. She looked at me the way someone looks at a rat in her kitchen.

I checked the house number twice. It was the right one. I stopped struggling and gave myself up.

The walk to the patrol car was the most humiliating of my life. Neighbors in pajamas leaned over their balconies and stabbed me with their eyes. They put me in the back seat with my hands behind me, the rotating lights illuminating my ruin. I could already see myself handcuffed in front of my mother; I could already imagine the endless shame that would chase me for years.

Then I saw him. Mr. Alarcón had come outside in his pajamas and was pushing through the enraged neighbors, arguing with the officer and gesturing toward the patrol car. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I could see him furious, defending me against a mob that owed me nothing but contempt. I looked at him through the car window, and my eyes filled with tears.

A surly officer opened the door and approached me with one finger raised.

“Do you know that man?”

I nodded.

“Did you come to see his daughter?”

I nodded again, although that wasn’t the reason that had dragged me out of bed.

“Do you have any idea what time it is? Or how badly you scared all of us?”

My eyes were fixed on Marcelo, who was watching me from a distance with a disappointment that hurt more than the thorns.

“Are you on drugs?”

I shook my head.

“Look at me and talk to me. If you want to get out of this, start using your mouth.”

“No, sir,” I replied, trying to make my tongue obey me.

“Get out. He’ll take responsibility for you. And get the hell out of here before I change my mind.”

***

When I approached him, I didn’t dare raise my eyes. He took me firmly by the nape, like someone leading a little dog that had escaped the yard, and made me walk past the onlookers while giving them knife-edged green looks. He didn’t say a single word the entire way to the door.

The woman was waiting for us in the foyer, wearing the most disgusted expression I had ever seen. Marcelo closed the door behind us and let me go abruptly.

“Sit down. I’ll be right back.”

They went into the kitchen. From the sofa, I could hear their whispers growing increasingly agitated.

“What is that girl doing here, Marcelo? Who is she?”

“She’s Julia’s best friend.”

“And what the hell is she doing here alone at this hour, in that condition?”

“I don’t know, Renata.”

“Tell her to leave. Have her mother come get her. We’re busy, remember? You had my cock in your mouth ten minutes ago, or did you forget?”

“Renata, let me take care of her and make sure she’s all right.”

“All right? Look at her! She’s half drunk, she’s filthy, she’s torn up. Call her parents.”

“Shh, keep your voice down. It’s complicated. Her family is complicated. Let me handle it.”

“And why didn’t you let the police handle it? Are you seriously going to put her first today, of all days, when I was naked in your bed?”

“She’s a young girl. She’s my daughter’s best friend. She’s spent more afternoons in this house than in her own. I’m sorry.”

“You’re an idiot, Marcelo. Remember that.”

She passed in front of me to collect her purse and swept me with a look of hatred that left me speechless. The slam of the door shook the pictures in the entryway.

***

Marcelo returned to the living room a few minutes later, his hair disheveled and his effort not to explode plainly visible. He stood in front of me without saying anything, measuring me with those green eyes that had stolen my sleep for four years. I didn’t dare hold his gaze.

“I’m taking you to the hospital and then home,” he said curtly.

I stayed rooted to the sofa.

“Shit,” he muttered, and went to get something from the bathroom.

He came back with a first-aid kit, sat at my feet, and pulled on sterile gloves without looking at me.

“Take off your pantyhose.”

I obeyed trembling, using what little willpower I had left to keep my dress from riding up too far. He took my right leg with a father’s natural ease, rested it on his thigh, and began examining it thoroughly. He frowned and clicked his tongue; he didn’t like anything he saw.

“On your back,” he ordered, patting the sofa twice.

I lay down. I clutched my skirt between my thighs out of modesty, aware of how ridiculous I was being. He cleaned the lacerations on my knees, calves, and ankles with a patience that contradicted his icy voice.

“Are you going to tell me what you were thinking now?” he asked without looking up.

I mumbled something I couldn’t even understand myself.

“Turn over.”

I turned carefully, my heart pounding against my ribs. The wounds on my back were deeper, especially the ones that had pierced me high on my thighs, where the skin meets the buttocks. His hands began at my ankles and moved upward, inch by inch, and every span of skin I surrendered to him grew wet inside. I felt my panties sticking between the lips of my cunt, soaked without permission.

“Do you have more higher up?” he asked when he reached the edge of decency.

I felt a clear stab in my right buttock, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it.

“I’m not sure.”

“Touch yourself and tell me if it hurts.”

I brought my hand to my ass, intending to confirm it for him, but my mouth locked up. The mere thought of him seeing my skin like that, in my underwear and covered in filth, paralyzed me more than the pain.

“I’m not sure,” I repeated.

I almost fainted when I heard him answer with practiced serenity.

“Let me take a look.”

His hands pushed my dress up without hesitation or fuss, revealing the white underwear I’d put on without thinking and the small disaster the fall and my nerves had caused down there. A cold current raised gooseflesh along my back.

“Yes, you have one near the crease,” he confirmed in the same voice as always. “And you took a nasty fall: the bruise on your lower back is the size of my hand. What the hell were you thinking?”

I couldn’t answer him. The brush of the glove, the nearness of his fingers, the way he moved the edge of my panties aside to confirm it without playing with my modesty, had me biting my forearm to keep from moaning. My face burned, my entire body boiled despite the cold air coming in through the window. My cunt contracted on its own, with unfamiliar throbbing that frightened me more than it aroused me. I felt a hot thread seep from inside and dampen the cotton. I prayed he wouldn’t notice, although some sick part of me prayed that he would.

“And what did you drink?”

“Some liquor… my mother’s.”

“Sweetheart, please. Why would you do something so stupid?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Alarcón. I got sad about something and…”

“‘Got sad about something’ doesn’t justify walking halfway across the city at this hour and climbing a fence. Something could have happened to you. Anything. And you could have gotten me into enormous trouble by being here alone, without anyone at home knowing where you were.”

“I needed to see you.”

“Me? Why?”

A knot formed in my throat so large I thought I would never be able to speak again.

***

He helped me sit up. When I raised my eyes, I found a concern that tore me apart even more than his anger.

“Look at me. You’re trembling. Say something—you’re scaring me.”

I closed my eyes, breathed deeply, and gathered the last coins of courage I had left.

“Mr. Alarcón… I have feelings for you.”

I couldn’t open my eyes after saying it. The silence lasted an eternity.

“Do you mean feelings in a romantic sense?”

I nodded, my eyes still closed and two tears running down my cheeks.

“Sweetheart, sometimes our minds deceive us. At your age, it’s incredibly easy to confuse…”

I shook my head.

He let out a sigh that seemed to weigh as much as an entire house and pressed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger.

“It isn’t possible. It can’t be.”

“I know,” I lied in the thread of voice I had left.

He took my hand and placed it on my own knee, as if contact could save him rather than me.

“There are plenty of boys your age out there, I promise you. You have to…”

I couldn’t take it. I broke down in sobs I hadn’t even known I was carrying. My whole body shook, I couldn’t breathe, and my chest felt as if it were splitting like fruit left in the sun. He drew me against his chest and held the back of my neck with one hand while the other traced circles across my lower back.

“Easy, sweetheart. Everything’s all right.”

But his voice was breaking too.

“I’m a bitter old man, understand? I’m dead inside, already contaminated. You’re in the best part of your life. You deserve something just as new.”

He reclined me against him on the sofa, his arm beneath my head like a pillow and his hand stroking my back with a tenderness that finished undoing me. I buried my face in his chest and repeated softly, over and over, “I love him, I love him, I love him.”

“Sweetheart, you’re going to make me cry. I can’t stand seeing you suffer like this.”

I raised my head and dared to look at him.

“Tell me I’m not crazy. Tell me you feel something for me, even if it’s just a little. I swear I felt it at Julia’s birthday dinner, in the way you looked at me when I brought you coffee, in a thousand other little details. Please.”

“Sweetheart…”

“Tell me you didn’t open this house to me out of pity. Tell me you wouldn’t do it for just anyone. Tell me you’re afraid of hurting me, but don’t tell me you don’t feel it. Please, I’m begging you.”

There was another sigh, longer and deeper. And then, his voice broken, cold and whole at the same time, he answered me.

“No.”

I stopped breathing.

“You’re not wrong.”

Blood rushed back through my veins in a hard throb.

“I have feelings for you too. But it’s impossible, sweetheart. Impossible.”

I held him against me as if it were the last night before the end of the world. My thumb slowly rose to the corner of his mouth and stayed there, shyly, as if suddenly I didn’t know what to do with reality. He closed his eyes and let me touch him.

“Don’t do this to me, please,” he whispered.

But I couldn’t stop anymore. I ran my thumb across his lower lip, parted it slightly, and he bit it as if it hurt. I brought my face close and brushed his mouth with mine, barely touching, and he turned his head half an inch to escape. I insisted. I pressed my lips more firmly against his, opened them with my tongue, and searched for his. He held out for one second, two, three—and suddenly gave in. He bit my lower lip with long-suppressed hunger and thrust his tongue deep into my mouth. I felt a hoarse, embarrassed moan escape his chest, and that sound finished breaking me open inside.

“You’re crazy,” he murmured against my mouth. “We’re both crazy.”

“I don’t care,” I replied, finding his hand and placing it over my breast through the dress.

At first he squeezed it guiltily, undecided, and then with the certainty of a man who had already crossed the line. He pinched my nipple through the fabric, and I arched like a cat. A sharp gasp escaped me, and he covered my mouth with his other hand.

“Shh, sweetheart. Be quiet. Be quiet.”

He yanked my neckline down and pulled one breast free. He stared at it for a moment, his jaw tight, as if deciding whether to take the final step or get up and run. Then he lowered his head and took my nipple into his mouth. He sucked it slowly at first, wrapping his tongue around it, and then harder, tugging it with his teeth. I buried my fingers in his hair and whispered, dying of embarrassment and desire at the same time, “More, sir, please, more.”

His hands pushed my dress up to my waist. He tore off my white panties in one clean yank, without ceremony, and left them lying on the bloodstains on the sofa. He opened my legs with his knees and stared at my cunt with an expression I had never seen on him: pure hunger, hunger accumulated over years, the same hunger I had carried in my chest since I was fifteen.

“Holy God,” he murmured. “Look at you.”

He ran two fingers up and down my vulva, slowly gathering the wetness dripping from me. He showed them to me, shining, and put them in his mouth without taking his eyes off me. He sucked them clean, and I almost came from that alone.

“You taste like a good girl,” he said, his voice rough. “And you’re asking me to do the worst thing to you.”

“Yes,” I replied without thinking. “Do your worst.”

He knelt on the floor in front of the sofa, tugged my hips to the edge, and buried his face between my legs. The first lick tore a muffled cry from me; I covered my mouth myself so I wouldn’t wake the neighborhood. He sucked my clitoris with the tip of his tongue, in circles, pressing his upper lip against the bone, while he slid two thick, curved fingers inside me that found a spot I hadn’t even known I had. He began pumping them slowly, then faster, without stopping his nursing at my clitoris, and I felt my first orgasm rise from my feet like an electric shock. My whole body convulsed, I crushed my thighs against his head, and sank my nails into his scalp. He didn’t let up: he kept sucking me through the entire orgasm, swallowing what I soaked his chin with, until I pushed his head away because I couldn’t take it anymore.

He climbed up my body with his face shining and kissed me on the mouth. I tasted myself on his tongue and liked it—liked it so much that I told him by biting his chin. He gave a hoarse little laugh, half incredulous, half dazed.

“I’m going to hell for this,” he murmured.

“Take me with you.”

He stood for a second to lower his pajama pants. His cock sprang free, hard and thick, a prominent vein running from top to bottom and the tip already wet with pre-cum. I stared at it open-mouthed. I had imagined it a thousand times, but my imagination hadn’t come close: it was bigger, redder, more obscene than anything I’d fantasized about.

Without thinking, I slid off the sofa and knelt in front of him. I gripped his cock with both hands, felt it pulsing against my palms, and put it in my mouth without ceremony. I sucked him as best I could, clumsy but desperate, taking him as far as I could and massaging his balls with one hand. He held the back of my head without forcing me, letting me set the pace, panting whenever my teeth brushed him.

“Sweetheart, not like that,” he growled after a while, pulling my hair back. “I’ll come in your mouth right now like that, and I want to fuck you.”

He lifted me from the floor with surprising strength, laid me on my back on the sofa, and settled between my legs. He ran the tip over the lips of my cunt once, twice, three times, wetting himself with what I was leaking, and looked me in the eyes.

“Are you sure, sweetheart? Once I’m inside, there’s no going back.”

“Put it in,” I begged. “Put it all the way in, Mr. Alarcón. Please.”

He pushed in slowly and carefully, letting me feel every inch. I opened myself wider, clung to his shoulders, endured the initial sting and then the delicious stretch as he filled me. When he sank all the way in, he stayed still for a second, his forehead against mine, breathing into my mouth.

“My God, sweetheart. My God.”

He began moving with slow, long thrusts, pulling almost all the way out and driving back in to the hilt. I dug my heels into his ass, whispered “more, harder” in his ear, and he obeyed, picking up the pace until the sofa began banging against the wall. He covered my mouth with his hand whenever a moan escaped that was too sharp.

“Be quiet, be quiet,” he begged through his teeth. “The neighbors, sweetheart, the neighbors.”

He turned me onto my stomach, arranged me on my knees at the edge of the sofa with my ass raised, and put it inside me from behind again. From there he fucked me deeper, more like an animal. He gripped my hips and drove into me with hard, dry blows that shook my breasts against the cushions. With his other hand he pressed the back of my neck against the leather, subduing me. I felt like I belonged to him in a way I had never understood before.

“Do you like it like this?” he growled in my ear, biting my earlobe. “Tell me you like the way the old man fucks you. Tell me.”

“Yes, sir,” I gasped. “I love the way you fuck me. Don’t stop, please, don’t stop.”

He put his thumb in my mouth, and I sucked it. Then he pulled it out wet and pressed it against my asshole, barely applying pressure, without going in. That little game detonated my second orgasm without warning: I clenched all around his cock, shook violently, and buried my face in the sofa to muffle the cry. He held me firmly and kept thrusting through the entire orgasm, stretching it out until I no longer even knew my own name.

“I’m going to come,” he warned, his voice breaking. “Where, sweetheart? Where?”

“Inside,” I said without thinking, and regretted it the instant I spoke. “No, in my mouth. In my mouth, sir.”

He pulled out in time, turned me over again, and threw me onto the floor in front of him. I opened my mouth, stuck out my tongue, and looked up at him like a grateful little dog. He jerked himself twice, very quickly, and filled my tongue with a thick spurt, then another shorter one on my chin, and another on my lips. I swallowed everything that managed to get inside and licked the tip clean to the last drop while he looked down at me with glassy eyes, his legs still trembling.

He dropped into a seated position on his heels, panting, and ran his thumb over the corner of my mouth to wipe away the semen running down my neck. He brought the finger to his lips and sucked it slowly without taking his eyes off me.

“We’re damned, sweetheart.”

“I know,” I whispered.

He lifted me onto the sofa, settled me against his bare chest, and covered me with the blanket from the backrest. His heart was still galloping beneath my ear. He stroked my back with his fingertips in circles, the same caress as before but carrying a different meaning now. I buried my face in his chest and repeated softly, over and over, “I love him, I love him, I love him,” and now it wasn’t a prayer: it was a fait accompli.

“Sweetheart, you’re going to make me cry. I can’t stand seeing you suffer like this.”

“I’m not suffering anymore,” I answered.

I raised my head and dared to look at him. Everything was still impossible: tomorrow he would regret it, tomorrow I would have to leave this house and go back to being Julia’s best friend. But he had just confirmed, with his mouth and his entire body, the one longing that had kept me alive throughout those last four years, and at last I had a reason, even if only one, to keep breathing tomorrow.