I Crossed the Entire City Just to See Him Once

All the way there, my mind never stopped working against me. I repeated the same thing over and over, like someone rereading a contract they know they shouldn’t sign but signing it anyway: What do you think you’re going to accomplish? Did you really think any of this made sense? Twenty-two years old, in my final year of university, and there I was, crossing neighborhoods I didn’t know at night, wearing the same dress I’d put on that morning for class and with half a bottle of wine in me.

Mr. Herrera was Valentina’s father. My best friend since I was fifteen. A forty-four-year-old man who spoke little and listened a lot, who had an entire library in his study and the habit of making coffee at ten at night. I’d been in love with him longer than I dared admit, and that night, for reasons the wine had made undeniable, I decided I couldn’t go on without telling him. Every time I thought about him, my pussy tightened beneath my underwear, and for months I’d masturbated imagining his cock entering me across the desk in his study, with the books trembling on the shelves.

The edges of my shoes had already rubbed my heels raw by the time I reached the main avenue intersection. I could feel the skin split open, the burning becoming sharper with every step. I could have stopped. I could have called a cab or called someone or simply turned around. But I had a specific image fixed in my mind—his face, his eyes watching me as he listened—and that image was enough to keep me going.

The wine had slowed my perception. When something passed in front of my eyes, it took an extra second to process it. I raised my hand to check the time on my phone, and my hand left a trail behind it. It was after one in the morning. I’d been walking for more than forty minutes and still had another forty or so to go.

Someone whistled from a dark entrance in the distance. Then another whistle, closer. I quickened my pace with my eyes fixed on the sidewalk, silently repeating his name as if that were enough protection from everything else I preferred not to think about.

Four years of bottled-up feelings and one night of wine had converged in a decision that wasn’t reasonable but wasn’t completely irrational either. I’d tried before—pushing all of it out of my mind, convincing myself it was a fantasy that had survived longer than it should have—and it hadn’t worked. That night I needed an answer from his own mouth. A real answer, not the ones I invented alone during sleepless hours, with two fingers shoved into my pussy and my pillow bitten so my roommate wouldn’t hear me come while thinking about him.

The condominium gatehouse had a middle-aged guard with the face of a man who had seen too much that week. He looked me up and down—the wrinkled dress, the shoes, the hour—with an expression that mixed suspicion with something that might have been pity.

“Who are you looking for?” he asked.

“Mr. Herrera. Rodrigo Herrera. Building D, second floor.”

“Do you have authorization to enter?”

I opened my mouth. I had nothing. No excuse prepared, no name I could invoke to get them to let me through. The guard raised his radio. I took advantage of the momentary distraction to move away from the gatehouse before he could stop me.

I stood on the opposite sidewalk, staring at the fence. Eight feet high, maybe ten. But along the side there was a wooden panel for climbing vines, attached to the fence like an accidental ladder. From the street it wasn’t easy to see. Up close, it was practically a gift.

I took off my shoes. I put them in my purse.

I started climbing.

My hands found grips between the slats while my feet searched for purchase. My dress caught twice; I yanked at it carelessly and heard a seam give way somewhere. When I reached the top, I spotted the security camera aimed directly at my face, and a second later I heard the guard’s voice over the loudspeaker.

“Get down immediately!”

I closed my eyes.

I jumped.

On the other side was a bush that had looked soft from above. It wasn’t. I landed on my side, the branches scratching my arms and neck, and several thorns pierced my right thigh with such precision that they tore a sound from me somewhere between a moan and a curse. The blow to my tailbone was the worst of it.

There was no time. The guard’s footsteps were approaching from the left. I got up as best I could, my thigh throbbing with pain, and ran. I crossed an interior garden, barely dodged a stone fountain, tripped on a curb, and fell to my knees on the paving stones. I got up. I kept going. Motion-activated lights came on as I passed, like an involuntary parade. Someone shouted something from a second-floor window that I couldn’t understand.

When I finally found the door to Building D and the number two engraved in brass, I rang the bell without stopping. Once. Twice. Five times. Ten. As I waited, I silently begged whatever version of luck was left in the world to let him open the door before they caught me.

The guard’s hand closed around my forearm like a trap.

“Come with me right now!”

“Just a moment,” I begged. “Just a moment, please.”

I pulled. He pulled harder. My bare feet dragged over the paving stones while I resisted with the weight of my whole body, my eyes fixed on that door that refused to open.

And then the door opened.

But it wasn’t him.

A woman of about forty—beautiful, with her dark hair loose and wearing a spaghetti-strap dress—looked at me from the threshold. Her expression went from surprise to something I recognized immediately as disgust. I looked at the number on the door. Two. Building D. The address was correct.

I stopped resisting.

***

Two police officers were waiting at the condominium entrance when the guard brought me out. They seated me in the back of the patrol car. Outside, several neighbors in pajamas watched from the sidewalk. An older woman whispered something to her husband while pointing in my direction. The window glass reflected an image I didn’t want to recognize as mine: the dress torn in two places, dark blood on my legs, my eyes red.

The entire condominium was awake because of me. Lights on in the windows, doors ajar, shadows behind the curtains. My entrance had been, to put it mildly, memorable.

I saw him among the crowd. He was coming quickly, making his way through the neighbors with that way of moving that had always made me feel he divided the space before he arrived. He spoke with the police. One of the officers opened the car door and bent toward me with an unfriendly expression.

“Do you know that man?”

I nodded.

“Were you coming to visit him?”

I nodded again.

The officer held my gaze for a few seconds. Outside, Rodrigo was saying something I couldn’t hear through the glass.

“Get out,” the police officer finally said. “And thank your lucky stars.”

Rodrigo Herrera put a hand on the back of my neck—firmly, without a word—and guided me back through the neighbors who still hadn’t finished staring at us. I walked with my head lowered, looking at the paving stones my bare feet already knew by heart.

***

When we reached the apartment, the woman in the spaghetti-strap dress was picking up her purse from the sofa.

“Rodrigo, this is too much,” she said without looking at me.

“She’s Valentina’s friend,” he replied with the same calm as always.

“I don’t care who she is. Tonight was supposed to…”

“I know.”

“Then tell her to leave. Call her parents. She’s not your responsibility.”

“Her family situation is complicated,” he said. “I can’t do that.”

Rebeca looked at me over her shoulder with an expression that needed no words. Then she picked up her coat from the chair and walked toward the door.

“Whatever you say,” she said.

The slam of the door reverberated through the entire apartment.

Rodrigo didn’t move for several seconds. Then he exhaled slowly and went to the hall closet. I heard him open and close a drawer. When he came back, he was carrying the first-aid kit, and he already had the latex gloves in his hand.

“Take off your stockings,” he said. “And sit down.”

***

He put on the gloves with the mechanical efficiency of someone accustomed to solving problems without making a drama of them. He took my right leg in both hands and began examining it from the ankle upward, moving calmly. He frowned every time he found something he didn’t like. He didn’t speak for several minutes. He simply worked.

“Lie on your back.”

I lay down on the sofa. He sat at my feet and began cleaning each wound with a damp gauze pad, covering it afterward with a dressing. I held my dress tightly between my thighs, staring at the ceiling and controlling my breathing, because every time his gloved fingers moved another inch up my thigh, my pussy leaked a little more and I felt my panties soaking through against the leather sofa.

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

I didn’t answer.

“Turn over.”

I turned onto my stomach. The wounds on the backs of my thighs were deeper. His hands moved up inch by meticulous inch. The position was ridiculous—I was face down on his sofa while he cleaned something I had brought upon myself—and yet I didn’t want it to end. I could feel that my dress had ridden up to the middle of my ass, and I knew he could see my panties, knew he could see them wet, and that certainty tightened my stomach with something that was no longer shame.

“Do you have anything higher up?” he asked when he reached the limit of what decency allowed.

“I don’t know,” I lied, although I could clearly feel the prick in my right buttock.

“Touch yourself and tell me if it hurts.”

I obeyed. It hurt. But my mouth couldn’t manage to say so.

“Let me check.”

He lifted the hem of my dress with the same naturalness one used to handle any practical matter. He gave a short exclamation.

“Yes, there’s still a thorn in there. And you have a serious bruise on your lower back.” He paused. “What did you drink?”

“Wine.”

“How much?”

“Too much.”

He finished treating me in silence. When he stood to dispose of the used gloves, I sat up on the sofa with my dress in place and my eyes on the parquet floor. I heard the faucet running, then his footsteps returning. He sat in the armchair across from me. He folded his arms.

“Talk.”

***

I should have made something up. A fight with my roommate. A reasonable crisis. Anything that sounded better than the truth at three in the morning. But the night and the wine and everything I had done to get there had undone any ability I had to construct a presentable lie.

“I needed to see you,” I said.

“I know that already. Why?”

“Because if I waited until the next day, I wouldn’t do it.”

Rodrigo said nothing.

“And what was it you had to do?”

I looked up. It was the first time I had looked directly at him since we entered the apartment. He had dark circles under his eyes. His hair was slightly disheveled. The same face I had gone over mentally hundreds of times, one I had known by heart for years before understanding why it mattered so much to me.

“Tell you that I’ve been attracted to you for a while,” I said, “and that I don’t know how to handle it on my own anymore.”

The silence that followed lasted long enough to make me completely regret it.

“Listen,” he finally said carefully. “Sometimes the mind…”

“Don’t tell me I’m confused.”

He stopped.

“Don’t tell me that because it isn’t true,” I continued. “And you know it.”

“What is it that I know?” he asked slowly.

“That I’m not the only one feeling this. I’ve noticed things. The times I stayed for dinner and you sought me out with your eyes when Valentina wasn’t looking. That afternoon with my university assignment, when we spent three hours in your study talking about something that stopped being what it was and turned into something completely different. I know what I felt those times. I just want to know whether I was wrong.”

Rodrigo stood up. He went to the window and stared at the condominium lights with his hands in his trouser pockets. I spent a full minute watching his back, knowing that anything he said next could destroy me or save me, and by then I more or less didn’t care which.

“You weren’t wrong,” he said without turning around.

I let out the breath I had been holding for quite some time.

“But that doesn’t change what’s between us,” he continued. “The age difference. Valentina. Everything that just happened tonight.”

“And what is it that just happened tonight?” I asked.

He turned toward me. There was something on his face that wasn’t exactly sadness, but looked very much like it.

“You’re on my sofa, injured, at three in the morning, because you crossed half the city to tell me something I’ve spent months trying not to think about,” he said. “That’s what happened tonight.”

We looked at each other from opposite ends of the room. Neither of us spoke for a moment that lasted too long.

I got up from the sofa. The bandages pulled at my skin, but I didn’t care. I walked toward him barefoot, my torn dress hanging from one shoulder by one of the seams that had given way when I jumped. When I was one step away, I placed my hand on his chest. I felt his quick heartbeat beneath his shirt, the breath catching in his throat.

“Then don’t send me to Valentina’s room,” I said.

He lowered his gaze to me. He stayed that way for three seconds, maybe four, and in those seconds I watched him finish losing the last battle he had left to fight. He grabbed my face with both hands and kissed me as if he had been holding himself back from doing it for months, which was exactly what had happened. His tongue entered my mouth without asking permission, searching for mine, and I sucked it hungrily, pressing myself against him, feeling for the first time the shape of his hard cock against my belly through the fabric of his trousers.

“Oh God,” he murmured against my mouth. “I knew this was going to happen. I knew it from the moment you opened that damn door.”

“Shut up,” I told him. “And fuck me.”

He lifted me off the floor by my thighs, careful not to touch the bandaged wounds, and carried me to the sofa. He laid me on my back and climbed on top of me. I tore the buttons from his shirt one by one while he pulled my dress up to my waist. When he saw my soaked panties, he let out a growl that went through me completely.

“You’re dripping,” he said, running two fingers over the fabric. “Look at you. You’re such a slut.”

“Because of you,” I gasped. “Only because of you.”

He ripped off my panties in one pull. He knelt on the floor between my spread legs and buried his face in my pussy without preamble. His tongue found my clitoris immediately and began licking it in slow, hot circles while he pushed two fingers all the way inside me. I screamed so loudly that he covered my mouth with his free hand.

“The neighbors already called the police once tonight,” he whispered. “Don’t make them come back.”

I nodded desperately, biting his palm while he kept eating my pussy with a devotion that was driving me crazy. He sucked my lips, pushed his whole tongue inside me, curled it around my clitoris, then pulled it out only to bury it in me again. His fingers fucked me with a firm rhythm, curling against a spot that made me arch my back off the sofa.

“I’m going to come,” I moaned against his hand. “I’m going to come, don’t stop, please don’t stop.”

He sped up. His tongue dug into my clitoris, his fingers drove harder, and I felt an orgasm come crashing over me, shaking me from head to toe. My pussy clenched around his fingers, my thighs tensed, and I let out a muffled scream against his palm while I came across his mouth in spasms that wouldn’t end.

When I opened my eyes, he was looking at me from between my legs, his chin glistening with my wetness. He smiled for the first time all night.

“Four years thinking about this,” he said. “And I never imagined you’d taste like this.”

I sat up as best I could, my legs still trembling, and undid his belt. I pulled down his trousers and underwear in one motion, and his cock sprang out hard, thick, curved upward, the tip already wet with fluid. I stared at it for a full second. It was bigger than I had imagined in any of my fantasies, and I had imagined it quite a lot.

I took hold of it. I brought it to my mouth and shoved it all the way in at once, until the tip touched the back of my throat and I had to breathe through my nose so I wouldn’t choke. Rodrigo threw his head back and let out a hoarse moan.

“Fuck,” he said. “Fuck, just like that.”

I started sucking his cock with genuine hunger, pulling it out to the tip and sliding it back in to the hilt, letting my mouth fill with saliva and letting it run down over his balls. I licked its entire length, sucked the tip with my lips tightly wrapped around it, sucked his balls one by one while masturbating him with my hand. He gripped my hair, guiding me, thrusting his hips into my face with short thrusts that made me gag.

“You’re going to make me come in your mouth,” he gasped. “And I don’t want to. Not yet.”

He pulled me away firmly, his cock gleaming with my saliva. He laid me back on the sofa, opened my legs, and positioned himself between them. He looked into my eyes while running the tip of his cock over my pussy lips, up and down, coating himself with my wetness, rubbing against my clitoris until I was moaning and begging him to put it inside me.

“Say it,” he ordered. “Tell me what you want.”

“I want you to fuck me,” I gasped. “I want your cock inside me. Put it in.”

He pushed in slowly, letting me feel every inch. My pussy opened around him with a hot burning sensation that made me dig my nails into his back. When he was fully inside me, he stayed still for a few seconds, breathing against my neck.

“You’re so tight,” he whispered. “My God, you’re so tight.”

He began fucking me with long, deep thrusts, pulling almost all the way out and sinking back in to the hilt. Every strike of his hips against mine tore a moan from me that he muffled with his mouth, kissing me, biting my lips, sucking on my neck. The sofa creaked beneath us. I wrapped my legs around his waist and begged him to go harder, faster, to fuck me the way he had wanted to for years.

He gave it to me. He began pounding into me mercilessly, with the brutal rhythm of a man who had been holding himself back for months, and I arched against him with every thrust, feeling his cock hit a place that made me see stars. The dressings on my thighs were coming loose, and some of the wounds had started bleeding again, but nothing could have mattered less to me.

“Turn over,” he gasped, pulling out of me abruptly.

I got on all fours on the sofa, my ass toward him. I felt him spread my buttocks with both hands, felt him position the tip against my dripping pussy, and felt him penetrate me with one thrust that made me collapse onto my elbows with a muffled cry. In that position I felt him even deeper, touching a place that was driving me wild.

He fucked me by gripping my hips and pulling me against him with every thrust, making a wet, obscene sound whenever our bodies collided. He slapped one cheek. Then another. My skin burned, and my pussy clenched tighter around him.

“Slut,” he growled. “My slut. My daughter’s friend turned into my slut.”

“Yes,” I gasped. “Yours. All yours.”

He grabbed my hair and pulled my head back without stopping his thrusts, then reached around to rub my clitoris with two fingers while fucking me from behind. I came again almost immediately, clenching around his cock with spasms that tore a hoarse moan from him.

“I’m going to come,” he gasped. “Where? Tell me where.”

“Inside,” I begged him. “Inside, come inside me.”

He thrust into me three or four more times with all his strength, and I felt him bury himself to the hilt and stay there, trembling, while he came inside me with a long, hoarse moan. I felt the hot spurts filling me, one after another, while he held my hips against his so he wouldn’t lose a drop.

We stayed like that for a few seconds, panting, with him still inside me. Then he pulled out slowly and turned me over to look at me. His hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat. He bent down and kissed me on the mouth, long and unhurried, with a tenderness that had been absent from everything before.

I felt his semen begin to run down my thighs, mingling with the blood from the wounds. I didn’t care.

“You still have to stay the night,” he murmured against my lips. “But not in Valentina’s room.”

“No,” I said. “In yours.”

He lifted me into his arms again and carried me to his bedroom. He laid me on his bed, lay down beside me, and pulled me against his chest. I stayed there quietly for a long while, listening to his heartbeat slow, feeling his semen between my legs and the sweet sting of the thorns still lodged somewhere in my thigh.

I thought that perhaps all of it had been worth every one of the thorns.