I Was the Sugar Baby of Three Men and I Fooled Them All

I was born in Las Palomas, a neighborhood where misery is inherited just like a last name. My mother had three daughters by three different men, and none of them stayed long enough to learn our names. I grew up understanding one thing with absolute clarity: nobody gives you anything for free, and the little you have, you have to know how to charge for.

When I turned eighteen, I finished high school and my mother started with the same old song: I should study, get a degree, not end up like her, scrubbing other people's houses. I nodded while thinking about something else. A degree wasn’t going to get me out of the neighborhood in less than five years. I had something worth much more, and it paid off right away.

The only reason a girl my age sleeps with an old man is money. It’s always money.

Those mature men with money love young skin, a voice that whispers to them that they’re the best. I learned to give them exactly that. And never, not once in all those years, did I feel anything even close to desire for any of them.

***

The first one was called Aníbal. I met him in the line for the transport that goes up to the town, a coffee grower in his forties, with broad hands and an expensive watch. He was riding with an employee in a cargo pickup, and while the two men talked about the harvest, I was figuring out which of them could finance my life. The answer was obvious.

I didn’t come on to him directly. I played shy, thanked him for the ride with that smile I’d spent years practicing in front of the mirror, and when I got off I left my number written on a piece of paper.

—Just in case I ever need a ride again —I told him.

Aníbal called me three days later. The first meeting was almost innocent: a coffee in the square, a hand that stayed too long on mine, a quick kiss when we said goodbye. But we both knew what it was from the start. That same week I enrolled in the technical institute with the money he left on the table, folded inside a napkin. My body was starting to generate income, and that made me happy in a way sex never did.

We met near the square. He’d show up in the pickup, I’d get in where no one could see me, and we’d end up in a motel on the outskirts called Santa Lucía, a dump with rough sheets and a fan that barely turned. There he’d fuck me hard, always bareback, always finishing inside me because he liked imagining he was the only one. I moaned just enough, bit his shoulder at the exact right moment, whispered in his ear that no guy my age made me feel what he did.

It was a lie. All of it. While he huffed on top of me, I stared at the damp stain on the ceiling and did the math. How much I still owed for the semester. How much more until I could get out of the neighborhood. Sometimes I’d grab his head and press it against my neck so he couldn’t see my face, because no matter how much I rehearsed, the boredom showed in my eyes.

Aníbal had his quirks. He liked me waiting for him in the room with my skirt on and nothing underneath, sitting on the edge of the bed with my legs pressed together. He’d arrive, lock the door, and stand there looking at me for a few seconds before touching me, as if he needed to make sure it was his. I played along. I’d open my legs slowly, tell him to come here, whisper that I’d spent the whole week waiting for him. He believed it every time, and every time he left more bills on the nightstand.

***

For almost three years I was Aníbal’s girl. My mistake was starting to believe my own act. I thought that, with enough patience, I could convince him to leave his wife for me. I pulled out everything I had: long conversations until dawn, calculated tenderness, the promise of a child he fantasized about so much. I let him finish inside me precisely for that reason, because a pregnancy would have tied him to my life forever.

But men like Aníbal aren’t stupid. He smelled the hustler behind the sugar baby. One afternoon, in the same motel as always, while fastening his belt without looking at me, he dropped it on me without anesthetic.

—There are too many like you in every town in this country —he said—. I’m not throwing away everything I built for one more.

It hurt my pride, not my heart. His visits became farther apart, and with them my income. Soon the bills were suffocating me again and I understood I needed a new source.

***

I got a job as a waitress in a pizzeria downtown. That’s where the wildest, riskiest stage of my life began. The pizzeria was full of men who would pay anything for a good-looking girl, and I let myself get fucked for whatever came up: three dollars, five if the guy was generous. I did it in the back room, against the flour boxes, fast and without feelings, then went back to the counter to serve beers like nothing had happened.

The only thing I refused to do was oral sex. It always seemed too intimate to me, and a whore doesn’t hand out intimacy. A doctor once warned me it wasn’t healthy to swallow just anyone, so I had my excuse ready. Still, I did it once in a while, biting the bullet for a few more bills.

That cheap phase lasted three years. I left it behind when I fell in love with Darío.

***

Darío was the only real thing in my whole story. I met him in my last year of high school and, for the first time, I didn’t calculate a thing. He was possessive, jealous, and I loved that intensity. With him, sex wasn’t work: it was hunger. He fucked me four or five times a day whenever we could see each other, in my room, with my mother sleeping in the next room and pretending not to hear.

I have a quirk that always worked in my favor: I almost never come when I’m being fucked. That let me endure the longest sessions without getting exhausted, take him over and over without asking for a break. With Darío, for the first time, I genuinely wanted to finish with him. I almost never did, but I didn’t care. It was enough to feel him inside me and believe, for a little while, that this was love and not business.

To avoid losing him I got a steadier job as a bookkeeper at a food distribution company. Twelve hours a day for next to nothing, but it was a fixed salary. The problem was that I also started working weekends in a restaurant, and those were exactly the days Darío came into town to see me. The endless afternoons in my bed were over. He got tired of traveling for nothing, and one day he simply showed up with someone else. I think he already had her before he left me.

I broke up with Darío in March, and I cried for him like I never cried for anyone. But the neighborhood doesn’t forgive mourning: you have to eat, you have to pay, you have to keep going.

***

That was when he appeared, my perfect prey. A mature foreigner I met through messages, one of those men whose voice a whispered Latin girl can melt. To him, my accent was a siren song.

I went after him without giving him a chance to breathe. For nine months I worked him over the phone, hours and hours every day, building the character of the young woman who only dreams of a man with experience. I swore that guys my age had only been an experiment, that I needed a grown man who would treat me like a real woman. I played submissive, accommodating, loyal. I made him believe the money he sent me meant nothing, that what I wanted was him.

Lie, again. I only wanted enough dollars to cross the border and start over, far from Las Palomas, with him nowhere in my plans. While I was writing him endless promises, Wilmer and Édgar, two coworkers, were filling my body every week in the warehouse. To him I swore I didn’t even look at my coworkers.

But the old man wasn’t stupid. Something in my inconsistencies didn’t add up. And one day, carelessly, I posted a story with a photo where I could be seen way too close to Wilmer. I gave myself away.

At the beginning of September he sent me a long, cold message. He said he saw his whole world in danger, that he recognized in me the hustler so many people warn about in these countries, that he wasn’t going to lift me out of misery just because I demanded it from him more and more brazenly. The same conclusion Aníbal had reached years earlier. On the exact day nine months were up, he left me.

***

I didn’t fall apart. By then I was already twenty-four and had a level of seduction few could match. I found my next victim fast, this time a guy my age, ugly and clumsy, the kind who has barely touched a woman. He fell into my claws within days.

I’ve got him trapped between my legs, handling him with sweet, spoiled-girl whispers. I made him believe the child I’m carrying is his, when in reality it’s Darío’s, the last gift he left me before he walked away. My poor boy is going to raise it as his own, a happy cuckold who doesn’t even suspect a thing.

He dreams of becoming a pilot one day. I’ll be the only one who makes him fly high, between my thighs, while I finish gathering what I need to leave.

This is my confession, no makeup on it. I’m not looking for anyone to understand me or forgive me. In Las Palomas, you’re not born to be loved: you’re born to survive. And that, more than anyone, I learned.