The Afternoon I Crossed the Line With My Detained Client

My name is Valeria, and I’ve been practicing criminal law for twenty years. I’ve defended murderers, drug traffickers, swindlers. Nothing I did in those years ever cost me sleep. Except for one afternoon, in cell number twelve of the provincial penitentiary.

The case was brought by Prosecutor Mendoza, an old friend from university. A guy of thirty-three, Nicolás Vera, had been caught with four kilos of cocaine in the garage of his house. He’d agreed to store the merchandise for a friend in exchange for money. Typical. What wasn’t typical was the way he looked at me when I walked into the interrogation room. Not like guilty men look at their lawyer. He looked at me like a man who already knew something was going to happen between us.

—Valeria Quintana —I said, extending my hand.

—Nicolás —he replied, not letting go right away.

He had brown eyes and long eyelashes. A tattoo peeking out from the neck of his T-shirt. Fifteen years younger than me. I should have pulled out of the case that very afternoon, and I didn’t.

—Why did you do it? —I asked him, once the police left us alone.

—I needed the money. I got fired from my job. I’ve got debts and a girlfriend I want to support.

I believed him. Or I wanted to believe him. I explained that if he gave up the person who had supplied the drugs, we could get house arrest. He nodded without hesitation. He gave me the other guy’s name, his girlfriend’s phone number, everything.

I squeezed his hand when I said goodbye. One second longer than necessary.

***

That same week I had to meet Rubén Falcón, the prison director. A tall, gray-haired guy with that air of men who think authority makes them the owners of the world. He received me in his office with a top-to-bottom scan that lasted longer than politeness allows.

—Doctor Quintana, what a pleasure —he said, pointing to the chair—. Here we take good care of the detainee.

I was wearing a red dress I’d put on without thinking too much. I regretted it the moment I walked through the door. Falcón wouldn’t take his eyes off my legs.

—I need to visit my client —I said, sharply—. And I need it to be private.

—Of course. Although I’d like to invite you to a coffee first. So we can go over the file more calmly.

—I handle the file with the prosecutor. Thank you.

His secretary, a young brunette named Brenda, came in with some papers. I saw the conspiratorial look he gave her. I saw how she let his hand brush her waist as she passed. I knew what went on in that office. Half the city knew. Falcón collected favors with the bodies of prisoners’ girlfriends, and his secretary was part of the show.

—I’ll leave you alone with the detainee in his own cell —he said finally, chewing over the decision as if it were a concession—. We’ll remove the bunkmates for a few minutes. We’ll give you a panic button in case anything happens.

—That seems like a nice gesture —I replied.

It wasn’t. It was a trap, and I knew it.

***

Brenda escorted me down the corridors. The prisoners whistled, said things I’m not going to repeat, and a couple of them grabbed their crotches when I passed. She laughed.

—Relax, Doctor —she said—. They’ve been months without seeing a woman. Anything looks like a goddess to them.

We reached cell twelve. Nicolás’s two bunkmates were taken away, escorted into another corridor. Brenda opened the bars, let me in, and closed them behind me.

—Thirty minutes —she said, and left.

Nicolás was sitting on the lower bunk. He stood up as soon as he saw me. He had a mark on his cheekbone, a fresh bruise.

—What happened to you? —I asked.

—Nothing. An argument.

—About what?

—Things in here. Doesn’t matter.

I set my bag on the floor. I took out the panic button and put it on the pillow of the cot. An automatic, procedural gesture. I should never have done it.

—I have good news —I told him—. They caught the other guy. The judge approved the deal. In forty-eight hours you’ll be home with an ankle monitor.

His eyes filled with tears. Not with joy. With relief. I saw him come closer, face bruised, and I couldn’t hold his gaze.

—Thank you, Valeria.

—It’s my job.

—No. It’s more than that.

He hugged me. A grateful-client hug, that’s all it was at first. I hugged him back, patting his back the way you pat someone who has just received the news of their life. Then he didn’t let me go. Then he kissed me.

And I kissed him back.

Thirty seconds. That’s the time I gave myself to stop. Thirty seconds in which I thought about the courthouse, my marriage, the ethics complaint, the camera that was probably recording from some corner. Then I stopped thinking.

He pushed me against the bars. He turned me around and pressed me back against the cold metal. My tits were crushed between the bars, the dress hitched up to my waist, the thong pulled to one side. His tongue traced my neck, my ear, the lobe where my little hoop earring still jingled. I felt his hard cock against the curve of my back, thick even through the fabric of his pants, and I let out a moan I’d gone months without making.

—Keep your voice down —he whispered, with an authority I hadn’t heard from him before—. There are guards in the hallway.

—Wait a second —I told him.

—I can’t.

He slid his hand in front, hooked my thong with two fingers, and touched me there, in the cunt already soaked through, sliding his index and middle finger between my swollen lips. He brought them to his mouth without looking at me, sucking my wetness with his eyes closed as if it were the first thing he’d tasted in months.

—You’re dripping, Valeria —he said in my ear—. You’re dripping and I haven’t even started yet.

He knelt behind me. He lifted my dress even higher, yanked my thong off in one pull —I heard it tear, wet— and spread my ass cheeks apart with both hands. First I felt his breath, then the tip of his tongue tracing me from my clit to my asshole and back again. A long, filthy lick, with no respect at all for what I was on the other side of those bars.

I gripped the bars with both hands until my knuckles went white. Nicolás drove his tongue into my cunt, all of it, searching inside me as if he wanted to devour me from there. He sucked my lips one by one, bit my clit with his mouth closed, licked my ass with an obscene slowness that made me lift my hips, begging for more.

—Shut up —he kept telling me every so often, between licks—. Shut up, Valeria.

I couldn’t shut up. I was pushing my ass against his mouth as if it weren’t me doing it. He slid two fingers into my cunt, curled them upward, and with his tongue he kept playing with my clit, sucking it and letting it go, sucking it and letting it go. A third finger went into my ass, just the first knuckle, and that was when I lost the little that was left of me. I came against the bars, biting my forearm so I wouldn’t scream, my legs trembling so badly that if he hadn’t been holding my hips I would have fallen onto the concrete floor.

He turned me around. He took me to the cot. He pulled my dress off in one sweep over my head, unfastened my bra in one move and threw it to the floor. He took his T-shirt off with the other hand and shoved his pants down to his knees.

His cock stood up against his stomach, thick, the tip already shining. Bigger than I expected. I stared at it for a second, mouth open, and he noticed.

—Suck it —he told me. It wasn’t a question.

I knelt on the cot and took the base in my hand. I ran my tongue along the underside, from his balls to the tip, and a sound escaped me when I tasted him. Salty, masculine, trapped. I put it in my mouth as far as I could, feeling it fill me, bumping against my throat. I grabbed his balls with my other hand and squeezed them gently while I worked him up and down, leaving a strand of saliva that soaked his whole cock.

—That’s it, Doctor —he said, gripping my hair—. That’s it, with that pretty little mouth of yours.

He drove it in all the way. I took it whole, holding back the gagging, tears in my eyes. He pulled out, let me breathe for two seconds, and shoved it back in. I dug my nails into his thighs. When he pulled it out completely, my whole face was shining with saliva.

He threw me onto my back on that narrow mattress and fell on top of me. He pried my legs open with his knee.

—You have to tell me to stop —he said, looking me in the eyes—. If you don’t tell me now, I won’t be able to.

—Don’t stop. Put it in me.

He took hold of it with his hand, ran it twice between my lips, wetting the tip in my wetness, and rammed it into me in one shot. All of it. With a single thrust that made my back arch off the cot and made me bite my lip until it bled.

—Holy fuck —he whispered, staying still inside me—. How tight you are.

He started moving. At first slowly, pulling almost all the way out to the tip and burying himself again to the hilt, watching my face with every thrust as if he were memorizing my reactions. Then harder. The cot creaked with every thrust, the springs shrieked, the bars vibrated against the wall, and I dug my nails into his back, scratching him with the exact memory of what we were doing. He kissed me while he fucked me, mixing my panting with his, making me take his tongue into my mouth.

He grabbed my tits with both hands, squeezed hard, bent down to suck a nipple and bit it. I arched again. With one hand he went down to my clit and started rubbing it in circles, never stopping his thrusts, with the rhythm of a man who knew exactly what he was doing.

—Come again —he ordered—. Come with my cock inside you.

I came. I came with my mouth open against his shoulder, biting him, my cunt clenching around his cock in spasms he felt because he said “that’s it, that’s it, that’s it” in my ear while he kept thrusting.

He pulled his cock out, shining, dripping. He turned me face down. He lifted my hips until I was on all fours on that miserable cot, my face buried in the pillow he’d been sleeping on for weeks, breathing in that smell of a confined man that in another context would have disgusted me and that there, instead, finished undoing me.

He spread my ass cheeks with both hands. He spat. I felt the hot glob landing on my asshole and running down toward my cunt, and he didn’t give me time for anything because he was already driving his cock into me from behind, in my cunt, with one long thrust that knocked the air out of me.

—Is this how you like being fucked? —he said in my ear, grabbing my hair, yanking it back so I’d arch my neck.

—Shut up.

—Tell me. Tell me how you like it.

—Like this. Hard. Like this.

—Like this, Doctor? Like this, the way nobody ever drives it into you at home?

—Yes. Yes. Yes.

He buried himself to the balls with every thrust. I heard the wet sound of the collision, the slap of my cunt, the impact of his pelvis against my ass. He put his thumb in my asshole while he kept fucking me and that’s when I screamed into the pillow, a muffled cry that scraped my throat raw. With the other hand he grabbed one of my tits and squeezed it like he wanted to leave a mark.

—Shut up —he told me, and laughed softly—. The guards, Doctor. The guards are going to hear you.

I felt him get hard in another way, more rigid, more frantic. His thrusts became uneven.

—I’m gonna come —he panted—. I’m gonna come, where?

—Outside. Outside, on my back.

He pulled out at the last second. I felt the hot spray landing between my shoulder blades, a long spray, with several spasms, while he growled, squeezing his cock with his hand and unloading on me. A second shot hit my waist. Then he collapsed beside me on that one-person cot, his cock still hard, dripping onto the sheet, and we stayed silent for a few minutes, listening to his breathing.

I touched the scar on his cheekbone with my thumb.

—Was it because of me? The fight.

—Some idiot said something stupid about you.

—Nicolás.

—What?

—Don’t fight over me again. I’m not worth that.

He laughed quietly.

—I decide what you’re worth.

***

I got dressed in a hurry. I wiped my back with the hem of the dress before putting it on, feeling the warm semen stick to the fabric. I fixed my hair, looking at myself in the dark reflection of the bars. I stuffed the torn thong into my bag, balled up. I picked up the panic button from the pillow and put it back in my bag as if that could undo anything. Before leaving I looked at my hands: they were shaking.

I knocked on the bars. Brenda appeared a while later with that smile I could no longer read. She looked me up and down, paused for a second on the wrinkled dress, the messed-up hair, the marked neck, and said nothing. She escorted me out through a different corridor from the one I’d come in through. More discreet. One for the women who left the way I was leaving.

In the car I sat for twenty minutes without starting it. With my hands on the steering wheel and his smell still stuck to my skin, between my legs, in my mouth. I thought I was going to cry. I didn’t. I thought I was going to throw up. I didn’t. I slipped my hand under the dress, touched my swollen cunt still dripping, and brought my fingers to my nose. I thought about all the ethics codes I had just broken and all the reasons why tomorrow I was still going to be his lawyer.

Nicolás was released with an ankle monitor forty-eight hours later. He went back to his girlfriend. I went back to my husband, my practice, and my life as an impeccable woman. We never spoke again. He never sent me a message, never came to the office, never looked for me. He did what was required.

And I, ever since then, every time I take on a new case, every time a young man looks at me from the other side of the glass with that mix of fear and gratitude, I look down at my hands under the table to make sure they still aren’t shaking.

One day they’re going to shake again. That’s what nobody taught me in law school.