The Builder Who Renovated My Bathroom and My Entire Life

I had been obsessed for months with renovating the two bathrooms in the house. They had become stuck in an era that was no longer mine: greenish tiles, dripping faucets, a bathtub with stains that wouldn’t come out no matter how hard I scrubbed. I asked half a dozen companies for quotes, and they all gave me figures that seemed invented to scare me off. I was about to give up when my husband, almost by chance, found a builder who worked for himself and charged half as much.

His name was Bakary. He had come from Senegal a few years earlier and specialized in tiling and plumbing installations. Andrés hired him over the phone without giving it much thought, pleased to have solved the problem without having to set foot in a single building-supply store himself.

“He starts Monday,” he told me that night, already in bed. “I’ll leave it to you to coordinate everything. I won’t be around.”

That sentence, spoken without any particular intention, ended up changing everything.

I won’t be around.

Andrés worked from six in the morning until six in the evening, twelve long hours at a logistics company on the other side of the city. Bakary started at seven and left at three. There was one exact hour, between six and seven, when the house was empty and silent, and then eight more hours when it was just him and me among the dust and the noise of the angle grinder.

I noticed it on the first day. I didn’t admit it to myself, but I noticed.

Bakary was tall, taller than he seemed when you saw him hunched over his work. He had big, strong hands, and a way of looking at things—the tiles, the grout lines, the level against the wall—as if nothing in the world deserved to be rushed. He didn’t talk much. When he did, he spoke slowly, weighing every word, and laughed with a low laugh that took time to arrive but was worth the wait.

“It’s going to look very good, ma’am,” he told me on the second day, indicating the entrance bathroom with his chin. “You’ll have to be patient with the dust.”

“Don’t call me ma’am,” I replied, surprised by my own tone. “My name is Lorena.”

He nodded without smiling yet, but something shifted in his eyes.

***

During the first week I devoted myself to pretending I had things to do. I rearranged papers that didn’t need rearranging, watered plants I had already watered, walked down the hallway on any pretext to see him from behind, bent over, his T-shirt stuck to his back from the heat, the sweat outlining every muscle. I brought him coffee midmorning. Then I started bringing him something to eat as well. After that I stopped inventing excuses and simply stayed leaning against the doorframe, watching him work, watching his arms tense as he lifted the tiles, watching his pants cling to his ass when he bent over.

He knew. Of course he knew. A man like that knows perfectly well when a woman is looking at him, when a woman is getting her panties wet just from watching him work.

On Friday of the second week, as he handed me the empty cup, his fingers brushed mine, and neither of us pulled away. It was barely a second, but a second is enough when you’ve spent too long feeling invisible in your own home, when you’ve gone too long without anyone touching you as if they truly desired you.

“Lorena,” he said, and my name in his mouth sounded different from the way it sounded in Andrés’s.

I didn’t answer. I held his gaze until heat climbed up my neck and dropped between my legs, and then I turned around and went back to the kitchen, my heart pounding and my pussy throbbing as if I were fifteen again.

That night, lying beside my sleeping husband, I knew it had already been decided. All that remained was for it to happen.

***

It happened the following Monday.

Bakary took twenty-minute breaks every couple of hours, sitting on the living-room sofa covered with an old sheet so it wouldn’t get dirty, and drank water while looking at his phone. That morning I sat beside him. I didn’t say anything. Neither did he. I placed my hand on his thigh and felt the muscle tense beneath the fabric of his work pants, and higher up, against my palm, something that was already beginning to harden.

“If we start this,” he told me quietly, without moving my hand away, “we won’t be able to stop.”

“I know,” I replied, squeezing a little, feeling it grow beneath my fingers.

He kissed me slowly, as he did everything, taking his time, his tongue exploring mine without haste as he slid his hand up my thigh and under my skirt. When his fingers brushed the soaked fabric of my panties, he moaned against my mouth, and then he stopped taking it slowly. He tore my panties off in one pull, spread my legs on the sofa, and plunged two fingers straight into my pussy, already dripping with the desire that had built up over two weeks. “You’re so fucking wet,” he murmured, fingering me slowly while watching my face. “You’ve been wanting this for days.” I unbuttoned his pants with trembling hands and pulled out his cock, thick, dark, already hard and leaking at the tip. I gripped it with both hands and took it into my mouth without hesitation, sucking him greedily while he threw his head back and let out a guttural moan. I sucked him slowly at first, then hungrily, swallowing him until he made my throat arch, feeling him pulse between my lips. “Come here,” he said, pulling me up. “I want to fuck you now.” He positioned me astride him, pulled my panties all the way down, and guided me with his hand until the tip of his cock began to push its way inside me. I lowered myself slowly, feeling him fill me inch by inch, bigger than anything I had ever had inside me, and when he was buried completely I let out a moan I couldn’t contain. I began moving on top of him, up and down, feeling his cock brush against the inside of me with every thrust, while he gripped my hips and dug his nails into my skin, setting the pace, harder and faster each time. We made love that way, with construction dust still floating in the morning light and the neighbor’s radio playing somewhere in the distance, fucking without restraint, the sofa creaking beneath our weight and my moans mingling with his deep grunts. When I felt myself coming, I dug my fingers into his shoulders and came with my whole body trembling, squeezing him inside me, and he managed a couple more thrusts before pulling out and coming across my belly with a hoarse moan, marking my skin with his hot semen.

When we were finished, he laughed with that low laugh of his and told me he had to get back to the bathroom or he wouldn’t finish the job on time. I laughed too, my legs still trembling. And that was how it all began.

***

The job had been budgeted for four months. I managed to make it last almost a year.

I invented changes. I asked him to knock down a partition wall that didn’t need knocking down. Suddenly I decided I wanted tiles in a different color and that the ones he had already installed would have to be ripped out. Andrés complained about the money, but he signed every new estimate without suspecting a thing, exhausted by his own twelve-hour days, happy to come home to a house that was gradually becoming beautiful.

He didn’t know that the house wasn’t the only thing being transformed.

I stopped sleeping with my husband. I gave him excuses—tiredness, headaches—and the truth was that I didn’t even have to try very hard, because for a long time there had been nothing left between us but habit. Bakary filled every space Andrés had unknowingly left empty, and he also filled every corner of my body that had gone ignored for years. We fucked in the master bedroom, on the sheets I carefully changed afterward, with him penetrating me from behind while holding my hair and whispering in my ear about how tight my pussy was, how good his cock looked on me. In the kitchen, against the new countertop, one leg raised over his shoulder while he fucked me standing up, thrusting so hard that the dishes in the drainer trembled. In the half-finished bathroom, amid the smell of fresh cement and sweat, kneeling while he put it in my mouth and then drove it into me bent over the new bathtub, my screams ricocheting off the freshly installed tiles. I learned to suck his cock like I had never sucked Andrés’s, taking my time, playing with his balls while I sucked him, looking him in the eyes when I noticed he was close to coming so he would hold back a little longer. He learned every inch of my body—where to touch me to make me come in seconds, how to lick my pussy until I screamed into the pillow, how to fuck me slowly until I was desperate and then plunge all the way in at once, deep to the hilt.

Every break was ours. Twenty stolen minutes worth more than entire years of my marriage, twenty minutes of sweat, muffled moans, of coming again and again on those hands that knew exactly what to do.

In the afternoons, before leaving, Bakary showered at my house. More than once I got under the water with him, soaping his broad back, kneeling beneath the hot spray to suck him while the water poured over both of us, swallowing every last drop when he came against my tongue. I prepared something for him to eat, and we sat talking in the kitchen as if we were a real couple, as if that were our life and not an interlude that would close with the last bead of silicone. We talked about his hometown, about his mother, who was still there, about the plans he had. I listened to him and thought that never, in twelve years with Andrés, had I listened to anyone so attentively, nor had anyone fucked me with such hunger.

At five-thirty he left. I changed the sheets, opened the windows, and scented the room so the air would erase every trace of him before my husband crossed the threshold. It was almost a ritual, and I admit that I even enjoyed the ritual.

***

My body began to change. With so much exertion, so many mornings, I had become firmer, more awake. I looked at myself in the mirror and liked what I saw for the first time in years. Andrés noticed.

“You’ve been looking gorgeous lately,” he told me one night with a foolish smile. “It must be the renovation. It’s making you happy.”

“Must be,” I answered, and had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from bursting out laughing.

One afternoon we ran out of condoms. It was a stupid oversight, and I should have stopped there. I didn’t. Bakary asked whether I was sure, and I told him yes with a clarity that frightened even me. That time he fucked me bareback for the first time, feeling every inch of his naked cock slide inside me without any barrier, and when he came inside me, filling me completely, I let out a moan I had never let out with anyone. From that day on, I didn’t want him to use anything again. I had grown accustomed to feeling him without barriers, to feeling his hot semen flood me every time, and the thought of the consequences, instead of stopping me, began circling in my mind like another temptation.

What if it happened? What if it really happened?

It did.

***

I knew before I took the test. A woman knows these things. When I saw the two lines on the test, sitting on the edge of the new bathtub he had installed with his own hands, I didn’t feel afraid. I felt something like happiness, stubborn and silent.

I told him that very morning. Bakary was silent for a long while, looking at me, and then he took my face between those enormous hands and kissed my forehead.

“What are you going to do?” he asked me.

“Whatever I want,” I replied. “For once in my life, whatever I want.”

We planned it together, in low voices, in the kitchen, like two conspirators. I made Andrés believe the baby was his. It wasn’t difficult; all it took was sleeping with him for a couple of nights, letting him fuck me clumsily and quickly, without any desire on my part, my mind fixed on another man while Andrés panted on top of me, and letting the dates add up in their own way. He became euphoric. He called his mother, bought a ridiculous rattle, and started talking about names. I let him. I needed him to pay for the health insurance, the ultrasounds, the tests—everything an excited man pays for without batting an eye.

I kept up the charade until the seventh month, fucking Bakary whenever I could, even with my belly already growing, finding new positions so I could keep feeling him inside me—on my side, from behind, with him kneeling behind me while he whispered that the child was his even though the whole world believed otherwise. By then the bathrooms were finished, immaculate, gleaming, and Bakary had been paid every last euro for work he had more than earned. There was no more construction. No more excuses. No reason left to keep pretending.

***

I filed for divorce one autumn afternoon, with a calmness that surprised even me.

Andrés understood nothing. He asked me whether there was someone else, and I said no with a martyr’s expression that still makes me a little ashamed. He negotiated, begged, got angry, then begged again. In the end he gave in on almost everything, exhausted and defeated, convinced that it was his fault for never being home. I kept the newly renovated apartment and the baby’s insurance, paid in advance for an entire year.

The child was born in spring. He is just like his father: the same dark, luminous skin, the same calm look even when he cries. Bakary moved in with me a few months later, without hurrying, as he does everything. The house he had renovated for an unfaithful woman ended up being his, and that first night he slept under my roof as something more than a clandestine lover, he fucked me in every room, starting in the kitchen and ending in the shower, as if he wanted to leave his mark on every corner that had once been another man’s territory.

Someone had to come from the other side of the world to teach me how to really live, to remind me that I, too, had the right to desire and choose, and to be fucked the way a woman deserves to be fucked. I went back to work. Bakary kept tiling bathrooms all over the city, from one end to the other, with those patient hands that one day settled over mine and did not pull away.

Now we have two children at home and another on the way. Sometimes, when I watch them sleep, I think of that dead hour between six and seven in the morning, of the silence of the empty house, and laugh to myself.

I regret nothing. It’s the one thing I know for certain.