The Commander Who Broke My Vows That Night

I had been living in the Convent of Saint Cyprian for six years when I saw him again. Six years praying to forget him, fasting until desire dried up inside me like a flower between the pages of a book. Six years pretending my vocation had been a call from heaven and not an escape.

The convent stood on the slope of a wooded mountain range, far from the nearest town. The walls were gray stone and the windows so narrow they barely let the moonlight in. My cell had a crucifix, a narrow bed, a small altar with a candle, and a window that looked out onto the inner courtyard.

That night I had been praying until late. It was October, and cold air seeped in beneath the door. I, kneeling before the altar, wore the black habit down to my feet and the white veil over my brown hair. My hands were clasped and my eyes closed, but the rosary trembled between my fingers.

I knew he was coming.

He had written to me three weeks earlier, in an envelope with no return address that the mother superior had handed me without asking questions. Only one line, in large, firm handwriting: “I’m stopping by the convent in October. Wait for me.” And I, instead of burning the letter as I should have, had hidden it beneath the mattress and read it every night before sleeping, while a warm dampness woke between my thighs that no prayer could dry.

The door creaked. I didn’t need to turn around to know it was him.

“Sister Lucia,” he said in that deep voice I remembered in every one of my sins.

Damián came in, closing the door behind him. He filled the space. He was nearly six and a half feet tall, broad-shouldered, with the solid body of a man who has commanded other men for too many years. He had dark skin, a thick mustache with a few gray hairs in it, dark eyes under heavy brows. He wore the party’s dress uniform: a khaki jacket with brass buttons, dark trousers, and boots still damp with courtyard dew.

“I knew you’d come,” I murmured without getting up.

“And still you pray.”

“For both things.”

Damián gave a low laugh, almost a growl. He took three steps and stopped behind me. I felt the brush of his trouser leg against my shoulder, the heat of his body against the nape of my neck covered by the veil. He rested a large hand on my head, over the white linen, like a father blessing a daughter. The hand stayed there. It didn’t move.

I closed my eyes. Don’t let him touch me any more, Lord. Or let him touch me all at once. But not this.

“Stand up,” he said softly.

I stood. When I turned to face him, the difference in size hit me like it had the two times I’d seen him before. I was small, slight, with a waist he had once encircled with one hand and laughed about. He looked down at me as if I were something fragile that might break if he looked too hard.

“How long has it been?” he asked.

“Seven years since the funeral. Six years, two months, and eleven days since I came here.”

“You counted.”

“Every single one.”

He slipped two fingers under my chin and tipped my face up. His hands were rough, knuckled with calluses, the hands of a man who has done many things he would never tell a nun about. He looked at me without speaking for a long time. I held his gaze because I knew that if I looked away, I would start crying.

“Your mouth is exactly as I imagined it,” he said.

“My mouth has never kissed anyone. Ever.”

“I know. That’s why I came.”

Damián kissed me.

It was not a gentle kiss. It was a kiss that had been waiting seven years, his and mine, a kiss that smelled of tobacco and aged rum and the pine forest on the road up here. He shoved his tongue all the way into my mouth without asking permission, tangling it with mine until I no longer knew how to breathe. He gripped my waist over the habit and crushed me against him, and I felt what the habit had been hiding from me all that time: that my body still knew exactly what to do with his, even though I had never touched him before. Against my stomach, through layers of wool and cotton, Damián’s hard cock pressed into me, thick and hot even through his clothes, and a moan escaped me straight into his mouth. My hands rose on their own to his chest. Under the khaki jacket, his heart beat hard and fast, just like mine.

“You shouldn’t be here,” I whispered against his lips.

“You shouldn’t have written to me either.”

“I didn’t write to you.”

“You wrote to me every night, sister. I heard you.”

Damián lifted my habit with one hand, hitching it up to my waist, and slid the other between my thighs over the convent’s thick drawers. He paused there for an instant. He found the soaked patch in the cotton and let out a low, satisfied, almost cruel growl.

“You’re dripping, sister. Under all this mourning, you’re dripping for me.”

“Don’t talk like that, for God’s sake.”

“I’m going to talk worse, girl. I’m going to tell you everything I’ve wanted to tell you for seven years.”

He pulled my drawers aside with two fingers and shoved one thick finger inside me in a single thrust. I jumped and clutched the lapels of his jacket. No one had ever put anything inside me, not even I had ever dared to probe there in the dark. Damián’s thick finger opened me up inside, explored slowly, found a spot that made my knees buckle.

“Tight as a virgin,” he murmured against my ear. “Because that’s what you are, right? Still.”

“Yes.”

“Say it properly.”

“I’m a virgin. No one has touched me. Only you.”

“Good girl.”

He pulled out the wet finger and brought it to his mouth in front of me, sucking it clean without taking his eyes off mine. I felt an emptiness open between my legs where his finger had been. I wanted it again. I wanted everything. I wanted him all the way inside me, even if it split me in two and damned me forever.

Damián sat on the edge of the narrow bed. The old cords creaked under his weight. I stood in front of him, my hands hanging at my sides, the veil still perfectly in place and the habit lowered again, as if nothing had happened. He took off his cap and set it on the floor. Then he crooked one finger at me: come here.

I knelt in front of him. The stone floor hurt my knees through the habit, but I didn’t care. Damián stroked my veil with a tenderness that undid me.

“I’m not taking it off,” he said. “I want to remember you like this. On your knees and with the veil, sucking my cock like the sluttiness nun in the world.”

My fingers trembled at the word in his mouth. But I didn’t look away. I unbuckled his belt with clumsy fingers. I had spent my whole life undoing nothing that wasn’t mine, and yet my hands knew what to do. I pulled down his trousers to his knees and his cotton underwear, and he appeared before me, already hard, thick, dark like all his skin, with veins marked along the shaft and the broad, shiny head beaded with a drop hanging from the tip. I looked at him for a second and my eyes filled with tears he didn’t understand.

“Don’t cry, girl,” he said softly.

“It’s not sadness. It’s that I can’t believe it. It’s that it’s bigger than I prayed for.”

“You prayed for this?”

“I prayed for this. Every night. Forgive me.”

“Forgiven.”

I took him in my hand and lowered my head. I kissed the tip first, slowly, as if it were something sacred, and tasted that thick salty drop that left my tongue burning. Damián closed his eyes and tipped his head back. I heard him let out a breath between his teeth.

“Sister…” he said, and the word broke in his throat.

I licked his cock all the way from the base to the head, slowly, learning every vein with my tongue. I kissed his heavy balls, one and then the other, and took them into my mouth in turn because he, with his hand over the veil, guided me there without a word. Damián breathed hard, mouth open, and every now and then he dropped a dirty word through clenched teeth that made something squeeze deep in my belly.

“Open wider, girl. Take it all. That whole virgin mouth for me.”

I took him into my mouth. Slowly at first, then with more confidence, letting his breathing set the rhythm. One hand went up and down with my lips, the other I rested on his thick thigh, feeling how tense he was under the fabric. Damián put his hand over my veil. He didn’t press, didn’t force me yet. He only stroked my head like something he loved and knew he was going to lose.

“Slowly… like that, girl…,” he murmured. “Learn at your own pace.”

I dared to go deeper. The tip hit the back of my throat and made me cough. Tears sprang to my eyes and saliva dribbled down my chin to the black habit, but I didn’t pull away. I went down again. And again. Damián swore under his breath and gripped the veil harder.

“Fuck, sister. Fuck. Who would’ve said God had saved that mouth for me.”

I was soaked beneath the black habit. He hadn’t touched me, I didn’t need him to. Damián’s voice, his hands on my veil, the salty, skin-warm taste filling my mouth: that was enough. I squeezed my thighs together and felt my cunt throbbing alone against the rough fabric. That was enough. That and the bitter taste of him on my tongue. When he tensed his legs and gripped my head a little harder, guiding me, setting the rhythm for the first time, I knew I was close. I was close too, without anyone touching me, just from the friction of my thighs closed under the habit and my nipples hard against the linen of my underdress.

“Swallow it, girl,” he panted. “All of it. Don’t spill a drop.”

Damián groaned low, deep, a sound that bounced off the stone walls and that I hid inside the veil as if I could smother it. His cock swelled one last time against my tongue and burst. The first spurt hit the roof of my mouth hot and thick, the second my throat, and I swallowed obediently, swallowed all I could, while it kept spilling at the corners of my mouth. His heat filled my mouth and throat. I took him all in, without pulling away, while my own body trembled like a reed. I clenched my thighs, bit my lower lip so I wouldn’t scream, and I came there on my knees, my mouth full of him and without anyone having touched me once. My cunt throbbed inside the habit like a second heart. The altar candle seemed to flicker.

Afterward there was a long silence. Damián breathed with his head thrown back. I had my forehead against his thigh, eyes closed, still trembling, with a white thread escaping from the corner of my mouth that I wiped with the back of my hand and licked without thinking.

“Come here,” he said at last, voice rough.

He made me stand and sat me on his lap like I was a child. He kissed my forehead over the veil, then my nose, then my lips. He didn’t mind the taste. He sucked on my mouth slowly, finding himself in my tongue, and groaned low when he found it.

“I’m not done with you yet, sister,” he murmured against my ear. “That was just to calm me down. Now I’m going to eat you whole before I get inside you.”

***

“Is there hot water in this place?” he asked.

“There’s a washroom at the end of the corridor.”

“Does anyone come by at this hour?”

“No one passes through here after matins.”

He carried me in his arms to the communal washroom, not caring that I still weighed far less than he could have carried. The room had an old cast-iron tub and a faucet that took a while to produce hot water. Damián opened the tap and waited, holding me from behind, his mustache brushing my temple and one hand tucked under my habit, squeezing a small breast over my underdress.

“I promised myself I wouldn’t come looking for you again,” he murmured.

“I promised myself the same.”

“Two broken promises in one night. Bad start.”

I laughed for the first time in six years. A small laugh, held in, almost a sigh. Damián smiled against my hair and pinched my nipple between two fingers, not stopping his own laughter either, until it hardened like a little stone and I tore a groan from him with the bite I gave his free hand.

When the water turned hot, he unfastened my habit. He did it with a patience that hurt my stomach. Button by button, tie by tie, until the black habit fell to the floor like an empty sack. Then the scapular, the cincture, the white slip I had worn underneath for years. Last, with almost religious care, he removed my veil. My brown hair fell to my shoulders. No one had seen it for six years.

“God,” Damián said. And he said it not like a blasphemy, but like a prayer.

He stood looking at me naked for a long while, without touching me, as if I were a painting. The small breasts with dark, erect nipples, the hollow belly of fasting, the patch of brown hair between my thighs, wet and flattened against my skin. He ran one finger over my sternum, down my navel, and stopped just before my pubis.

“No one has ever seen you like this.”

“No one.”

“Blessed are you.”

He put me in the tub. The water was too hot, but he mixed it until it was right. He rolled up his khaki shirt sleeves to his elbows and knelt beside the tub. With a hard, rough bar of soap, he soaped my back, my arms, my small breasts, my flat stomach, my thin thighs. He washed me with the concentration of a man who has had very few chances in life to do things properly. When he reached between my legs, he didn’t pretend it was just another part of me. He opened my thighs with his free hand, set the soap aside, and ran his soapy fingers over the lips of my cunt, back and forth, slowly, until a moan slipped from me and echoed off the tiles.

“Shh. They’ll hear you, little nun.”

“I don’t care.”

“I do. I still have a lot to do to you and I don’t want anyone interrupting us.”

He slid two fingers inside me, this time without the barrier of clothing, and curved them searching for that same spot from before. I gripped the edge of the tub with both hands. Water splashed along my back every time he moved his wrist. With his thumb he found my clit and rubbed it without hesitation, as if he knew by heart a map I was only just discovering myself.

“You’re thinner than last time.”

“The convent isn’t famous for its kitchen.”

“I’m going to make them feed you. And now you’re going to come in my hand, sister. Here, in the water, without making a sound.”

“I can’t…”

“You can. Look at me.”

I looked at him. His mustache was damp with steam and his black eyes were fixed on mine. His fingers opened me up inside with a slow, steady rhythm, while his thumb circled my clit as if polishing it. I began to tremble. Water sloshed between my breasts. I bit my lip until I tasted iron.

“Good girl. That’s it. Now.”

I came in his hand with a long shudder that arched my back inside the tub. I made no sound. I only opened my mouth and sank my nails into his forearm while the orgasm climbed from my feet to the crown of my head, and he kept pressing and curving inside until the last tremor. When he finally withdrew his fingers, he brought them to his nose, smelled them, and smiled like a wolf.

“I can do anything, sister. I’ve spent twenty years doing whatever the hell I want. The only thing I haven’t been able to do is come get you sooner.”

I cried silently under the water. Damián pretended not to notice and kept washing my shoulders with the sponge.

***

Back in the cell, he dried me himself with a large towel he’d taken from his duffel bag. He put me in a clean white nightgown, thin and soft, that wasn’t mine. My nipples showed through the fabric and he lingered a moment staring at them, running his thumb over them until they hardened again. Then he undressed without shame, leaving only his underwear, and for the first time I saw the full body of that man: the broad back with two old scars, the black hair on his chest, the firm stomach, and a fresh erection pushing against the fabric of his underwear as if half an hour earlier hadn’t been enough.

“Take it off for me,” he said.

I did. I pulled down his underwear with both hands and let his cock spill out again, even thicker in the gray light, pointing at me. Damián climbed into my narrow bed, which was too small for two but accepted his weight without complaint, and pulled me on top of him. I curled against his chest like I had dreamed so many nights, the nightgown bunched up to my waist and his hard cock pressing into my stomach. His skin smelled of soap now and the sweat from before. His mustache tickled my forehead.

“Open up,” he whispered.

I spread my legs over him and stayed still, straddling his hips, my soaked cunt resting on the base of his cock. Damián gripped my ass with both hands and began moving me forward and back, sliding me over him, without putting it inside me yet. Each swing dragged my clit along the full length of that hot, hard shaft, and I had to bite his shoulder to keep from screaming.

“Easy,” he murmured. “I’m going to be your first, sister. And I’m going to do it slowly, even if I die.”

“Put it in already. Please. Damián, please.”

“That’s how you ask?”

“Put it in me. Fuck me. Whatever you want. But now.”

I heard him laugh low, satisfied, against my neck. He lifted me a few inches, took hold of his cock with one hand, and guided me until the thick head touched me right at the entrance. I lowered my hips a finger’s width. He stopped. I lowered another. The head opened me slowly, wide, unbearable, and I let out a long moan that broke in my throat.

“Shh. You lower yourself. At your pace. I’m not moving.”

I went down more. I burned inside. I was tearing apart. And still I kept going, another centimeter and another, while Damián dug his nails into my hips and breathed through clenched teeth beneath me, taut as a bowstring. When I reached the bottom and felt his hair against mine, I stayed still for a few seconds, trembling, with him buried to the hilt.

“Good girl. Blessed girl. That’s it.”

“It hurts.”

“I know. It’ll pass. Breathe.”

I breathed. Little by little, the pain turned into something else. I started moving on my own, hands braced on his chest, rising and falling slowly, rediscovering every centimeter each time. Damián watched me from below with his mouth slightly open, touching me only at the hips, letting me do it, letting me learn. The cell filled with the wet sound of him sliding in and out of me, and my broken breathing, and the bed creaking against the stone.

“Look at you,” he murmured. “Look at you, Sister Lucia. Riding me like you were born for it.”

“Damián…”

“Say it.”

“I was born for this. I was born for you.”

He grabbed the back of my neck and threw me onto my back without leaving me. In one motion I ended up underneath him, legs open and him on top, propped on his elbows, looking down at me with bright black eyes. He began moving now, slowly at first, then deeper, then harder, marking every thrust against the wall with the sharp slap of the bedframe. I wrapped my arms around his back and my legs around his hips and let him do whatever he wanted with me.

“Squeeze,” he panted. “Trap me in there.”

I squeezed as hard as I could. Damián swore against my neck and drove in harder. Every shove drove my head deeper into the pillow, and I felt him filling me completely, taking inch by inch a space that had been mine alone for six years. One hand slid up my side, grabbed a breast, pinched my nipple with rough fingers.

“Again, girl. Come again for me. With my cock inside you this time.”

That was enough. Those filthy words in my ear and him buried to the hilt, hitting a place inside me I hadn’t known I had. I came with a low cry, my mouth pressed to his shoulder to swallow the scream, and my cunt clenched around him. Damián groaned like an animal.

“Fuck. Fuck, sister. You’re going to make me come inside you.”

“Yes,” I said, and my own voice surprised me. “Inside. All inside. Leave it in me.”

“May God forgive us.”

“Let him forgive nothing.”

He drove in once more, all the way to the bottom, until I felt his hips against mine and his teeth in my shoulder. And then he came inside me with a long, heavy groan, spurt after spurt, hot and thick, while he held me so tightly he squeezed the air out of me. I felt him filling me, overflowing me, already running down between my thighs while he was still throbbing inside. I lay beneath him trembling, tears sliding from my temples onto the pillow, with an idiot smile I couldn’t fit off my face.

We fell asleep like that, wrapped around each other, the moon slanting through the narrow window, him still inside me for quite a while until he slipped out on his own and left a warm trail over the sheets. The altar candle burned itself down sometime in the middle of the night. I dreamed of the sea, though I had never seen it.

***

I woke with the gray light of dawn and his hand drawing slow circles on my side, over my hip. Damián was awake, watching me. His mustache was tousled, his eyes a little puffy with sleep, his smile small. He had slipped the other hand between my thighs without hurry and was playing with what he himself had left there the night before.

“Good morning, beautiful sister,” he murmured.

“Good morning, commander.”

“Not commander anymore. Not for years.”

“For me, always.”

I kissed his chest, over his heart, and stayed a while listening to it beat. Damián stroked my loose hair with a tenderness that didn’t suit his body, while with the fingers of his other hand he kept slowly smearing his own seed over my cunt.

“I like the way you call me,” he said.

“How?”

“Like I still command something.”

“You command me.”

Damián was silent for a long while. Then he lifted my face with two fingers, as he had done the night before, and kissed me very slowly. Without hurry. With a sweetness that shattered me into a thousand pieces. Then he spread my legs again, climbed on top of me, and slid inside without a word. This time it didn’t hurt at all. This time it fit on its own.

He fucked me slowly, deeply, barely speaking, looking into my eyes the whole time as if he wanted to memorize my face before noon. I answered with my hips, lifting them to receive him each time, feeling his mustache brush my nipples, his hot breath against my collarbone. The cell was cold, but we were burning. The bed creaked softly, almost like a prayer. When I came, I did it in silence, my nails dug into his broad back. When he came, he did it without pulling out, pressing me into the mattress, murmuring words in my ear that I didn’t dare repeat even inside my own head.

Afterward we lay there wrapped around each other, him on top, not separating.

“Do you know the worst part, sister?”

“What?”

“That you command me too. And in my life, I never let anyone have that.”

I sank into his chest. It was cold in the cell, but he was a man-sized stove covering me with his arms. I didn’t want to get up. I didn’t want noon to come. I didn’t want terce prayers, or the mother superior, or the rest of my life without him.

“Damián.”

“Yes?”

“If God exists, is what we did a sin?”

“No idea, girl.”

“And if He doesn’t exist?”

“Then there’s nothing to forgive.”

“Then let Him not exist,” I murmured, and closed my eyes.

Damián kissed the top of my head. He smelled of night, of wet stone, of distant cigarette smoke from one he hadn’t lit. I stayed there, wrapped around a man I should never have loved, in a bed I should never have let anyone into, in a place supposedly devoted to silence. And for the first time in six years, two months, and eleven days, I regretted nothing.