The Gardener Came Upstairs Without Showering, and I Waited for Him

A little while ago I found myself staring at my reflection in the big bedroom mirror. I’m several months along now, and I still have trouble recognizing this new body—round, slow. Sékou is sleeping beside me, facedown, one arm draped across the pillow. An hour ago he was on top of me, breathing hard against my neck, his cock still hard as it plunged all the way into my pregnancy-swollen cunt, and now he’s resting as if nothing happened. I can still feel his semen sliding down the insides of my thighs, warm and thick. I know that when he wakes up he’ll come looking for me again, shove his cock into me without asking, because by this point in the pregnancy he knows I get horny over just about anything. In the meantime I’m writing, because there’s something I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since I found out I was going to be a mother.

It isn’t him I need to talk about. It’s someone else. Someone who passed through my life before him and who, for some reason, has come back into my thoughts right now, when everything seems settled.

His name was Yacine.

***

To understand what happened with Yacine, we have to start a little earlier, when my life was a neatly organized disaster and I pretended it wasn’t.

My partner at the time had moved out of the apartment a few months before. Then Bakary came along, moving into my home almost without me deciding it. He didn’t work, didn’t lift a dish, and had no intention whatsoever of building anything with me. But he dazzled me and took me to bed like very few men had. He had a thick, curved cock that touched places I didn’t even know existed, and he fucked with the calm assurance of a son of a bitch that left me trembling and begging for more. When I understood that the only thing he was going to give me was sex—that kind of sex that ruins you for the ones who come afterward—I confronted him one night in the kitchen. He gathered his things without arguing and went off to look for his next victim. He left me wounded in my pride, which sometimes hurts more than the heart, and with a cunt accustomed to a size that wasn’t easy to replace.

That was me—hurt and eager to prove to myself that I could still make someone want me—when I started paying attention to the gardener in the complex.

Yacine tended the flower beds and lawns throughout the entire complex. He was tall, nearly six foot two, with a body shaped by the sun and the effort of every day, not by a gym. He wore his hair long, tied into dreadlocks that fell down his back. He mowed the grass shirtless, his torso gleaming with sweat, his tight shorts outlining a bulge impossible to miss, and I spied on him from the balcony with a coffee going cold in my hand while I squeezed my thighs together.

“Good afternoon, ma’am,” he always greeted me, with a huge, open smile.

“Good afternoon,” I replied, then went inside before it became too obvious.

I have needs, I kept telling myself, as if that justified what I had already decided.

One hot afternoon I offered him a glass of cold water. He came up to my door, still with dirt on his hands, and stood in the doorway without daring to come in. I told him to enter. He drained the water in one swallow, his Adam’s apple moving in that black, gleaming neck, looked at me, and that look was enough. There was no need to speak. I kissed him, pressing one hand against his damp chest, biting his lower lip, and he lifted me off the floor as if I weighed nothing, his open hands on my ass, squeezing me against the bulge that had already grown rock-hard inside his pants.

He carried me to the sofa. Right there he tore off the summer dress I was wearing and stood staring at me in my panties as if he’d never seen a woman before. He yanked down my underwear and buried his face between my legs before I could say a word. His tongue thrust in at once, broad and clumsy, licking my cunt like someone drinking water after a day in the sun. I grabbed his dreadlocks with both hands and pressed his head against me, grinding myself against his mouth until I came screaming, my legs clamping around his ears.

When he lifted his face, his chin shining with my juices, he pulled down his pants. I saw his cock for the first time and a moan escaped me. It was thick, black, hard as a stick, its veins standing out, hanging heavily between his legs. I gripped it with my hand—I couldn’t wrap my fingers all the way around it—and put it in my mouth before he could react. I sucked him whole, swallowing him all the way back until my throat contracted and tears blurred my vision. He stared at me open-mouthed, unable to believe what was happening to him.

“Wait, wait,” he pleaded, breathless. “I can’t hold back.”

And he couldn’t. He laid me on my back on the sofa, spread my legs, and drove it into me with one thrust, all the way to the bottom, wrenching a hoarse cry from me. He started fucking me fast, too fast, with the desperation of a boy who had been holding back for too long. Two minutes later he was already coming inside me, gripping my tits with both hands and panting in my ear. I wrapped my legs around him, squeezing him, letting him finish deep inside.

When he pulled out, his cock still hard and semen running out, I was embarrassed to look at him. At him, not myself. He apologized two or three times for finishing so quickly. I put a finger to his lips and smiled. I’ll teach you, I thought.

That was the beginning of something that lasted for months.

***

I liked asking him to come upstairs without showering after work. I told him to come just as he was, his shirt hanging from his shoulder and the smell of exertion on his skin. At first he was a little embarrassed, but eventually he understood that that was exactly what turned me on. Something raw, real, without perfume. The first thing I did when he came in was kneel in front of him, pull down his pants, and take his sweaty cock out of his underwear so I could suck it like that, salty, with the taste of the whole day clinging to his skin. I did it slowly, looking up at him, while he held on to the doorframe so he wouldn’t fall.

Yacine was young and still didn’t entirely know what he had between his hands. He had strength, energy, an endurance that never seemed to run out, but he lacked the wickedness, that art of taking his time. And I taught him. Everything I had learned from other men, I put into practice with him. I showed him how to go slowly, how to read me, where to stop so I would end up begging him to continue. I taught him how to eat my cunt properly, to lick me open with two fingers spreading my lips, to run the tip of his tongue over my clitoris for minutes without changing the rhythm, until I tugged at his dreadlocks and begged him to put it in me.

“Slower,” I whispered against his ear. “Don’t rush. We have all afternoon. Pull it out. Leave me right there on the edge. Now again.”

He learned quickly. Session after session he became better, more confident, more attentive to every reaction in my body. He went from being an anxious boy who nearly came as soon as we started to being a lover who could hold me on the edge for an incredibly long time, pulling out when I was about to come, leaving me panting in the void, until I couldn’t take it anymore and begged him to finish me. He learned to fuck me every way: on his knees while I leaned against the sofa, my ass sticking up as he slapped me harder and harder; sitting down with me riding him, my tits bouncing in his face while he sucked my nipples; on our sides, one of my legs over his shoulder, while he put his thumb in my mouth and I sucked it.

His strength was something else. When he completely let go, when he stopped holding back and surrendered to the pure intensity of youth, he slammed me against the wall or the headboard with such force it took my breath away. He gripped my hips with those enormous workingman’s hands and pounded into me from behind, driving it all the way in, pulling it almost completely out, then thrusting it back in with a hard, dry smack that shook my entire body. The slap of his balls against my cunt could be heard throughout the room. I begged him for more, harder, deeper, even though afterward it hurt to sit down.

One night, between the two of us, we broke the bed. I was facedown with a pillow beneath my hips, my ass raised, and he was fucking me from behind, one hand pressing my face into the mattress and the other holding me by the waist. He fucked with such force that the bed began moving against the wall, one hard thud after another, until one of the crossbars gave way with a crack and everything collapsed. He fell on top of me without pulling out and kept fucking me right there, on the sunken mattress, until he emptied himself inside me with a roar that left my ears ringing.

Afterward we both lay on the collapsed mattress, laughing like two teenagers who had just pulled off a prank, his semen still running down my thighs.

“We broke it,” he said, still breathless, his limp cock resting against my hip.

“It was time,” I replied.

And it was true. It was the same bed where I had been with my ex, the same one where Bakary had left my heart raw. Throwing it in the trash gave me enormous relief. Without knowing it, Yacine helped me remove from my home what needed to go.

The next day my whole body hurt. My cunt was swollen, my nipples red from so much biting, my ass marked with the purple imprints of his hands, and a deep, persistent ache in my crotch lasted for hours. But it was a pleasurable pain, a physical reminder of the night before that I carried with me all day with a secret smile. Every time I sat down or crossed my legs, I thought of him and my underwear grew damp.

We became partners in a game no one else knew about. In the mornings he worked in the gardens as if nothing were happening, respectfully greeting the other residents, and I went downstairs to take out the trash just to cross paths with him for a second. One look was enough. He would come up that night, and we both knew it from early on.

“You pruned the rosebushes beneath my balcony today,” I told him once, pretending innocence.

“I thought that way you’d watch me longer,” he replied without looking up from the shears.

I laughed to myself all the way back to the elevator. He had something that many men with twice his experience had never had with me: the ability to make me feel desired with a single sentence. And, to top it off, a cock that filled me completely.

***

What I didn’t expect was that Yacine would also turn out to be a good man.

He began behaving in ways none of the others had even attempted. He washed the dishes before leaving. He showed up with groceries because he’d heard me say I didn’t feel like going out. He invited me to dinner at modest places, but ones chosen with care. He looked after me. And above all, he made love to me for real; he didn’t just fuck my body. He began taking his time outside the bedroom too, kissing my neck without hurrying when he found me washing dishes, slipping his hand beneath my dress without it necessarily being the prelude to a hard thrust. Sometimes he ate me out for half an hour, calmly, between my legs, simply for the pleasure of doing it, without looking for anything for himself afterward.

The boy fell in love. I saw it coming and didn’t know how to stop it in time. He devoted all his will to giving me exactly what I had demanded from Bakary and never received: presence, tenderness, the feeling of mattering to someone. Feeling loved and cared for by such a strong man should have been enough.

And yet it wasn’t.

Because I’m the kind of woman who wants what rejects her. The shameless, the elusive, the thing that refuses to be caught. I had Yacine surrendered at my feet, and that, though I’m ashamed to admit it, took away some of his appeal. At the hottest moments of sex I sometimes asked him for impossible things, whispered in his ear that he should get me pregnant, give me a child, come deep inside me and knock me up, fill my cunt until it overflowed. I whispered it in a broken voice while he pounded into me faster and faster, and I felt his cock grow harder as he came with a roar, shooting hot streams inside me. But it was only to turn him on, to feel him go crazy on top of me. I didn’t mean it. Not with him.

I understood the difference later. I would have given Bakary, who had treated me like a piece of furniture, everything he asked of me. With Yacine, who gave me everything, I held myself back. People are a contradictory mess, and I was no exception.

***

I made the decision one morning, watching him sleep. Yacine was pure innocence and pure abandon at the same time, an tireless machine and, at the same time, a man who deserved to be truly loved. And I wasn’t capable of doing that. Staying with him out of comfort would have been the worst cruelty: keeping him for years only to end up breaking his heart when someone else came along who did make me lose my head.

I decided to let him go. Let him find someone who could return his feelings, someone who would give him the children he dreamed aloud about between the sheets.

I said goodbye to him one night beside the complex pool, when no one was left and the water reflected the lights of the apartments. I didn’t tell him right away that it was goodbye. First we got into the water, naked, and right there in the pool, my chest pressed against the edge, I asked him to put it inside me slowly, in silence, so no one would hear us. He drove into me from behind, water splashing between us, holding my hips beneath the surface, fucking me for a long time while I bit my arm to keep from screaming.

Afterward we went out to one of the loungers and stayed together for nearly two hours, unhurried, as if we both knew there wouldn’t be another time. I sucked his cock slowly, sitting between his legs, savoring it, looking into his eyes as I pulled it out and put it back in my mouth. I sucked him until he was hard again, then climbed on top of him, guiding it with my hand until I fitted it inside me, and stayed still for a long while, feeling all of him inside me, committing him to memory. Then I began to move slowly, leaning against his chest, finding myself in him one last time.

That last time I let him finish inside me. I didn’t care about the risk. When I felt his cock swell and begin to tremble, I squeezed my legs around his hips so he couldn’t pull out, and stayed seated on top of him, milking him with my cunt while he filled me with hot spurts all the way inside. I wanted to give him something that was his alone, a memory he wouldn’t share with anyone else. I stayed on top of him for a long time afterward, feeling his cock soften inside me without letting it slip out. Yacine deserved it. I know he would have been a wonderful father, patient and devoted, but that child wasn’t meant for us.

“Is this goodbye?” he asked afterward, drying my hair with his T-shirt, semen still running down my thighs.

“It’s a thank-you,” I told him, and it was the most honest thing I had to give him.

He never came back to mow the lawn at my building. I suppose he asked to be moved to another area. I never held it against him.

***

After Yacine came a period I still have trouble putting in order.

Oumar arrived, and with him a first pregnancy that this time I actually wanted. Oumar was almost the opposite of Yacine in every way: hard in bed, dominant in the house, the kind who takes ownership of the place and the woman who lives in it. He fucked me as if he were punishing me, grabbed me by the hair, forced me to suck him down my throat, spread my legs whenever he felt like it, and shoved it inside me without asking. And I, who prided myself on being independent, let him do everything. I even became pregnant to keep him by my side, a desperate move none of my friends would have advised.

No one had ever treated me the way he did. That relationship left me with certain inclinations, certain new needs I discovered almost by accident and still indulge in today. But that’s another story, one that deserves its own account and that I promise to tell later, with all the details.

For now I’m left with this: with Yacine, with the smell of earth and sun, with the broken bed and the laughter, with the last afternoon at the pool and his semen running down my legs as I said goodbye. He was the kindest man who ever passed through my life, and the only one I let go knowing exactly what I was losing.

Sometimes desire and affection don’t walk together. Sometimes you learn that too late.

Sékou just moved in bed. He stretched out his arm to find me without opening his eyes, which means he’s waking up. I can already see his cock outlined beneath the sheet, hard again despite having just finished moments ago. I’m going to put down the notebook, set it on the nightstand, and go back to him to let him put it inside me again, without pulling out until we both fall asleep again.

Thank you for reading me.