The Mulatto Woman Who Was Waiting for Me Naked in an Empty Apartment

I met her in the worst city in the tropics, one of those places that slowly rot beneath the heat, with peeling facades and bars that smelled of cheap rum. I had been living for months in a dead-end boardinghouse, killing the afternoons with cigarettes and cynical conversations. Then she appeared, and everything else became background noise.

Her name was Yamilet. Mulatto, tall, with a way of walking that forced men to fall silent when she passed. The first time our eyes met, I was on the boardinghouse balcony, smoking. She lifted her head from the street, held my gaze longer than necessary, and smiled like someone who already knew how the story ended.

“Are you inviting me up, or are you going to stare at me from there all afternoon?” she said.

I didn’t know how to answer. She laughed, kept walking, and for three days I couldn’t think about anything else.

I saw her again at the bar on the corner. This time I sat beside her without asking permission, with the nerve desperation gives you. We talked about nothing—the city, the heat, how little there was left to do in a place like that. But everything she said had a second meaning, an invitation hidden beneath every word.

“I have a place,” she told me at last, biting the rim of her glass. “A borrowed apartment. Empty. If you want, I’ll show you what can be done in a place where nobody knows us.”

I should have hesitated. I didn’t.

***

The apartment was on the third floor of a building that was falling apart. I climbed the stairs with my heart pounding like a teenager’s. When I opened the door, I found her with her back to me beside the picture window, the evening light entering through her skin. There was no furniture. Only a mattress on the floor and her, slowly taking off her dress without turning around yet.

“Close it,” she said. “And don’t turn on the light. I want to see you only by what comes in from the street.”

I obeyed. I came up behind her and put my hands on her waist. Her skin was hot, damp from the afternoon’s oppressive heat. She smelled of clean sweat and something sweet I couldn’t name. I moved her hair away from her neck and kissed her there, just below the ear, and felt her shudder against me.

She turned around. She fixed me with her eyes and began unbuttoning my shirt, one button at a time, unhurried, as if we had our whole lives ahead of us. Every time she freed one, she grazed my chest with her nails. I was barely breathing.

“Slowly,” she murmured when I tried to hurry her. “What’s worth having isn’t done in a rush.”

She shoved me against the wall. She looked down at my bulge and smiled with open, shameless malice. She opened my pants, loosened my belt, and slowly pulled down my underwear, leaving my cock exposed, hard and throbbing in the half-light. She took it in her hand and squeezed from the base to the head, slowly, as though measuring it to decide how much she was going to make me suffer.

“Look how desperate you are,” she whispered, and licked my frenulum with the tip of her tongue. “I’m going to leave it soaking wet before you put it in me.”

She knelt without taking her eyes off me, held me by the hips, and took my cock into her mouth. It wasn’t a hurried or pretty blowjob. It was deep, wet, filthy, full of the sounds of saliva and restrained breathing. She swallowed half my length, then pulled back until the head was shining with spit, before descending again, deeper, her tongue pressing against the vein underneath. I had to brace one hand against the wall so I wouldn’t lose my balance.

“Don’t come yet,” she said without letting go, her mouth full. “I want to taste you properly.”

She licked my balls, sucked them one at a time, and then went back to my cock with the patience of a fucking bitch, working it in a slow rhythm that pulled short moans from me. Whenever she noticed I was about to come, she pulled away, ran her tongue over her lips, and giggled softly, leaving me hard and trembling.

“Not yet,” she said. “You’re in charge tonight, but I set the pace.”

I lifted her off the floor and carried her to the mattress. I laid her on her back and took my turn. I lifted the dress she still had on, moved aside her soaked panties, and found a dark pussy, open and shining with desire. I sank my fingers between her folds and she let out a long gasp, throwing her head back. I spread her flesh wide and stroked her clitoris with my fingertip, gently at first and then more firmly, until she began moving against my hand, asking for more with her hips.

I bent down and put my tongue inside her. I licked her from the entrance to the hood of her clitoris, slowly, sucking up the juice already running down her thigh. With every pass she writhed harder, buried her fingers in my hair, and pushed my face against her pussy as if she wanted to erase my mouth with her wetness. The room filled with her smell, sour and sweet at once, and with her increasingly ragged moans.

“That’s it, you bastard… like that,” she murmured. “Suck me properly. Don’t waste my time.”

I put two fingers inside her while I kept licking, opening her, pumping slowly until she responded with a spasm and soaked my hand. Then I looked at her, my face wet with her juice, and saw that she wasn’t laughing anymore. Her lips were parted, her breasts rising and falling rapidly, and there was a raw need in her eyes that struck me harder than any words.

“Now,” she begged, grabbing me by the nape. “Now, yes.”

I settled between her thighs and rubbed the tip of my cock against her pussy once, twice, smearing myself with her juices. I opened her properly with my hand and entered slowly, watching her swallow me inch by inch. She was warm, tight, wet in a way that made me clench my teeth, and when the head passed the first ring of flesh, she let out a sigh that ran all the way up my spine. I sank into her to the hilt, feeling every contraction, every tremor of her walls around me.

We started slowly, finding the rhythm, and little by little the pace became urgent, brutal, the mattress sliding across the floor and our bodies sticking together with sweat. She dug her nails into my back and opened her legs wider, demanding that I really open her, that I fuck her without restraint. I held her hips with both hands and drove into her with hard thrusts, hearing the wet, crude sound of our bodies colliding in that empty room that belonged to no one anymore.

“Deeper,” she screamed in my ear, her voice broken. “Put it all the way in, you son of a bitch.”

I lifted her legs onto my shoulders and worked her that way, going deeper, watching her stomach tense with every impact. She clutched at the nonexistent sheets, arched her back, and offered me her open pussy, sliding and pulsing around my cock. I withdrew only to plunge back in, again and again, harder each time, until both our moans blended into a single animal sound.

In a change of momentum I turned her facedown, pressed her face into the mattress, and lifted her hips. I spread her ass with my hand and rubbed my cock between her buttocks, dizzy from the heat of her skin. She let out a muffled, dirty laugh, as if she understood exactly what I was thinking. I didn’t get inside her from behind; she asked me not to, told me to keep wrecking her from the front, not to pull her out of that vertigo. So I went back to her pussy, straight in, without tenderness, and hammered her from behind while she bit her forearm to keep from screaming too loudly.

“That’s it, that’s it… don’t stop,” she said between gasps. “I want to feel you all the way.”

I answered with longer, heavier thrusts, losing patience. My cock throbbed from all the friction, and I felt her clench and open with every stroke, soaking my balls and sliding around the base. I slipped one hand between her legs to rub her clitoris at the same time, and the instant I touched her properly, firmly, she began to tremble. First her thighs, then her stomach, and then her whole body, until she released a long, hoarse cry and squeezed me inside her as if she wanted to milk me.

“That’s it, baby,” I whispered. “Come on my cock.”

The words drove her wild. She began moving herself, raising and lowering her hips against me, asking for more noise, more force, more brutality. The hot air circulating through the room made us sweat like animals. I sucked one breast, then the other, pinching her nipples until they hardened beneath my mouth, and she answered by digging her nails into my shoulders, leaving red marks that burned.

We came almost at the same time, her trembling beneath me, me emptying myself with a groan that escaped from deep inside me. I felt my cum bursting inside her in thick, hot pulses, and I didn’t pull away immediately; I stayed buried to the hilt while I kept spilling, listening to her breathing in ragged gasps, her pelvis still wet and trembling. When I finally withdrew, a thread of semen gleamed between her thighs and on the flattened mattress.

We lay still, panting, our skin burning, until a neighbor’s fan was the only sound left.

***

We spent an entire week that way. Every afternoon the same apartment, the same stairs, the same mattress on the floor. I learned her body by heart: the mole beneath her left breast, the way she narrowed her eyes just before coming, the glorious, shameless laugh she released afterward. I convinced myself it was something more than sex. I convinced myself, like an idiot, that she felt the same.

One afternoon she talked to me about leaving together. About abandoning the city, crossing the border, starting over anywhere that didn’t smell rotten. I listened with my head resting on her stomach, smoking, believing every word.

“I’d need to sort out some papers,” she said, running her fingers through my hair. “And you’d have to have everything ready. The money, the documents. So we don’t waste time when the moment comes.”

“I have just enough,” I admitted. “Some savings. My passport.”

“Then keep it safe,” she smiled. “We’re going to need it.”

***

The day I understood everything, I didn’t understand it at the time. I understood it afterward, when it was already too late.

She asked me to accompany her to the bank. She needed to take care of some paperwork, she said, and was embarrassed to go alone. We went together, her hand on my arm, her perfume clouding my judgment. While we waited in line, she pressed herself against me, whispered in my ear about what we were going to do that night, described every detail until I stopped looking at what I was signing. The clerk slid papers across the counter; I nodded; she bit my earlobe and giggled softly.

“Sign here, my love,” she whispered. “And here. So we don’t waste time later.”

I signed. I signed without reading, dazed, with the blood far from my head. We left the bank and she took me back to the apartment, where we showered together for the first time. The lukewarm water, her soapy hands on my back, her mouth searching for mine beneath the stream. She knelt in the shower and sucked my cock again, quickly, wetting my thighs with water and saliva, then stood, wrapped her arms around my neck, and whispered that she was happy, that tonight she was going to give me everything. It was the last time I touched her. I didn’t know it.

“Tomorrow,” she said as we parted at the door. “Tomorrow at this time we’re leaving. Come early.”

***

I arrived at the apartment early, hope pulsing through me again like a boy’s. I ran up the stairs two at a time, opened the door, and found the place empty, just as it had been on the first day. I sat on the floor and waited.

An hour passed. Then two. The sun began to fall and the light changed color. I lit one cigarette after another, looked out from the balcony, paced around the deserted room. There was no sign of Yamilet.

When night fell, I returned to the boardinghouse. I opened my bedroom door and stopped dead: it had been ransacked. The suitcase was open, clothes scattered across the floor. My father’s watch, the old camera, and my passport were gone. The drawer where I kept the few dollars I had saved was empty.

I felt a sick vertigo in my stomach. I collapsed onto the unmade bed, breathing hard, searching for the documents that were no longer there. All that remained was the drawer’s dirty hollow and a sweet perfume smell that suddenly made me nauseous.

The next morning I ran to the bank without having slept, my clothes rumpled. The clerk looked at me coldly.

“Your account is at zero, sir. Everything was withdrawn yesterday. Here are the forms, signed by you yourself.”

I recognized my signature on the paper. I remembered the line, her breath in my ear, the shower. Everything was one single moment, one perfectly arranged trap, while I thought I was in love.

I stumbled out. I wandered aimlessly through a city that seemed to mock me on every corner: the filthy bars, the women leaning in doorways, the ruined buildings. The whole world held up my own misery for me to see.

***

Two weeks later, the boardinghouse had settled back into its routine: weak fans, sluggish flies over the rotten fruit at breakfast, dull arguments about the weather. I was at my usual table, with a glass of watered-down rum and a cigarette burning down in the ashtray.

I looked the same as before. The same worn suit, the same unkempt beard, the same cynical jokes I used as a shield. No one would have guessed that I had been stripped of my last cent, left without papers and almost without a bed of my own. No one except those who know the look hidden behind a smile.

That afternoon, one of the new guests, a young man with a shirt that was too clean, broke the routine:

“Hey… does anyone know what happened to that gorgeous mulatto woman? Yamilet, I think her name was. I used to see her around here, and then she suddenly disappeared.”

A heavy silence fell. The old-timers looked at one another and shrugged. No one wanted to be the first to speak.

I picked up my glass and raised it as if making a toast.

“Good luck to her,” I said calmly. “I hope she managed to get out of this rotten city. Wherever she is, I hope they love her more than we loved her here.”

The young man looked at me, intrigued, waiting for more. I said nothing else. We kept drinking, smoking, laughing bitterly, and her name dissolved into the smoke as if she had never existed.

I leaned back in my chair. The rum burned my throat, but I no longer felt it. I watched the fan turning slowly on the ceiling and thought of her: her laughter, her skin, the heat of her body, and immediately afterward the image of the ransacked room. Both things were true at the same time. Tenderness and betrayal. Pleasure and fraud.

The most absurd thing is that if she appeared on that balcony again, I think I’d climb the stairs all over again.

I smiled with the crooked grimace of a man who no longer expects anything. Because at last I had understood the only truth worth knowing in that city: no one ever wins. You merely take more or less time to lose everything. And I, at least, had lost it between the thighs of the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.