The Trans Woman Who Got Into My Taxi at Dawn

I’ve been driving a taxi for almost ten years. Most of my shifts are at night, around the downtown area and the neighborhoods that ring the capital. When you spend so many hours behind the wheel, you end up thinking you’ve seen everything: drunks arguing with the cashier, couples fighting right on the sidewalk, girls coming out of bars at five in the morning with their shoes in their hands. But that dawn brought me a surprise I still find hard to say out loud.

I’ve been married for nine years and I have two kids. My salary at my other job doesn’t cover anything, so on my days off and most nights I spend them inside the taxi. Until that night, it had never even crossed my mind to be with anyone who wasn’t a woman. I didn’t even think of it as a possibility. I’m saying that up front, because after what I’m about to tell, you end up looking at yourself differently in the mirror.

It was around three in the morning. I was coming down a big avenue, one of those that are empty at that hour, where all you see are the yellow lights of the traffic signals blinking for nobody. I saw a figure on the sidewalk raise a hand. A tall woman, short pink skirt, some kind of white coat, and white knee-high boots. I slowed down and stopped half a block away.

She got in the back, strong perfume, sweet voice. She gave me an address on the other side of the city, almost forty minutes away on the inner highway. I accepted without thinking twice. At that hour, a long fare is a blessing.

“Have you been working long?” she asked me.

“Since nine,” I answered, not taking my eyes off the rearview mirror.

I looked at her more closely. She was beautiful, with straight hair falling over her shoulders and lips painted a nearly black red. But there was something in the jaw, a slight shadow under the makeup. And the voice, though she worked to keep it soft, had a deep undertone that gave her away. That was when I understood she wasn’t a woman. Or that she was, but not in the way I was used to understanding it.

I didn’t say anything. I kept driving.

Inside, I was wondering what was happening to me. I didn’t feel disgust, I didn’t feel rejection. I felt curiosity. I kept watching her through the mirror every time a billboard’s light painted her face. She crossed and uncrossed her legs, slowly, fully aware that I was looking at her.

“Does it bother you?” she asked at one point.

“Does what?”

“That I’m a transvestite.”

It took me a while to answer. I gripped the wheel a little harder than necessary.

“No,” I said at last. “To each their own.”

She smiled and fixed her hair. We didn’t talk again until we got there. The address was a low building, one of those old towers with the entrance barely lit by a flickering fluorescent tube.

“We’re here,” I said, looking at the taximeter clock.

She stayed still in the seat. She didn’t open her purse, didn’t look for her wallet. She just looked me in the eye through the rearview mirror.

“I’ve got a problem,” she said.

I turned around slowly. I already knew what was coming.

“You don’t have any money.”

“I don’t. But I can pay you for the ride with something else, if you want.”

The blood rushed to my head, but not from excitement, not yet. It was anger. I’d spent twelve hours glued to the wheel and she came out with a proposal like that, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

“Get out,” I said coldly.

“Wait.”

“I said get out.”

“You won’t regret it. I swear you won’t regret it.”

I clenched my jaw and looked at her again. Her eyes were locked on mine, without challenge, without fear. Just the steadiness of someone who knows exactly what she’s offering and exactly what it’s worth.

“I’ve got a family,” I said, as if that could matter to either her or me.

“I’m not asking you to leave anyone. I’m asking for five minutes.”

I stayed silent for a long while. The avenue was dead. A dog crossed the middle of the asphalt unhurriedly. Cold dawn air came in through the passenger-side window. I felt my heart hammering against my ribs.

“Fine,” I said, and I wanted to die the instant the words left my mouth.

She smiled like she’d won something. She got out of the back seat and walked around the car. When she opened the passenger door and climbed in front, perfume flooded everything. It was a sweet smell, almost cloying, different from the one my wife used.

“Lean back,” she said softly.

I pulled the seat lever and let myself fall back. The taxi roof turned into a gray blur with a little warning light glowing. I shut my eyes for a second and opened them again.

You are not doing this. You are not really doing this.

She started over my pants. Her long nails, painted the same dark red as her lips, drew slow circles over the fabric. I had nothing to do but stay still, watching the lights from the building’s sign through the windshield. I felt her breathing near my ear, and that was what really woke me up more than the caresses.

When she realized I was already hard, she unzipped me carefully. She took everything out with a skill that left me speechless. It was obvious this wasn’t her first time. Not her second. Not her tenth.

“Easy,” she said, lowering her head.

I felt her tongue before her mouth. A long stroke, from base to tip, slow, as if she were tasting a dessert. I slapped the armrest before I could help it. I almost blurted out a curse.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” she said, and kept going.

What came after doesn’t resemble anything anyone had ever done to me before. My wife doesn’t do that to me. The fling I had years ago didn’t either. It’s something else. There’s technique, surrender, a lack of hurry I didn’t know existed. Every time her mouth went up, her tongue played around the tip; every time she went down, she made a barely audible sound that gave me goose bumps.

She grabbed my testicles with her other hand and squeezed them gently. I had spread my legs without even noticing. I had both hands on the wheel and my eyes closed, and the sound of the engine idling was a dull cushion beneath everything. The police radio kept murmuring softly, talking about a crash at the Fifteenth Street crossing.

I don’t know when I grabbed the back of her neck. I did it as if she were a woman, without thinking. I buried my fingers in her hair and guided her, set the rhythm. She let me, without complaint. And then I touched her shoulders, her legs, her firm ass, which surprised me beneath the fabric of the coat. I was harder than ever and my head was going a thousand miles an hour.

“Getting close?” she asked, pulling her mouth away for a moment.

“Yeah,” I answered, almost breathless.

She sped up. I gripped the wheel as if I were about to rip it out. When I came, I filled her mouth and she didn’t move, didn’t pull away. She stayed there until I stopped shaking. Then she sat up slowly, fixed her hair, and ran a hand over her lips as if touching up her lipstick in front of a mirror.

“Easy,” she said again.

I couldn’t speak. My heart was trying to climb out through my throat. I looked at her, and what scared me most was not what I had just done. It was realizing I wanted to do it again.

“That service costs two hundred,” she said, smiling. “But since you brought me all the way here, let’s leave it at that.”

I laughed despite myself. I nodded.

“My name’s Yamila,” she added, taking a card from the coat pocket. She left it on the dashboard. “If you want me as your client, call me.”

She got out of the car without waiting for an answer. She closed the door slowly. I watched her walk to the building gate, those white boots and that woman’s stride no surname was ever going to take away from her. Then I looked at the card. A name, a number, nothing else.

***

I kept it in the glove compartment. For three weeks I stared at it every time I opened the compartment, telling myself I wasn’t going to call. When I got home, I hugged my wife and convinced myself that that dawn had been an accident, a weird thing, something any worker can go through after so many hours without sleep.

It took me exactly three weeks to dial the number.

“Hello, it’s the taxi driver,” I said, feeling ridiculous.

Yamila didn’t ask which taxi driver. She just gave me the name of an intersection and set the time for two in the morning.

Since then I pick her up once or twice a month. I never take her anywhere. We stay in some vacant lot, some unlit street, and she does her job and I pay her what it’s worth. Sometimes we talk about Sunday’s game, sometimes about my kids. Once she told me how she ran away from home at fifteen. Another time she cried and I didn’t know what to say, so I gave her a little more money and handed her a cigarette.

I’ve never fucked her. I didn’t dare, I never really wanted to, I don’t know how to explain it exactly. But the blowjobs Yamila gives me I haven’t found in any other mouth. And even though it’s hard to say out loud, even though I still feel strange every time she gets out of the taxi and I go back home with my wife waiting for me in bed, this is one of the few things I have all to myself.

It’s my confession. I keep it here, in these lines, because I’d never dare tell a priest.