What I Told My Mother That Afternoon at the Beach Bar

Of all the places I’ve lived in and visited, the sea is the only one that makes me think clearly. There’s something in the constant sound of the water, in the salt that works its way into your pores and stays there for days, that forces you to let your guard down. Not all at once. Little by little. That week in August on the southern coast didn’t look any different on the surface: vacation with my mother Pilar, my uncle Ramón, and his children in a rented apartment facing the beach. But it was different in every way that mattered, because three days earlier I had met Martín.

I saw him for the first time at the beach bar on the shore, ordering something cold with that calm self-possession men have when they don’t need to make a scene for you to notice them. Mid-forties, dark hair with gray at the temples, the tanned skin of someone who works outdoors. When he looked at me it was brief, without insistence, without that little smirk of someone who knows they’ve been caught looking. I looked away first. That wasn’t usual for me.

In three days we went from crossing paths on the shore to staying at the beach bar until they turned the lights off. He talked without needing to fill every silence, and that felt strange to me after years surrounded by people who had an opinion about everything. He really listened, without interrupting, without waiting for his turn to wedge in his own story. That afternoon, with the sun sinking toward the horizon and our feet buried in the still-warm sand of dusk, I told him about Roberto.

Roberto was my mother’s husband for six years. They married when I was nineteen and he was thirty-eight. He was the kind of man who knows exactly the effect he has and doesn’t waste a second of that advantage. During the first year we all lived under the same roof: my mother, him, and me, in a three-bedroom flat in the city center that suddenly felt very small. It took me three months to realize what was beginning to happen between us. Another three months to decide not to do anything about it.

It started with looks that lasted a second too long. With brushing my arm as he passed in the hallway. With asking about my plans, my friends, what I wanted to study, what kind of men I liked, with a steady attention my mother had never paid me. I’m not saying that to blame her. I’m saying it because it was true, and because that attention mattered to me more than it should have. I was twenty when I kissed him, in the kitchen, on a Tuesday afternoon while she was at work. The decision was mine. That’s something I’ve had to learn to live with.

It lasted almost a year. And it wasn’t “something.” It was fucking. Fucking against the kitchen counter with my mother’s apron still hanging on the hook behind me. Fucking on the living room sofa with the TV on to cover the noise. Fucking in her double bed, face down, biting the pillow that smelled like her perfume, while Roberto held my wrists down against the mattress and whispered in my ear how tight I was, how well I sucked him off, how he came harder inside me than inside her. I was twenty years old and I swallowed every word like it was water. I knelt and sucked his cock in the bathroom with the door closed while she watched TV in the living room, he buried his fingers in my hair and fucked my mouth until he came and made me swallow every last drop without spitting out a single one. He’d shove two fingers into my cunt in the hallway, against the wall, while I tried not to make a sound, and make me come like that, biting my lip so I wouldn’t cry out, his free hand covering my mouth.

It wasn’t love. I knew that from the beginning, and I think he knew it too. It was something closer to wanting to cross a line you knew you shouldn’t cross precisely because you knew it, that kind of desire that feeds on the forbidden more than on the person themselves. He liked that I was his wife’s daughter. He told me so. He told me with his cock inside me, half laughing, half groaning: “You’re Pilar’s daughter and you’re sucking me off like a whore.” And my stomach would lurch and I’d press myself harder against him. When it ended, it ended because he wanted it to, without a scene and without explanation. One day he simply stopped looking for me. The next day he acted as if nothing had happened, and I kept quiet because there was no decent way not to.

—Does your mother know? —Martín asked when I finished.

—No.

—How long have you been carrying that?

—Four years.

He nodded slowly. He looked out at the sea for a moment and then back at me with that calm of his that didn’t judge but didn’t numb anything either.

—I’m not telling you to go tell her —he said—. But I think you’ve been silent for so long that you don’t even know how much it weighs anymore.

I didn’t sleep that night. I turned his words over for hours while I listened to the sound of the sea from the bedroom window. Martín was right about one thing: silence has a price too, and I’d been paying it without ever calculating it. The next day, when my mother sat in the living room with her beer and her end-of-day cigarette, I decided it was time.

—Pilar, I need to tell you something.

She looked at me over the rim of her glass with an expression that hovered somewhere between fatigue and concern.

—Are you okay?

—Yes. I think so.

She settled back into the armchair without saying anything else. I knew her well enough to know that was a sign she was listening.

It took me almost a minute to begin. When I did, I said it slowly, choosing my words carefully, trying not to blunt what had to be said but not to fling it at her without padding either. That Roberto and I had fucked. That it lasted almost a year. That it happened in that house, in her bed, on her sofa, in her kitchen, while she was at work. That I was sorry.

She stayed still for what felt like several minutes. She took a long drag from her cigarette. Then another sip of beer, unhurried. She didn’t look at me while she processed what she’d just heard.

—When did it start? —she asked at last.

—When I was twenty.

—How long did it last?

—Almost a year.

The silence that followed was different from the previous one. Heavier. More final. She stood up with the cigarette between her fingers, her back half turned toward the window, staring out at the street as if there was something easier to look at out there than me.

—I need you to leave here this week —she said.

—Pilar...

—This isn’t a discussion. I can’t have you here right now. I don’t know when I’ll be able to. But not this week.

—And Roberto? Doesn’t he have any part in this?

—I’m not talking about Roberto.

—You should be.

—Daniela. —She said my name in a way that shut the subject down—. You’ve got your father’s flat in the city center. You won’t be stuck for somewhere to go.

I left without looking back. I stopped on the landing, took a deep breath, and called Martín from the street.

That night I slept in his bed. It wasn’t exactly a rational decision, but it wasn’t a completely blind impulse either. There had been something between us from the first day at the beach bar and we both knew it, and that night, after everything that had happened, continuing to ignore it would have taken more effort than I was willing to make.

We stayed still for a long while. His hand on my back, my forehead against his neck. When we finally moved, it was with that calm things have when they don’t need justification. He kissed me on the mouth first, slowly, then peeled my clothes off piece by piece, unhurried, watching me as he did it. When he had me naked on my back against the mattress, he spread my legs with his hands, settled between them, and lowered his mouth to my cunt.

He ate me out slowly, completely. He ran his flat tongue from the bottom up to my clit, stopped there to suck with his lips, and then went back down. He slid two fingers inside me and curled them, searching for that spot deep inside while he kept licking me, and I clutched the headboard with one hand and his hair with the other. When I came the first time, I pressed his head harder against me and he didn’t stop: he kept licking while I trembled, devoured my climax like he was hungry for days, until I told him to come up because I couldn’t take any more.

He climbed on top. I grabbed his cock with my hand. It was hard, thick, hot, and I dragged it through the lips of my cunt, wetting it before guiding it inside. He entered in one stroke, all the way in, and we both groaned at the same time. He started fucking me slowly, with long thrusts, propped on his elbows, looking me in the face. I dug my heels into his ass to make him go deeper. I told him in his ear, “Harder, like that.” And he obeyed. He fucked me against the mattress with his hands on my wrists, holding them above my head, while I looked up at him from below with my mouth open. Then he put me on all fours, got behind me, and shoved it back in with one thrust. He grabbed my hair, not hard, just enough to pull my head back, and fucked me like that until I felt my second orgasm rising inside me like a wave. I came screaming into the pillow while he kept thrusting. A little later he came, inside me, pressing my hips against his, and I felt every hot spurt as if he were marking something.

We stayed like that for a while, him on top of my back, panting, his cock still inside. When he came out, a thread of semen ran down my thigh. He ran his fingers through it and pushed it back inside me with two fingers, saying nothing, like someone picking up something they dropped. He kissed the nape of my neck. We fell asleep like that.

Weeks later I moved my things into Martín’s apartment.

The following months were a kind of reinvention. I learned to live without the constant weight of that secret, though I also learned that putting down a weight doesn’t mean feeling light right away. It takes time. Martín knew that without my having to say it, and that ability of his to read the space without filling it unnecessarily was what helped me most during those months.

He was patient and intense at the same time, a combination that’s hard to resist. We fucked with hunger and frequency: in bed, on the sofa, in the kitchen with the coffee going cold on the stove. Many mornings I woke up with his mouth already between my legs, the sheets tangled and the sun coming in through the window, and came before I’d fully woken up. Other nights I waited naked in bed, face down, and he’d arrive, strip without saying a word, climb on top, and fuck me from behind while I still had my legs closed, and he’d fuck me like that, tight, biting my shoulder. I sucked his cock in the shower with hot water falling over both of us, kneeling on the tile, and swallowed his load while he held my head with both hands and called me every filthy thing he felt like calling me, dirty words that would have annoyed me from another mouth and made me squeeze my thighs together from his.

There was a way he looked at me that made everything else lose all relevance, as if the only focus in that moment was exactly where I was. He didn’t ask me about the past. He didn’t need to.

I learned things about his body that still come back to me without warning: the way he held my hip when he wanted to set the pace, the exact pressure of his hands on my shoulders, how he could make ten minutes in a small apartment feel like time had stopped outside. I learned to ride him slowly, looking him in the eyes, with his hands spread over my tits and his thumbs on my nipples, and to make him come like that, squeezing my cunt around his cock while he begged me not to stop. With him I also learned not to hurry, which is something nobody teaches you and which changes the way everything else works completely.

***

Several months passed before I saw my mother again. It was a short visit, full of silences neither of us knew how to fill. I saw her thinner, with new gray in her temples, the look of someone who hasn’t slept properly in a long time. Roberto no longer came up in conversation, though she didn’t say that directly. I inferred it from the small gaps, from the way she looked away when his name slipped out unintentionally in what I was saying.

When I left, I sat on the front steps for a while, doing nothing in particular. I didn’t cry. I felt that specific exhaustion left by things with no clean resolution, the ones that don’t end well or end at all, that simply go on in an undefined state while life moves on around them without asking your opinion.

I called Martín. He told me he was nearby.

We met on a side street, in mid-afternoon, with that autumn light that turns everything amber and makes even ugly buildings seem tolerable. Hardly anyone around. He came with his hands in his pockets and hugged me without asking anything. I stood still against his chest with my head under his chin.

—How did it go? —he said after a while.

—Weird. Better than last time. I don’t know.

He pulled back a little and looked at me. I kissed him before he could say anything else. It was a slow kiss at first, but I bit his lower lip and felt his body tense. I slid my hand between us and squeezed his cock over his pants. He was already half hard. I pushed him toward the gap between two parked cars, against the wall of a building. He let me do it. I liked that about him too: he knew when to give up control without making it feel like a concession.

There was no one on that stretch of street. The afternoon light came in at an angle and cast long shadows over the asphalt.

He pulled my leggings down to mid-calf, unhurriedly, with that deliberate care of his that always left me on edge before anything even happened. He knelt right there on the sidewalk and parted the fabric of my panties with two fingers. He licked my cunt from bottom to top, long and flat, then closed his lips over my clit and sucked. I clung to the sleeve of his jacket with one hand and to his hair with the other so I wouldn’t lose my balance. I felt his tongue go in, come out, rise back to my clit, and two of his fingers making their way inside, moving slowly, searching. A car passed at the end of the street and I never stopped staring at the roof of the building across from us while he ate my cunt on his knees between two cars. The tension that had built up through the afternoon came apart in layers, slowly, until I felt something rising over me that started in my feet and went up without hurry, taking its time, until I couldn’t hold anything back anymore. I came in his mouth, biting my hand so I wouldn’t scream, pressing his face into me, and he sucked me until the end, until my legs were shaking so hard I had to lean against the wall.

When I straightened up, he was already standing, unbuckling his belt. I turned toward the wall and placed my hands on the cold brick. He shoved my skirt up in one tug and pulled my panties down to my knees. I heard him spit into his hand, felt him run it over his cock, and then the head pushing against my wet cunt. He entered in one stroke, all the way in, and I had to clench my teeth so I wouldn’t let out a moan that would have been heard all down the street. He grabbed my hips with both hands, hard, fingers digging in, and started fucking me against the wall. Fast. Hard. No ceremony. Our breathing mixing in the cold air, the wet sound of his cock sliding in and out, his hips slamming against my ass. He brought one hand around to the front and squeezed my tits under my sweater, pinched one nipple between two fingers, and I pushed my ass back so he could get deeper. As cars passed at the far end of the street as if none of this existed, he whispered in my ear, “Come again for me,” and I came, clenching around him, and felt him come right after, in three deep thrusts, his body pressed to mine and his mouth against my nape.

We stayed still for a moment afterward, panting. He rested his forehead against the back of my neck for an instant. He slid out slowly, and I felt the semen run down the inside of my thigh while I pulled my panties back up.

—Are you okay? —he asked.

—Yes —I said—. Now I am.

A few weeks later I found out I was pregnant.

It wasn’t exactly a shock. It was more the confirmation of something I’d begun to suspect without really wanting to know. I told Martín at breakfast, with the test on the table between our two coffees. He looked at me for a long moment, with that face of his that isn’t easy to read. Then he stood up, wrapped his arms around me from behind, and we stayed like that for a while while the coffee went cold.

There was nothing left to say that hadn’t already been said.