What the Bar Owner’s Glasses Were Hiding

If I told you she was five foot three, with shoulder-length, semi-curly, almost black hair, and that she hid behind thick-rimmed glasses, you wouldn’t picture the right woman. You’d need to see her in person, and even then you still wouldn’t know.

Loose T-shirts, blouses that disguise her breasts, plain straight-leg jeans, white sneakers whose soles are already marked by months of wear. She doesn’t talk much. She almost never laughs. She doesn’t make jokes, she doesn’t try to be liked, she doesn’t want attention. She’s the kind of woman who passes you on the street and, two steps later, has already vanished from your head.

That’s why I became obsessed with her. Because looking at her, looking again, and looking again didn’t help me at all: I could never get a precise idea of what she was like beneath all that invisible-girl façade. I didn’t know whether she’d have small, firm tits or heavy, sagging ones, whether her pussy would be shaved clean, left with a narrow strip, or full bush; I didn’t know whether her ass, the one that seemed round to me under those jeans, would be white, whether she’d have two dimples at the small of her back, whether her asshole would be pink or darker. Uncertainty, in my case, always translates into desire, and that woman was a whole catalog of uncertainties.

Lorena runs the bar on the corner, the one with the green awnings that’s open every day and has been for three decades. It’s run by her, her mother, and her older brother, but the real weight of the schedule falls on her; the others show up for a couple of hours, chat with the regulars, and leave. She’s thirty-eight. My parents have been going there for breakfast since before I was born, so I grew up seeing her without really seeing her.

Until I turned twenty-six and, one winter morning, looked up from the newspaper and realized she’d been watching me for a good while from the far end of the counter.

At first I let it go. I thought it was my imagination, one of those paranoias that cling to the ego and won’t let go. But the months became years, and the years sharpened my fetishes and, apparently, hers as well. There came a moment, I couldn’t say when, when I stopped pretending and started holding her gaze every time I walked into the bar.

Since then we’ve lived in a kind of silent game, mute, suffocating: she knows I’m looking for her, she likes that I’m looking for her, and I know she’s looking for me, and I like that even more.

Last summer she took a step that broke the game’s unwritten rules. She showed up on a Friday dressed like I’d never seen her before. A white sleeveless shirt, almost sheer, buttoned up to the second button; the dark ring of her nipples showed through the fabric, no bra, and every time she turned the hardened points were outlined by the air conditioning. Tight flared jeans at the hips and loose at the hem; her hair tied up in a messy bun with two rebellious strands falling over her neck. Thin black strap sandals, delicate, fastened at the ankle with a tiny strap. And the glasses, the usual ones, which that afternoon shone more than ever in the light coming in from the side through the glass front.

When I went up to the bar, I couldn’t hide what that sight had done to me under my trousers. My cock had gone hard against the seam of my jeans, forming a bulge no one with eyes could miss. I had to brace myself on the wood with both hands to cover the obvious.

Fuck, Lorena.

Women with glasses have always undone me. There’s something in the way they push them up with one finger after finishing a sentence, in the way they half-close their eyes before speaking, that throws me straight back into adolescence and leaves me like an idiot. And if the woman also wears thin-strap sandals and has her little toe painted a discreet red, I’m done for. I’ve spent too many years living with that combination of glasses and feet to pretend it doesn’t affect me.

—What can I get you? —she said, leaning her elbows on the counter. Her huge brown eyes behind the lenses looked like they’d never hurt a fly.

—A shot of amaretto.

She took longer than necessary to pour it. When she brought it over, her fingers made a strange movement: they moved toward mine, hesitated, pulled back halfway. I noticed because in fifteen years of crossing paths over that counter she had never done anything like it before. I went outside to smoke and cool my head, took two long drags from the cigarette with my cock still half-hard, pressed sideways in my trousers, and went back in with the false intention of behaving myself.

I didn’t manage it.

When I returned the empty glass, our hands met at the level of the glass. This time she didn’t pull away. She laid her hand over mine and left it there, still, for a second that lasted too long.

I extended my index finger and caressed the inside of her wrist, slowly, just once, tracing that thin area where her pulse showed. I looked up just in time to see her bite her lower lip. A small sound escaped her, a smothered moan halfway between surprise and surrender, which she disguised with a quiet “thanks” and a quick blink to hide what her eyes had just said. Beneath the thin shirt, her nipples had gone so hard they drew two perfect circles in the white fabric.

That wrist, that sigh, that tight mouth, those nipples about to burst through the cotton — that was the trigger. I couldn’t keep hiding behind looks anymore.

***

Three days later I went back to the bar during the dead hour of the afternoon, that silent stretch between five and seven when only the occasional retiree comes in for a coffee before the evening walk. I knew she’d be alone. She was alone.

—What can I get you? —she repeated, in the same tone as always, but this time with a steady gaze and an expectant set to her shoulders.

—An iced coffee.

I sat at the end of the counter, in the corner where the fluorescent light doesn’t reach and where the ceiling camera, I know because I’ve bothered checking more than once, doesn’t point. She made the coffee without hurry. When she set it down in front of me, she didn’t step back: she put both hands on the counter in front of me and stayed there, barely a meter away, waiting.

Neither of us spoke for a couple of minutes. I could feel her heat from the other side of the counter and, worse, I could feel my own. My throat had gone dry. Her glasses had fogged up for a moment from the coffee machine’s steam.

—Lorena —I said at last, in a voice rougher than I intended—. I’m incredibly attracted to you. I’ve spent years trying to figure out what you’ve got, and I can’t, and that’s exactly what turns me on the most.

I blurted it out in one go, without rehearsing it, without polishing it. After saying it, I tightened my fingers around the glass, expecting her to throw me out of the place with some polite excuse.

—It’s about time you told me.

She said it softly, almost without opening her mouth, without moving from where she stood. And at that moment all the suspicions I’d been dragging around for years were confirmed in one blow.

What had driven me crazy about Lorena wasn’t her body, or her silence, or the way she moved behind the bar. It was that I could see her being capable of anything. I could see her spending the whole day serving the worst nightmare in the neighborhood without losing her professional smile and then, once the shutter came down, kneeling in someone else’s kitchen with her mouth open, waiting for someone else’s cock, with the same naturalness with which she served a coffee. I could see her capable of both extremes at once. And the answer she had just given me, without blinking, without blushing, had just confirmed it for me.

I paid attention to her jeans, those normal jeans she always wore. When she turned around to grab a bottle, her ass moved with a freedom that had put me on edge more than once in the afternoons. They were made of stretchy fabric, the kind that shows underwear if the girl is wearing underwear. On her, nothing ever showed.

That had been my private obsession for months: imagining what she had on underneath. A string thong that would sink between her ass cheeks, a red lace triangle soaked in front, short boxer briefs that would press against her cunt, sporty boyshorts that would outline her lips, absolutely nothing and the jeans rubbing her clit every time she moved. Any of those options would do for me to get home, lie down on the bed, take out my cock and work it slowly while imagining I was pulling those jeans down to her knees and eating her pussy from behind while she kept drying glasses, bent over the counter, biting her fist so her mother wouldn’t find out from the storeroom. I’d jerked off so many times thinking about that ass of hers that the bedsheets had my full history recorded in dry stains.

—And now what? —she asked. Our faces were closer than was prudent. I could smell the shampoo she used, something citrusy and clean, and I could feel the heat rising up her neck.

—Now we rent a country house, as isolated as possible, where not even a dog from a neighboring town can hear us. And we fuck each other senseless for an entire weekend.

She smiled with half her mouth, a new smile I’d never seen before, dark and very calm.

—I like to dominate in bed —she said, with the same calmness she used to serve beers—. I like the other person to be my submissive. I like tying their hands behind their back, sitting on their face, and making them swallow until their jaw hurts. I’ve got an entire box of toys waiting for someone who can take them: thick dildos, a butt plug, a small leather whip, a red gag. Everything waiting.

—You can use them if you’re capable of dominating me —I answered—. I like being in control too. I like grabbing hair, spitting in someone’s mouth, fucking like the other person is a toy. So far no woman has managed to put me underneath.

—That’s going to change with me.

—We’ll have to wrestle for it in bed to find out.

—We’ll have to wrestle, yes.

She pulled out her phone without lifting her eyes from mine. She handled it with a speed that made it obvious this wasn’t the first time she’d booked a place for something like this. In less than five minutes we had a rural house an hour and a half from the city, in the middle of a valley, with no neighbors for miles, for the whole following weekend. She paid with her card without asking me. Coming from Lorena, that was already a declaration of intent.

Just as she put her phone away, the doorbell rang and a customer came in asking for a beer and some peanuts. I stood up with the calm of someone who has just closed a million-dollar deal, asked for her number in a low voice, saved it in my contacts under her full name and two emojis no one would be able to interpret, and left with my cock half-raised again, tightening my jeans from the inside.

***

Ten minutes later, sitting in the car with the engine off, my pocket vibrated. A photo. Her index and middle fingers together, shining, soaked in a thick, clear flow that hung between the knuckles in a long thread, and the edge of a red string thong pushed aside, stained with the same shine. You could see part of the labia of her pussy, shaved, swollen, blood-engorged, and the beginning of a pink, glossy slit starting exactly where the photo ended.

No text. No emojis. Nothing. I pictured her standing against the storeroom door, jeans unbuttoned, her hand shoved under the thong, her fingers sunk to the knuckles in her own cunt, biting her lower lip while the phone camera trembled in her other hand. I pictured her pulling those two soaked fingers out, spreading them so the strand of fluid could be seen stretching between them, taking the shot, and then wiping them against the edge of her panties with the same calm she’d use to rinse a cup. I closed my eyes, set the phone on the passenger seat, counted to a hundred, and started the car before I wound up marrying myself right there inside it with my hand in my fly.

I didn’t answer right away. I went upstairs, locked the door, got into the shower, and turned the water on hot. The moment I felt the stream running down the back of my neck, I grabbed my cock with my right hand and started stroking it slowly, palm full of gel, watching the head appear and disappear between my fingers with each pass. The image of the photo was burned behind my eyelids: her two shining fingers, that thread of fluid hanging, the edge of the red thong pulled aside over the swollen cunt.

I braced my forearm against the tiles and lowered my left hand to my balls, squeezed them gently, pulling the skin downward while my right hand sped up on the shaft. I imagined Lorena on her knees in the shower tray, her glasses fogged from the steam, mouth open and tongue out, waiting. I saw her semi-curly hair plastered to her cheeks by the water, her small dark nipples bristling over medium, firm tits, and a thick drop sliding down from her sternum to her navel. I grabbed her hair with my left hand, shoved my cock all the way down her throat, pulled it out, pushed it back in again, while she let a thick thread of spit hang from her chin to her chest.

I stayed like that for almost ten minutes, stopping whenever I felt I was about to come, changing pace, squeezing the base to hold out. I wanted it to last. I wanted to reach that photo with the whole load. When I finally let the orgasm rise, I clenched my teeth so I wouldn’t moan too loudly, pulled my cock out of the water, and shot it onto my open palm, spurt after spurt, four thick rounds of viscous semen that pooled in the hollow of my hand into a hot white puddle. Not a single drop hit the floor. I caught it all.

I got out of the shower with my hand raised, water streaming down my arm, and walked barefoot to the sink. I put my hand on the counter, palm up, the whole load of semen shining under the fluorescent light, my cock still half-hard dripping remnants between my thighs. I took the phone with my other hand and shot her the photo: my open hand on the bathroom counter, thumb and palm covered in thick semen, with the morning light coming in through a window she couldn’t identify.

“So you can get warmed up,” I wrote underneath.

“You’re going to regret saying that,” she replied instantly.

Ten seconds later another photo of hers arrived: the red thong pulled down to her thighs, one hand spread over her shaved lower belly, and on her pubis a small, glossy puddle of her own cum. She had masturbated at the same time as me, almost at the same rhythm. We had been jerking off in parallel thirty kilometers apart and both finished at the same time.

There are five days left until Friday. I’ve started doing the math in my head: how many hours five days are, how many minutes, how many bar shifts separate her from me, how many times I’m going to jerk off thinking about what that pussy is going to taste like when I finally get it in my mouth. Lorena keeps working as if nothing happened, serves coffees, rings up beers, attends to the retirees with that same small smile of hers. When I walk into the bar, she lifts her gaze for a second, smiles at me with her eyes, and goes back to her business, as if we were two strangers. But I know that when she closes the shutter and is left alone in the storeroom, she slips her hand inside her jeans thinking about the weekend ahead, just like I slip mine under the sheets thinking about her.

I don’t know who’s going to win the fight. The only thing I know for sure is that whoever loses is going to come out of that country house on Sunday night not really knowing their own name, with their ass open, their throat hoarse, and semen running down the inside of their thigh. And that there won’t be any way back, or any way to pretend we don’t look at each other, or to pass one another by as if we didn’t know each other.

I’ll tell you how the fight went.