The Singapore Spa and the Fantasy I Never Asked For

The sign had no name in English. Just Chinese characters engraved in gold on a dark wooden board, and beneath them, in smaller letters: “Deep relaxation. Professional service.” I saw it that Saturday morning, turning the wrong corner while I was looking for a café. The Singapore heat at that time of year was humid and constant, the kind of heat that weighs on your shoulders like something physical. I should have kept walking.

I had been away from home for almost three months. The project had started as a two-week audit and kept extending on its own, fueled by technical problems at the regional branch that no one had anticipated. I’ve been traveling around Asia for the company for years: Bangkok, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur. I know Singapore well. I know where to eat, which taxis to avoid, which spa near the hotel gives a good deep-tissue massage. That golden sign wasn’t that spa. That golden sign was a place I had always overlooked.

Rodrigo was at home with the children. He sent me photos every night, which I received when I woke up eight hours later: breakfast on the table, the park on weekends, the cat sprawled across the sofa. I love him. I always have. But three months is a long time, and the body doesn’t understand absences made with good intentions. For weeks I had been waking up with my pussy wet and no memory of what I had dreamed about, and in the hotel shower I touched myself quickly, with two fingers, unwilling to draw it out, just to relieve the constant pressure in my lower belly.

That morning, my colleague Isabel had turned down the suggestion of a massage with a naturalness that mildly irritated me.

“I’d rather use the time for shopping,” she said. “We’ll be back in two weeks and I haven’t bought anything.”

“I’d rather have someone work the knots out of my neck,” I replied.

“To each her own therapy,” she concluded, and left for the taxi.

And that was how I ended up alone in front of the golden sign.

***

The reception area was poorly lit. Blue and pink neon lights that, at midday, seemed more kitschy than unsettling, string music floating in the background, and two girls behind the desk who spoke only Chinese. I used the translator on my phone: I wanted a foot, neck, and shoulder massage. One of them nodded and indicated that I should wait in an armchair beside the wall.

I waited perhaps five minutes. Then he appeared.

European, without a doubt. In his forties, blond with a few gray strands at his temples, broad-shouldered beneath the white work tunic. He had the kind of calm presence that didn’t need to call attention to itself in order to have it. He moved through that place with the ease of someone who knew it by heart.

“What kind of discomfort are you experiencing?” he asked in English, without any identifiable accent.

“Knots. I’ve had built-up tension in my neck and upper back for weeks. And my feet—I walk a lot.”

He nodded as if that was exactly what he had expected to hear.

“The sixty-minute package covers all of that. Forty euros.”

“Perfect,” I said.

He took me upstairs by way of a narrow staircase. The room was small and clean: a massage table with neatly folded white towels, a little table with oils lined up in a row, and, in the upper-left corner, almost against the ceiling, a security camera with a tiny red light blinking silently.

This is weird. You could leave right now.

I didn’t leave.

***

The massage began with my head. His hands were large and precise, with a technique I recognized as professional from the very first contact: gradually increasing pressure at my temples, slow movements descending from the base of my skull toward my trapezius muscles. Within ten minutes, the tightest muscles had begun to loosen.

He continued with my arms. Then my feet, working the arches and each of my toes with a thoroughness that almost made me laugh. When he finished, he told me quietly that he would be back in a moment.

He left. He returned with a different bottle of oil.

“You have tension in your lower back too. Would you mind if we worked on your back as well?”

My back had been aching for weeks. It was true, and we both knew it without having discussed it.

“I don’t mind,” I replied.

“I’ll need you to take off your shirt.”

I took it off without thinking too much about it. He unclasped my bra with one hand and an efficiency that had nothing intimate about it—he did it the way you open a jar, functionally—and placed a towel over my lower back before beginning. The oil came warm, spread in broad strokes that started at the base of my spine and rose toward my shoulders.

I closed my eyes.

It’s just a massage. A massage like any other.

It lasted long enough for me to believe it.

***

There was no exact moment when things changed. It was such a gradual transition that, by the time I realized it, it was already too late to pretend I hadn’t.

His hands moved down from my shoulder blades to my waist. He lowered my pants slowly, a few inches, just enough to reach my buttocks. The tension there was real: when he began to work it out, the relief was immediate and physical. But the way he did it had stopped being technical. It was slower. More attentive. There was a different intention to it, which I felt in the pressure of his palms, which were no longer kneading the muscle but separating my buttocks, opening me with his thumbs until I felt a current of cool air run along my ass crack.

I wondered if I was imagining it.

When he slid his thumbs inward and brushed the lips of my pussy through my panties, undoubtedly noticing that they had been soaked for quite some time, I knew I wasn’t imagining it.

“May I continue?” he asked quietly.

I didn’t answer right away. I thought of Rodrigo. Of the children. Of the breakfast photo from that morning. Of ninety-four days away from home, and of how the body keeps its own accounts without asking permission.

“Yes,” I said.

He asked me to turn over. I turned. My bra got tangled in the towel, and I didn’t bother adjusting it. He didn’t say anything either. He began massaging my stomach in broad movements that rose and fell, each pass going a little lower, until the edge of his hand brushed my pubic mound over the wet fabric, and I spread my legs without deciding to, making room for him.

Then he stopped.

“Would you like me to continue?” he asked, for the second time.

I looked directly at him. His eyes were light, and he had the same expression as before: calm, with no urgency, no pressure. Just a question waiting for an answer.

“Yes,” I repeated.

***

His hands moved up to my tits. He explored them slowly, without hurry, learning their shape, weighing them in his palms, and when he reached my nipples he began with the pad of one finger and then grew more determined, pinching them between his thumb and forefinger until they were hard as rocks. I had to bite my lip to keep from making a sound I wasn’t ready to make yet. I didn’t quite succeed: a low, hoarse moan escaped me, sounding foreign to my own ears.

He crouched down and took one entire nipple into his mouth. He sucked it hard, pulling it with his lips, barely biting it with his teeth, while his other hand continued working my left tit. When he switched sides and sucked the other nipple with the same dedication, I had already jerked my hips upward involuntarily, seeking him blindly.

I looked toward the corner of the ceiling. The camera’s little red light was still blinking, slow and regular. It should have made me uncomfortable. Instead, I felt something I couldn’t name precisely: a mixture of exposure and surrender that I had never experienced in that way. Someone might be watching, at that very moment, as a stranger sucked my tits and I allowed him to. And knowing it turned me on far more than I would have expected; I felt another wave of wetness running between my thighs.

He spent a long time with my tits. Longer than I would have thought necessary. But when he finally stopped, I no longer had a coherent thought left. Only layers of sensation, piled one on top of another, and an insistent throbbing in my clitoris demanding that someone attend to it.

When he lowered his hands to my hips and finished removing what remained of my clothes—the pants, the wet panties he slowly peeled away from my pussy and dropped to the floor—the air in the room made clear what my body had been communicating for quite some time. I was spread-legged on the massage table, soaked, the smell of my own sex filling my nose.

“You’re beautiful,” he said in English, staring fixedly between my thighs.

I blushed. Genuinely. I hadn’t done that in years.

***

His mouth reached me before I had finished processing that it was going to. He knelt on the floor, pulled my hips to the edge of the table, draped my thighs over his shoulders, and buried his face in my pussy without ceremony. He began gently, licking from bottom to top, learning me first, parting my lips with his broad, flat tongue, and then with more confidence, closing his mouth over my clitoris and sucking it as if his life depended on it.

He used his tongue with a precision that dissolved whatever pretense of control I had left. He moved it in small circles, then in quick strokes with the tip, then sucked again, alternating rhythms until I had no idea where the next wave would come from. I let out the breath I had been holding without knowing when I had held it and grabbed his head with both hands, pushing his face harder against me. He didn’t resist; he let me press him and kept eating my pussy with a methodical slowness that was driving me crazy.

His fingers arrived soon after. Two at first, moving inside me with a rhythm that my hips followed involuntarily, curling upward toward the exact spot Rodrigo never quite managed to find. The sensation was direct and concrete, without embellishment: his fingers inside me, fucking me slowly, and his tongue outside, eating my clitoris without stopping. A third finger joined the other two, and I spread my legs wider, almost ashamed of how open I was.

“Fuck,” I murmured in Spanish. “Fuck, fuck, don’t stop.”

When he asked me, his mouth still shining with me, whether I wanted him to continue, I no longer answered with words. I pressed his head against my pussy again and fucked his face, moving my hips on my own, without shame, until a first small orgasm shot through my legs and left me trembling.

Three months. Ninety-four days. The body doesn’t have infinite patience.

I surrendered.

***

He stood up and removed his tunic unhurriedly. He was exactly what the profile of his shoulders had promised from the beginning: someone who knew what he was doing and didn’t need to prove it. When he lowered his pants, his cock sprang out hard and thick, the shiny head crowned by a thick drop hanging from the tip. My mouth watered before I could stop it.

He took a condom from the pocket of his tunic and put it on while looking into my eyes. He ran his hand over his cock a couple of times, making it good and firm, and spread my legs with his knees.

Penetration was slow. Deliberately slow. He pushed into me inch by inch, letting me feel every stretch, and when he was fully inside he stayed still for a second, his hips pressed against mine, letting me feel how full I was. Then he began to move: entering all the way and withdrawing almost completely, never staying inside, a long, calculated rhythm he repeated without changing. That constant suspension—that methodical denial of what I wanted, which was for him to fuck me properly already—had me clutching the edges of the table with my knuckles white.

“Keep going,” I said in Spanish, with a firmness that surprised even me. “Fuck me harder, fuck.”

He understood. Or he understood the tone.

He changed the rhythm abruptly. He drove his cock all the way in with a sharp thrust and kept pounding me hard and fast, making the table bang against the wall, his hands squeezing my tits and his thumbs punishing my nipples. The contrast was immediate, and I had to bite the towel to keep from screaming. Every thrust pulled an obscene gasp from me, and the wet sound of his cock entering and leaving my soaked pussy filled the entire room.

Then he pulled his cock out, gestured for me to turn onto my stomach, and positioned me on my knees on the table, my ass sticking up and my face resting on my forearm. First came warm oil, pouring over my back and running down my crack until it dripped between my legs. Then his lips, biting one buttock and then the other, and suddenly his tongue was between my cheeks, licking my ass with the same dedication with which he had eaten my pussy before. I screamed into the towel.

And then his cock again, burying itself in my pussy from behind with a single thrust, gripping my hips to fuck me with all the strength I had asked for. The alternation between one place and the other, without warning—sometimes his tongue, sometimes his fingers, sometimes his cock—meant I never knew exactly what would come next. That uncertainty was itself a form of pleasure I had never catalogued before.

He shoved it so deep that I felt his balls striking my clitoris with every thrust. He stretched over my back, found one nipple with his hand, and pinched it hard while whispering in my ear, in heavily accented English, how tight I was, how wet I was, how well my married-woman pussy swallowed his cock.

I didn’t know this was what I had been missing.

***

There came a moment when I sat up on my own, without anyone asking me to. I made him pull out, tore off the condom with my teeth, and took him by the hips, putting his cock in my mouth for as long as I wanted, setting the pace myself, because there was something about that reversal I needed. Taking an active part instead of merely receiving. I sucked him all the way, swallowing him until the tip touched my throat and tears filled my eyes, pulling him out with a strand of saliva and taking him back in. I licked the head with the tip of my tongue, sucked his balls one by one, ran my tongue underneath them, all the while stroking him slowly with my hand at the base.

He let me do it. He put one hand on the back of my neck, without squeezing, merely accompanying the movement of my head, and every so often he let out a low growl to tell me I was doing well.

When I took him out of my mouth and asked for another condom, I put it on him myself with both hands. Then I sat on top of him. I found the angle slowly, lowering myself onto his cock little by little, feeling it make its way inside me again from that new angle. When I had him all the way in, I placed my hands on his chest and began to move, first in small circles, then rising and lowering my whole body. I rode him with more rhythm once I knew what worked. His hands were on my hips, but they didn’t direct me; they followed me, adjusting to my movements.

He said something about my tits, that he had never seen any like them, and asked me please to put them in his mouth. I leaned forward and fed him one nipple and then the other, while he sucked and I kept moving on his cock, my tits now hanging over his face and my hair falling around me. That made me speed up. I began bouncing on him without control, my buttocks slapping his thighs, feeling his cock entering and leaving faster and faster, and suddenly everything came together inside me.

The climax came from the base of my spine. Long and deep, traveling upward toward my shoulders, followed by another, one after the other, my pussy squeezing his cock in spasms I couldn’t control. I didn’t scream, but not by conscious choice: no voice came out, only a broken gasp and my nails digging into his chest.

When I asked him if he wanted to finish on me, I got off him, removed the condom myself, and offered him my tits and my open mouth at the same time. He jerked himself off quickly over me, his fist closed and his eyes fixed on the way I stuck out my tongue to receive him, and he came in a long stream that painted my breasts, my neck, and part of my cheek. A second stream went straight into my open mouth, and I swallowed it without thinking, watching him. He came quickly, with a sound that belonged to no language I recognized. Then he remained motionless for a second, his cock still in his hand and dripping semen onto my tits.

I licked what remained on the tip before letting him go.

Afterward, silence. The television in the corner was still broadcasting in Chinese. The little red light kept blinking.

***

There was a small shower behind a partition at the back of the room. I stood beneath the hot water longer than necessary, letting the steam fill the cubicle, watching the semen mixed with oil run down my tits and over my stomach until it disappeared down the drain. I didn’t think about anything in particular. Or I thought about everything at once, which sometimes amounts to the same thing.

When I came out, he had put away the oils and laid clean towels on the table. He was waiting by the door with the same neutral expression he had worn at the beginning.

I paid the forty euros. I left a tip.

“Will you come back?” he asked as I picked up my purse.

I put on my sunglasses, even though I was still indoors.

“Maybe,” I said.

In the hotel elevator, Isabel sent me a photo of some caramel-colored shoes she had bought. I sent her a heart. Then I looked at myself in the elevator’s metal mirror: my hair slightly mussed, my clothes in place, an expression I couldn’t categorize with any exact word. I could still taste his come on my tongue.

I had spent three months feeling only halfway present in everything. That afternoon, for some difficult-to-explain reason, I felt whole.

Would I go back? You never know.