The Singer I Never Forgot Between My Sheets

It was a Sunday night and I didn’t have to get up early the next day. I’d been without a partner for several years—the last relationship had ended without drama but with the same finality as a door shutting—and my sex life had been reduced to masturbation. At thirty-seven, my libido was higher than it had been at twenty, something no doctor had ever explained to me satisfactorily but that didn’t worry me too much either. What did make me slightly uncomfortable was the predictability: always the same folders, the same shortcuts, the same result in fifteen minutes.

I had a fairly tidy collection. Images saved by category: blondes, brunettes, redheads. A folder with women over forty whom I’d tagged according to a criterion I’d set for myself without asking anyone else. Another with a few actresses and television presenters. One more, smaller, with acquaintances from different periods of my life who had had the bad luck of being photographed in ways that looked better in private memory than on social media.

That night, however, I didn’t open any folder.

That afternoon I’d heard a new version of an old song on the radio. And that had left me thinking about something I hadn’t thought about in a long time. For exactly about fifteen years.

Valeria Montero.

For anyone who doesn’t know her: Colombian singer, career launched in the late nineties and at one point absolutely unavoidable if you lived in Spain or in any Latin American country. She wasn’t the prettiest in the music scene of that era, nor the one with the most polished vocal technique. But she had something that was very hard to define without sounding like someone in need of professional help. Something in the way her voice would break at certain moments, as if for an instant she lost control of what she was doing. Something I, having just turned eighteen, already knew perfectly well how to name because I recognized it in my own body every time I slipped my hand inside my pajama pants.

The first time I heard her was with “Necesito estar contigo,” an apparently completely innocent ballad about distance and love. The video was simple: Valeria walking through a coastal city with her long dark hair moving in the wind, singing with her eyes half-closed. Nothing extraordinary. The kind of thing they put on daytime television and that normally doesn’t stop you in your tracks.

But at two minutes and forty-three seconds, something happened.

Valeria let out a moan. Short, soft, almost as if she had forgotten there was a microphone in front of her. The melody carried on, the lyrics continued, but in that two-second instant her voice did something completely different. Something that did not belong in the category of “singing” but in the category of a woman who had just had a dick shoved all the way in and hadn’t been expecting it.

I rewound the tape four times in a row.

By the fourth, I was so hard it hurt. I went to the bathroom, locked the door, pulled my pants down to my knees and jerked off standing up against the bathroom sink wall with Valeria’s moan looping in my head. I finished in four strokes, splashing the tiles, and stayed there leaning on the marble, breathing hard, thinking that this had been the most brutal orgasm of my short but dedicated masturbator’s career.

Her next album was a step up in every sense.

“Dime lo que sientes” started with Valeria panting before the melody even came in. Not once: throughout the four-minute song there were six or seven moments when her voice did those things. The record’s producer—either a genius or someone who shared my exact problems—had made the deliberate decision to mix those pants high in the audio track, perfectly audible, with no attempt at subtlety.

I’d put on the headphones from my Discman while lying face down in bed in the dark, my dick trapped between the mattress and my pelvis, and I’d thrust in time with the beat. I’d rub the tip against the sheet to the same rhythm as her panting and imagine it was her cunt under me, hot and tight, and that each of her gasps was because I was pushing into her another centimeter. When the final chorus came and Valeria shouted, “I can’t take it anymore, I can’t take it anymore, oh, oh, oh, that’s it!” I’d finish too, and cum into my underwear, soaking the cotton with so much semen I’d later have to hide the clothes at the bottom of the hamper so my mother wouldn’t ask questions. Always at the same time. The synchronization seemed significant to me in some way I couldn’t put into words.

Of course, Valeria being at the peak of her physical beauty in that stage was not an irrelevant detail. Her videos showed her dancing with a confidence that was impossible to ignore: her hips following the beat with a precision that seemed instinctive, her gaze into the camera at exactly the right moments. There was one in particular, “Corazón salvaje,” where she appeared in a low-cut dress and with her hair completely loose, looking at the lens in a way that made it feel like she was the one watching you. But I insist on the main point: what kept bringing me back was her voice. The moans were the core; everything else was decoration.

***

The qualitative leap came with her collaboration with singer Ignacio Torres: “Tu veneno.” A song that mixed sensuality with a certain sophistication, the two artists moving in the video as if they were about to cross a line they’d been told not to cross. It had elegance. Valeria knew exactly what she was doing with her body and with the viewer’s.

But the next video was in an entirely different category.

“La bestia” showed her inside a steel cage, hair loose, clothes functioning more as suggestion than as actual clothing, moving in ways that could technically be called dance but had very little to do with any conventional step. At one specific point in the song she bent forward, back to the camera, and what she did next with her hips belonged to a category I could only classify as pornography in motion: her lifted ass going up and down as if she had a dick buried inside her and was impaling herself on it. In other scenes she gripped the cage bars and threw her head back with her mouth slightly open and her eyes closed, as if somebody was fucking her from behind out of frame and the director had had the decency not to show the guy putting it in her.

I lost count of how many times I watched that video over the following months. No exaggeration. I jerked off to it on the computer in the living room when my parents weren’t home, on my phone in the bathroom, on the laptop screen with my dick out and a towel underneath as a precaution. In the end I knew it by heart frame by frame and could bring myself to the edge or hold off depending on which second of the video I was looking at.

***

Then came more irregular years. More commercial songs, some outright bad, where the only notable thing was that Valeria appeared in lingerie or in a swimsuit. Productions that sounded like quick, soulless studio work, with not a single moan in four minutes. It was also the period of her relationship with the footballer Rodrigo Albés, a perfectly faced, utterly charisma-free guy who appeared in every photograph with her, making her look smaller than she was with his arm over her shoulder. I started to hate him for no declarable reason, beyond the furious certainty that that idiot was fucking her every night and I had to settle for my hand.

There were whole stretches when I stopped listening to her. Only two songs from that period survived in my mental catalog. One, “Caramelo,” for the rhythm, which under certain circumstances still worked. The other was a collaboration with a Brazilian singer called Priya, who did know how to make certain syllables land exactly where they were supposed to land. In that case my interest was mainly in Priya and Valeria was almost an excuse.

***

That Sunday night I decided to set scruples aside and give the latest version of Valeria Montero a chance.

I searched for her newest video, “Libre y sola,” released just a few weeks earlier. The premise was predictable: newly separated Valeria, empowered, in her late forties and wearing them far better than I wore mine, strolling in a bikini across the deck of a yacht, dancing on the staircase of a nightclub, sinking into a jacuzzi surrounded by younger women as if she presided over an informal private court. A festival of post-breakup empowerment images that was hard to take entirely seriously.

What I did take entirely seriously was her back.

In the jacuzzi scene, Valeria was turned away from the camera with the water up to her waist. Her back completely bare. Her skin without a single visible imperfection under the orange dusk light the cinematographer had placed there with obvious intent. Her spine drew a perfect line from the nape of her neck to where the water hid it. I got quite a strong urge to lick her there, bite the back of her neck, grab her by the hips under the water and bury my cock in her in one thrust while the other women in the jacuzzi watched.

The problem was that she wasn’t moaning anywhere in the whole video. Not once.

I made the most logical decision I could think of: I muted the video and played the audio of “Dime lo que sientes” from the phone resting on the bedside table.

The result was objectively better than the original material.

I yanked off my pajama pants and underwear, spat into the palm of my right hand and grabbed my dick, already so hard it was hitting my navel. I started masturbating slowly, setting the rhythm with the phone’s gasps. As the video Valeria moved her hips on deck with the sea horizon behind her, the audio Valeria whispered in a broken voice that she couldn’t take it anymore. When on the screen she leaned over the yacht’s railing, pushing her ass back as if begging to be split open, the chorus came on the phone and she moaned at exactly the same moment I tightened my fist around the glans.

The synchronization was imperfect, but the human brain, after thirty-seven years of continuous practice, is perfectly capable of building a coherent narrative from incomplete material. I no longer saw a mismatched video and audio: I saw her, Valeria, on all fours on top of my bed, that perfect back arched downward and her cunt open, waiting for me to shove it in. I heard her panting because I was fucking her hard, because I was taking her from behind with one hand in her hair, because I had my cock buried in her balls-deep and every thrust of mine tore from her one of those moans that had been making me cum for twenty years.

I jerked off with my right hand, my wrist already aching and my thumb brushing the frenulum on every upstroke. With my left I grabbed my balls, squeezing them gently in time with the audio. The cum gathered at the base as if it had been stored there since the last time I’d listened to that song fifteen years ago.

I remembered being fourteen. The tape rewound four times in a row in the silence of my room. That first orgasm against the bathroom tiles. The teenage dick that still didn’t know what it would spend the rest of its life devoted to. And I smiled, with my hand moving faster and faster, because deep down the answer had been in front of me for twenty years: it was going to be devoted to that Colombian woman who moaned into a microphone.

It took me less than ten minutes. When the video Valeria turned from the jacuzzi toward the camera—looking straight into the lens with that expression of someone who knows exactly what she’s doing and doesn’t care that you know it too—and at the same time the audio Valeria let out that final “oh, oh, oh, that’s it!”, I felt my balls jump up all at once and something explode from the base of my spine to the nape of my neck. I came in jets. The first shot hit my collarbone. The second landed on my chest. The rest, four or five more convulsions, pooled on my stomach and the fingers of my right hand, warm and thick, while I kept squeezing my cock until the last drop, shaking it over my navel with my mouth open and making no sound because none would come out.

I stayed motionless for a few seconds, staring at the ceiling, breathing fast, semen cooling on my skin and the phone warm beside my thigh. Valeria was still moaning softly through the speakers as the audio ended.

“Valeria,” I told the screen, “you’ve been impossible for twenty years.”

I reached for the T-shirt I had on the chair by the desk, wiped my chest, stomach and fingers with the inside of it, turned off the screen and lay down in the dark with my cock still pulsing against my thigh.

Before falling asleep, I thought:

Tomorrow I have to try this with Carmen Valdés.