My First Time Was with the Man Across the Street

The Salcedos’ Christmas party was the event of the year in our neighborhood. Every December, that family opened the doors of their enormous house to the whole block, and no one—absolutely no one—dared to miss it. I had just turned eighteen, and that year I went with an agenda I didn’t share with anyone.

That afternoon I was wearing a skirt that fell halfway down my thigh and a sweater that fit more tightly than my mother would have approved of. I looked at myself in the mirror before going downstairs and thought I looked good. Or that’s what I wanted to believe. The truth was my head was somewhere else: on Rodrigo, on the plan we had agreed to without saying it out loud, on that gift I had been promising myself for weeks I would give him that night. My pussy, to be exact. That night I was planning to open my legs for him for the first time and let him fuck me until he broke me open from the inside.

“Valentina, we’re leaving now!” my mother shouted from the bottom of the stairs.

I grabbed my coat and went down.

***

Mr. Salcedo welcomed us at the door. He shook my father’s hand and kissed my mother on both cheeks. When he turned to me, something in his expression changed: not all at once, but gradually, like the edge of something slowly coming into view. He greeted me, kissed my cheek, and the instant my parents turned toward Mrs. Salcedo, his hand slid to my hip and squeezed with the confidence of someone who expected no resistance.

I moved away without making a sound, without a scene. I smiled and kept walking.

Later, when he offered to bring us drinks and asked me to go with him to get them, I already knew where that was headed. He led me into a side room, closed the door, and got straight to the point: he cornered me against the sideboard, slid a hand under my skirt, and squeezed my ass over my panties while with the other hand he tried to find a breast under my sweater. His mouth found my neck and he spoke in my ear in that rough voice people use when they think they’re entitled to something: that he’d watched me grow up, that he knew how men looked at me, that he was going to teach me how to suck it, that he wanted to see my lips smeared with his cum. I told him no. He kept insisting, shoved his hard-on against my hip so I could feel how hard he was. Someone opened the door at that moment and I used the second of distraction to get out.

I went straight to the kitchen and poured vodka with a trembling hand.

***

Rodrigo never showed up. His mother sent me a brief text: family emergency, grandmother sick, they didn’t know when they were coming back. I stared at the screen for an absurdly long moment, as if I expected the letters to change meaning.

The party had already given me enough to want to leave, but the vodka had set up a friendly hum in my head that made everything more bearable. I drifted from conversation to conversation, from room to room, without paying attention to anything in particular.

That was when I saw Don Alberto.

He had lived across the street forever. He was Rodrigo’s godfather and one of those men who filled a space without effort: big, calm, with that kind of confidence that doesn’t need to be proven. I guessed he was around fifty, though I never asked. He had large hands and salt-and-pepper hair, and when he spoke to you it was as if he had all the time in the world.

“Valentina,” he said when he saw me. “How are you?”

“Here,” I replied, lifting my glass. “Surviving.”

He let out a short laugh and poured himself something from the makeshift bar.

“Rodrigo couldn’t make it,” he told me. “You must know.”

“They told me.”

We talked for a while. It was always easy to talk to Alberto: he listened to me like what I said mattered, without that patronizing tone a lot of adults used when they spoke to a girl my age. It was my mother who ruined the moment: she appeared with her hawk’s stare, took the glass from my hand without much ceremony, and announced that we were staying two more hours.

I told her I was going home to a friend’s house by myself.

“I can’t drive you, I’ve been drinking,” she said. “And it’s not a good idea for you to be out alone at this hour.”

I turned and left the kitchen before she could finish the sentence.

***

I took my coat, said two words to my mother in farewell, and crossed to the door. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mr. Salcedo’s hand resting on my mother’s lower back with a familiarity that should not have been there. I said nothing. I left.

The cold outside was a relief. The sound of my heels on the pavement had something therapeutic about it. I walked without hurrying, feeling my body sway, the way the muscles in my calves worked with every step. There was something about moving like that, alone at night, that felt strangely mine.

“Valentina!”

I stopped. Alberto was walking toward me from the house’s entrance, his coat only half on and his breath steaming in the cold air.

“Where are you going?” he asked when he reached me.

“Home.”

“Alone?”

“It’s not far.”

We walked together without having planned it. The conversation flowed with the same easy rhythm as always, and when we reached the corner between his street and mine, he was the one who said:

“Do you want to come in for a moment? I’ve got decent whiskey and nobody waiting for me.”

I hesitated for a second. No more than that.

“Okay,” I said.

***

His house was warmer than I remembered. I took off my coat, sank into the sofa, and accepted the glass he handed me without thinking too much about what I was doing. He put music on low, sat beside me, and we picked up the conversation where we had left off.

At some point I told him about Mr. Salcedo. I don’t know exactly how the subject came up, whether it was the whiskey or just trust, but I told him everything: how he had slipped his hand under my skirt, how he had squeezed my ass, the filthy things he had whispered in my ear about sucking him off and swallowing his load. As I spoke, I saw Alberto’s jaw tighten.

“That son of a bitch has been doing that for years,” he said quietly.

“You knew?”

“I suspected.”

There was a silence. I could feel the whiskey warming me from within, and the tension of the story loosening now that I had said it out loud.

“And how did he leave you?” he asked then.

“Disgusted. And also...”—I searched for the word—“Disgusted is enough.”

“The body sometimes reacts even when the mind says no,” Alberto said slowly. “That doesn’t mean anything bad.”

“That’s exactly what happened,” I admitted, not quite sure why I was telling him this. “My nipples got hard as rocks and my panties got wet. And it confused the hell out of me.”

His hand was on the cushion between us. Not on me. Just there, like a fact with no intention yet. We looked at each other. There was no clear signal, or maybe there was and I simply didn’t recognize it as such until after it had already happened.

His hand moved to my knee, slowly, without hiding it but without roughness either. The heat of his palm came through the fabric of my tights.

“This isn’t right either,” I said.

“No,” he admitted. “It isn’t.”

But he didn’t take his hand away, and I didn’t ask him to.

***

What happened next wasn’t impulsive or awkward. It was slow, built in layers. His hand slid up my thigh without hurry, pausing now and then, as if giving me time to decide. What I did was move the cushions that separated us aside.

He touched my hair. He looked at me for a moment without doing anything else. Then he leaned in and kissed me, and I received it with a mix of nerves and something that wasn’t exactly surprise: it was recognition. As if some part of me already knew the night was headed in that direction. His tongue opened my mouth without asking permission and played with mine slowly, with a patient hunger that made me clench my thighs.

His hands knew what they were doing. They found my tits without rushing, kneaded them over my sweater before slipping underneath, pushed my bra cups aside and pinched my nipples between thumb and forefinger until a moan slipped out against his mouth. There was nothing in his movements like the clumsy urgency of boys my age, that haste that turns desire into an accident. Alberto took time as if it were his, and somehow that made it mine too.

I lay back on the sofa. He shifted beside me and his fingers traced the outline of my thighs to the hem of my skirt, and then beyond. When I felt them against my panties, I swallowed a sound I hadn’t planned to make. He pushed the cotton aside and ran a thick finger between the lips of my pussy, up and down, very slowly, not going inside yet. I was soaked. I could hear the sticky sound his fingers made moving there.

“You’re dripping,” he murmured, not as a question.

“Yes,” I said, because it was true and there was no reason left to pretend otherwise.

He pushed a finger inside me, all the way in, and curled it, searching for something I didn’t know existed. When he found it, I arched off the sofa. He added a second finger and started fucking me with his hand, slowly at first, then faster, while his thumb drew circles over my clit. I opened my legs as wide as I could and grabbed his wrist not to stop him, but to drive him deeper into me.

“That’s it, good girl,” he said with his mouth against my ear. “Soak my hand.”

He lifted me off the sofa like I weighed nothing and carried me up the stairs with a calm that felt almost unreal, his fingers still shining with me.

***

The room was dim. He laid me on the bed carefully and started undressing. That was when my heart began to pound hard, not exactly from fear, but from something that left me poised on the edge between wanting and not yet knowing what wanting really meant. When he pulled down his pants and boxers, my mouth fell open. I had never seen a cock in real life, and his was thick, long, with prominent veins and the swollen head pointing up. A strand of fluid hung from the tip.

“Wait,” I said.

He stopped immediately.

“Are you okay?”

“It’s just... it’s the first time. For me.”

There was a brief silence. Not of surprise, but of understanding.

“Do you want to stop?”

I thought of Rodrigo. Of the plan I had built for months and that had fallen apart with a text message. I thought of the side room at the Salcedos’ and the brutal difference between what I had felt there and what I felt now: here, nobody was asking me for anything. I was the one who had chosen to stay.

“No,” I said. “I don’t want to stop. Just... teach me.”

He lay down beside me and started again from the beginning, without rushing. He undid my sweater button by button. He traced my neck with his mouth, then my collarbone, the edge of my bra. When he finally took it off and his tongue found my nipples, one first and then the other, sucking them until they hardened and nibbling them carefully, I let out a sound from somewhere I hadn’t known I had access to.

His fingers slid slowly down my stomach until they reached my skirt, which disappeared before I even fully noticed. Then my panties, which he dragged down my legs and let fall to the floor. I was naked beneath him, eyes half-closed, letting each new touch settle before the next one came. I hadn’t imagined it could feel like this: not like surrender, but like a decision made calmly.

He took one of my hands and brought it to his cock. He made me close my fingers around it—his thumb and forefinger only just touching my skin—and guided me up and down, teaching me the rhythm, how to squeeze beneath the head, how to run my thumb over the slick tip. I could feel it hot, alive, pulsing in my hand. Hearing his breathing break over something I was doing made me even wetter.

“That’s it,” he said, his voice rough. “You learn fast.”

Then he gently moved my hand away and went down my body. His mouth left a wet trail over my stomach, over my hip bone, over the inside of my thigh. When he reached the place I had never let anyone reach before, I spread my legs without a second thought. He opened the lips of my pussy with his thumbs, paused for a second as if admiring something, and then buried his whole tongue inside.

He licked me slowly, bottom to top, stopping at my clit to suck it between his lips and let it go, again and again. He pushed his tongue into me and pulled it out, lifted it, drew circles, changed rhythm every time I started to get used to it. My hand slipped into his hair and I buried it in the back of his neck, pushing him against me without realizing it. He moaned against my pussy and that vibration shot through me completely.

“Alberto,” I murmured at some point, not really knowing what I meant to say to him.

He lifted his head and looked at me, his mouth and chin shining with me.

“Good?”

“Very good. Don’t stop.”

He went back down. He slipped two fingers inside me while he sucked my clit, curling them upward, and something in my belly began to tighten like a rope about to snap. When I came, I came against his mouth, my hips lifted off the mattress and a cry bouncing off the ceiling. It was the first orgasm anyone but me had ever given me, and it nearly took my breath away.

***

When he finally got on top of me, he kissed me first. Long. With my own taste still on his tongue. As if he wanted that to be the main memory of the night. He ran the head of his cock along the lips of my pussy, up and down, soaking it, and rested it at my entrance without pushing in.

“Breathe,” he told me.

He entered slowly. I felt the resistance of my body giving way centimeter by centimeter, an ache that skirted the edge of pain without fully crossing that line. I clung to his shoulders. I could feel myself opening on the inside to let him in, how every millimeter more was one of my own muscles surrendering. When he reached the bottom and his hips pressed against mine, he went still, letting me feel how full I was.

“Slowly,” I asked.

“Slowly,” he promised.

And he kept it. He pulled almost all the way out and sank back in with the same slowness, and again, and again, giving me time to adjust to him. I looked into his eyes and he looked into mine, and each thrust was something new I was learning about my own body.

When he found the rhythm, the discomfort dissolved into something completely different. I was surprised to find myself moving with him, adjusting my hips to his without consciously deciding to. He braced himself on one elbow and with his free hand grabbed a breast, pinched my nipple, then dropped to my clit and rubbed it with his thumb in the same rhythm as his fucking. He hooked my legs over his shoulders and in that position he went even deeper, to a point that tore a long moan from me that I didn’t recognize as my own.

“Look at me,” he said. “I want to see your face when you come.”

I couldn’t close my eyes even though I wanted to. Pleasure wasn’t a lightning bolt but a tide: something that kept rising without my being able to determine exactly when it started. I dug my nails into his back and felt my pussy tightening around his cock in waves.

I came with a muffled sound that embarrassed me for a second and then I didn’t care at all. He kept going a little longer, thrusting faster and harder, before pulling out at the last moment and finishing over my thighs and stomach in several thick, hot spurts. He stayed panting over me, his cock dripping the last traces of cum onto my skin.

We lay still for a moment. The ceiling of his room was in shadow. I could feel his semen sliding down to my hip.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. It was true, though I didn’t know what to do with that truth yet.

***

The shower was another beginning. He stepped in without asking permission and found me with my back to him, lathering myself with mechanical movements. His hands replaced mine, and then there was no more mechanics: only temperature and pressure and the weight of his body against mine. He lathered my tits from behind, stroked my stomach, went down to my pussy and slipped two fingers inside me without warning while the other hand kept pinching a nipple.

I felt his cock hard again, pushing against my ass. He made me place my hands on the tile and spread my legs. He bent down, opened my ass cheeks with his thumbs, and ran his tongue all along the crease, pausing where I wasn’t expecting it, wrenching a gasp from me. Then he straightened up, guided himself with his hand, and shoved it in with one thrust, all the way to the hilt.

It happened again, standing up, with water falling over both of us. This time without the initial slowness: it was more direct, more urgent. He gripped my hips with both hands and fucked me hard, making my tits slap against the tiles with every thrust. He pulled his cock all the way out and drove it back in with one stroke. He reached around me and found my clit while he kept fucking me, and within two minutes I was biting my lip not to scream. When I came, I did it with my teeth clenched and my forehead pressed to the cold tile, my legs shaking so hard he had to hold me up so I wouldn’t fall. He pulled out just before he came and emptied his load over my lower back and ass, watching it slide down with the water.

Afterward he dried me with the big towel as if I were fragile, though I no longer felt that way.

He led me back to the bed. The third time was long and silent, just movement and darkness and his breathing by my ear. He put me on my side, lifted one leg, and entered from behind very slowly. His hands roamed over my whole body while he moved inside me, one on my tits, the other dropping to my pussy to touch me in time with his thrusts. He took his time, alternating between almost pulling out and driving into me to the hilt. He made me come again, almost without my realizing it was happening, with a long, low tremor that started in my belly. When he came inside me—without warning, without asking me, holding me against him while he emptied thick jets of hot cum deep in my pussy—I went completely still.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” I said, sitting up and feeling the semen escaping from me onto the sheets.

“You’re right. I’m sorry.”

“The morning-after pill... tomorrow early?”

“Yes. As soon as possible.”

I dressed without saying much more. He asked if I wanted him to walk me home. I told him no, that that was enough for tonight. I didn’t say it cruelly. It was just the truth.

I left, struggling for a moment with the door’s security chain—which, of course, he had locked when he let me in—and then I was out on the street, alone again, with the cold and the silence and the neighborhood’s darkened windows.

***

At home, in the bathroom, I stood looking at the mirror for a while. My hair was disheveled and my lipstick had been gone for hours. Between my legs I could still feel the weight of his cum. I looked like the same person I’d always been, and I wasn’t.

I lay down, unable to sleep properly. I relived the moments out of order: Alberto’s hand on my knee, his tongue on my pussy, the cock sinking into me for the first time, the darkness of his room, that feeling that something that had been future was already past and could never be future again.

I dreamed of Mr. Salcedo. Of the smile he had worn when he welcomed us at the door, which in the dream turned into something different, darker. I woke up with my heart racing and my hand already between my legs, as if my body had started moving without consulting my head.

I touched myself thinking about Alberto. Only Alberto, and his big hands, and the way he had looked at me before kissing me for the first time. I slipped in two fingers the way he had, and with my other hand I rubbed my clit thinking about his mouth there, about his cock filling me. I came biting the pillow, arching my back off the mattress, with Alberto’s name stuck in my throat.

When I was done, I stayed still in the darkness, staring at the ceiling.

Did I regret anything?

I went over the question carefully, like someone checking their pockets before going to sleep.

No. I didn’t regret it.

It had been my first time, and it had been good. Not perfect, not like in novels, but good in a real, concrete way that novels never quite manage to explain. Rodrigo hadn’t shown up, and the night had taken its own course.

There was only one thing left absolutely clear, as I drifted off to sleep with the first light of morning coming in through the blinds: it wasn’t going to be the last.