The First Time I Said Yes for Money

I got married at twenty-two. I was young, I know, but when I met him I didn’t have a single doubt. There are people who come into your life and, within minutes, you know something has changed. Rodrigo was like that. I worked as a waitress in a restaurant in Palermo, in Buenos Aires, one of those places frequented by tourists and executives who can pay the bill without looking at the price. He came almost every Thursday for lunch, almost always alone, and sat at the same table in my section. He never said anything out of line. He left good tips and a discreet smile when he left.

The day of my twenty-first birthday I had to work. I couldn’t get anyone to cover my shift. Rodrigo came in for lunch and, before I could even get to the table, he put a little package wrapped in brown paper into my palm. He asked me to open it when the day was over. I couldn’t resist: I opened it in the kitchen. It was a perfume I knew only by name, one of those that are advertised in magazines but that I had never held in my hands.

I thanked him when I brought him his coffee. He told me I was impatient, with that half-smile of his. He pointed to the chalkboard beside the bar where the restaurant put the staff birthdays each month. If he hadn’t been there that day, he would have come back the next one with the gift.

Little by little, we started talking more each time he came in. He invited me to the movies. I said yes.

He was terse, not very talkative, but full of details. I fell in love fast. We’d been seeing each other for months and not a kiss, no physical advances. I had history: several boyfriends, an active sex life since I was eighteen, cocks of every size already known, cum swallowed in other people’s rooms. But with him everything was different, slower, and that made me nervous in a way I didn’t really know how to handle.

One afternoon, sitting in a square in Palermo, he told me he had something important to say. I thought he was going to ask me to be his girlfriend. I jumped straight ahead: dating, the first time together, talking about living together. He asked me to marry him. I said yes before he finished the sentence.

I took him to meet my parents. They were delighted. He took me to Mendoza, where he was from, to meet his. His parents welcomed me as if they had known me all their lives. The city seemed beautiful to me, different, calm. I said yes to everything.

We got married in the spring. A month later we were settled in Mendoza, in a spacious apartment a few blocks from his parents’ place. I got a job right away in a tourist restaurant near the main square. It was what I knew how to do and I liked it. Our sex life wasn’t passionate: Rodrigo fucked me twice a week, always at night, always with the lights off, always in the same position. He got on top of me, shoved his cock in me, moved five or six minutes, and came inside with a short groan. I almost never came. Sometimes I sucked him off when he felt like it, but he never pushed my head down to my pussy or licked me. It was enough, he told me. At least that’s what he told me then.

At twenty-four I got pregnant. By the fourth month of the pregnancy, the waitress shifts became heavy and I quit. Rodrigo earned well; it had always been that way. It was never an economic necessity; I worked because I wanted to. Our daughter was born in October.

Before she turned one, Rodrigo lost his job.

***

At first he took it as a break. He said something would come up, that Mendoza had opportunities. Two months later I started seeing worry on his face. At four months he asked if we could go live with his parents to save on rent. I agreed without hesitation. The house was big, my mother-in-law adored the baby, and anyway I already spent a lot of time there.

When the fifth month without work came around, I told him I was going to look for something. He smiled at me and said that sounded like a good idea. I went to the restaurant where I’d worked before, but they didn’t have any openings. They recommended an Irish pub near downtown. There was a spot for the morning shift, from eight to two. Few tips, few customers. Nobody wanted it for that reason. For me it solved the problem: my mother-in-law could watch the baby in the mornings and I’d be back for lunch.

The pub was quiet. Tourists having a late breakfast, the occasional traveler ordering a beer before noon. The tips were scarce. The work didn’t demand much from me and my head was free to think. Some customers who had had too much to drink said things to me, some compliment, some direct proposition to drag me into the bathroom and fuck me against the sink. I’d smile at them and keep doing my thing. I have big tits, a firm ass, and a waist that shows even with the pub T-shirt on, and in Mendoza that gets attention even more than in Buenos Aires. What they said didn’t bother me. It lifted my mood in a stage of my life that needed it.

Three months after I started at the pub, an American customer began showing up. He must have been about sixty, stocky, always quiet. He’d arrive, order two or three gin and tonics, and leave. He was in town for a long stay, I think he was negotiating with some winery in the area. He ended up in my section and stayed there. He was attractive for his age. He didn’t bother anyone.

One day, after his third drink, he told me he’d like to take me out. I said no politely. A week later he asked me again, this time putting one hundred dollars on the bar. I said no again, though my eyes went to the bill for a second before I pulled my hand away.

***

That week, at the neighborhood shop where I was running up diapers for the baby on credit, Don Héctor told me the tab had grown too much. He didn’t use direct words, but he didn’t need to. He looked at my tits first, then my mouth, then told me there were ways to settle the debt without money. My stomach turned thinking about his old dick inside my pussy, about having to suck it in the back room of the shop between boxes of pasta. He’s a man who does not attract me at all, who would not attract me even if he were the last one on earth. I left without saying anything.

That night I didn’t sleep. The baby slept in her crib, Rodrigo snored beside me, and I stared at the ceiling with a mix of disgust and anguish. Without the credit, I had no way to buy diapers the next day. I didn’t want to ask my in-laws for more money. They’d been supporting us for months without saying a single word, and I felt the weight of that every day.

The next morning Rodrigo got up in high spirits. He had an interview in a town three hours from Mendoza. He might be back at night. He left looking hopeful. I honestly wished him luck. For something to finally work out. For us to be able to breathe again.

At the pub the morning was quiet. Around eleven the American arrived. He ordered his first gin and tonic. Then the second. When he got to the third, he called me over with a discreet gesture and put the hundred dollars on the bar. He gave me his room number and told me to wait for him if he left at two.

I listened to all of it without moving. Then I said yes.

***

I spent the longest hour of my life waiting for two o’clock to come.

I left the pub with weak legs. I stopped on the sidewalk and thought it through one more time. One hundred dollars from a man I found attractive, or settling the debt with Don Héctor the way he was hinting. The second option wasn’t really an option. It was something else with no decent name.

I walked to the hotel.

At reception I asked for the room. They let me through without asking questions. I took the elevator upstairs. I knocked on the door.

He opened it naked. He didn’t say anything at first. I looked straight at his cock, couldn’t help it. It hung heavy between his legs, thick even at rest, with big, low-hanging balls. Neither Rodrigo nor any of my exes came close.

I hesitated for a second in the doorway. He told me to come in, not to stand in the hallway. I crossed over. He pointed to the bill on the nightstand and told me to take my clothes off.

I took the money. I put it in my purse. I thought about leaving anyway. But he knew where I worked, and I knew that if I ran out like that I couldn’t go back to the pub. I started unbuttoning my shirt.

My fingers were shaking a little. I undid button after button looking at him, and he lay back on the bed, his cock already hardening in his hand. He grabbed it and started jerking himself off slowly, without hurry, looking at me like someone looking at something they’d already bought. I took off my shirt. Then my bra. My nipples hardened the second the air touched them. I pulled down my pants, then my panties, and stood beside the bed naked, cheeks burning and my cunt already starting to get wet without my wanting it to.

While he watched me, his cock kept filling out in his hand. As it hardened I understood the real difference. Rodrigo has a normal size, an ordinary cock, the kind that goes in fine and finishes quickly. My ex-boyfriends too. This man was another category: long, thick as my wrist, veins standing out, with a broad, red glans at the tip. My mouth watered. Literally. I felt saliva gathering just from looking at it.

He said in a barely understandable Spanish, his American accent heavy on every syllable:

—Come. Sit. Suck.

It should have seemed ridiculous to me. It didn’t seem ridiculous. I sat beside him on the bed, leaned in, and took his cock in both hands. Not one hand was enough to cover its thickness. I held it a moment near my face, feeling it hot, throbbing against my palm, and then I opened my mouth and took it in. Barely half went in. My jaw stretched in a way that had never happened to me with Rodrigo. I started sucking it slowly, my tongue wrapping around his glans, bobbing my head up and down, working up saliva so it would slide better. I licked his balls too, one first and then the other, sucking them whole into my mouth while I stroked his cock with my hand. I went back up, and this time I pushed deeper. I felt the glans hit the back of my throat and nausea rise, but I didn’t stop. My eyes filled with tears, mascara ran in two black streaks down my cheeks, and he grabbed the back of my neck and started moving my head himself, faster, fucking my mouth.

Having that size in my mouth did something I wasn’t expecting: it turned me on. I wasn’t putting on an act. My body decided on its own, without asking my permission. I felt my cunt dripping down my thighs, clenching around nothing. I sucked his cock like I’d never sucked anyone’s cock before, with real hunger, while he groaned above me and called me “good girl, good fucking girl” in a dragged-out English.

He asked me to look for a condom in the drawer and put it on him. I’d never done that with any man other than Rodrigo. I opened the wrapper carefully and put it on as best I could, rolling it down his whole length with both hands. Then he pointed to himself and told me to get on top.

I got myself into position slowly, one leg on each side of his hips, his cock aimed at my pussy. I grabbed the base with my hand and guided myself. I rested the glans at the entrance. I was so wet that the tip was already slipping on its own. I started lowering myself. Feeling the length and thickness go in was a real physical impact, not a metaphorical one. It opened me centimeter by centimeter. A long, filthy moan escaped me, and I had no idea where it came from. I went lower. I was short of breath. He was filling me in a way Rodrigo had never filled me, not even close. When I finally sat all the way down, my ass tight against his thighs, I stayed still for a second, trembling, feeling him throbbing inside me. I started moving, just a little, going up and down a few centimeters, and I came before he’d even fully settled. An orgasm I hadn’t expected, one that ripped a rough cry out of me I couldn’t control, my pussy clenching around the cock in spasms that shook me all over.

He seemed to like that. He grabbed my hips with both hands, lifted me as if I weighed nothing, and threw me face down on the bed. He put me on all fours, kicked my legs apart, and got behind me. He shoved his cock back into me in one thrust, all the way to the base, and tore another moan out of me. He started fucking me like that, gripping my hips, slamming his balls against my clit on every thrust. He pulled my hair, brought my arms together behind my back and held them with one hand while he drove his cock into me harder and harder. The wet sound of my dripping cunt taking him again and again filled the room. The morbid thrill of being there, in that hotel room, on all fours for a sixty-year-old foreigner, doing that for money, betraying Rodrigo for the first time in five years together while he was off in some lost town looking for work, made me come again before I even realized it myself, my face pressed to the mattress and my cunt flooding beneath me.

***

When it looked like everything was about to end, he spoke again.

—Two hundred dollars more. Your ass.

I should have said no. I said yes. I wanted the money and, even if I didn’t admit it then, I wanted to know. I’d never been fucked in the ass. Rodrigo had never even hinted at it. And if my first time was going to be with a cock, it was going to be with that one.

He made me stay on all fours. He spit between my ass cheeks, spread my hole open with his thumbs and stared at my little asshole for a long while, silent, until he made my shame hurt more than the rest. Then he used his fingers. First one, wet with his spit and with what was dripping from my pussy, pushing it in slowly to the knuckle. He moved it around inside for a while. Then two. He scissored them apart to stretch me. I pressed my face into the sheet and breathed hard. He put in a third finger and I already felt like I was going to split, and he hadn’t even begun.

He took his fingers out. I heard the rustle of another condom. I felt the broad glans press against my hole, push, and then begin to enter. The difference in size I had already felt before in my pussy multiplied in a completely different way in my ass. It was intense at first, too much. It burned like I was being opened with an iron. A whimper slipped out of me and I wanted to crawl forward, but he had me by the hips and wouldn’t let me. He pushed his cock in slowly, a little at a time, pulling it out and sliding it back in a little deeper each time. He could tell I was having trouble and, far from slowing down, that seemed to turn him on even more. He showed no consideration whatsoever. He pushed all the way in until I felt his balls against my pussy, and there he stayed, still, breathing heavily over my back.

For a few minutes all I felt was the strain and my body’s effort to adjust. He started moving slowly, almost pulling all the way out and then pushing back in fully. Then something changed. The pain gave way and in its place something appeared I couldn’t quite name at that moment. A different kind of heat, deeper, a tingle rising from my asshole to my stomach. I started moving too, without anyone asking me to, pushing my ass back to meet his thrusts. I slipped two fingers into my pussy while he fucked me in the ass, and that was when I really lost my mind. I felt the thickness of his cock stretching my asshole and my own fingers entering me from the front at the same time.

I came like that, with two fingers in my pussy and his cock buried all the way in my ass, screaming into the pillow. Then again, almost right after, my whole body shaking. He changed my position, face up, with my legs over his shoulders, and shoved it back into my ass from that angle, looking at my face while he buried himself in me. Folded like that, ass lifted and knees against my tits, I felt it even deeper. He pinched my nipples, squeezed my throat with one hand without quite choking me, put two of his fingers in my mouth and made me suck them while he kept pounding me. At some point he pulled his cock out, took off the condom, came up to my face, and spat on me. In my mouth, on my cheeks, on my forehead. No man had ever done that to me. I didn’t know what to feel. My body didn’t know either, and I came again, my face wet with his spit and my ass open and throbbing with emptiness.

He grabbed his cock and jerked himself off over me, watching me. He came in two thick bursts, one landing on my tits and the other hitting my chin and lip. He came a lot, more than Rodrigo ever did, a thick white semen that ran down my neck to my collarbone. Then he lowered his hand and smeared it over my nipples, circling them, as if marking me.

He pointed to the bathroom with a gesture and said:

—Get dressed and go.

I cleaned myself with toilet paper. I looked at myself in the mirror for a second: mascara smeared, swollen mouth, red marks on my neck, semen still drying on the skin of my chest. I washed my face. I got dressed. He handed me the extra two hundred dollars without ceremony, like someone settling any ordinary bill. I changed only one hundred at the exchange office on the corner. The other hundred I folded and tucked into the bottom of my purse.

I took a taxi to the shop. Don Héctor charged me with the face of a man expecting something else. I put the bills on the counter. I saw frustration cross his face and left without saying anything more than what was strictly necessary.

At home I took a long hot shower. I still felt the burn in my ass when I washed, and it didn’t bother me. Then I sat in the kitchen drinking mate, alone, while the baby napped in my mother-in-law’s arms in the next room.

Rodrigo came home that night. He hadn’t gotten the position. He lay down beside me without talking much. He turned off the light.

That night, besides unemployed, he became what he had never known he was.