What Happened with My Daughter’s Boyfriend Should Never Have Happened

I was never proud of what happened. I’m not entirely sorry either. That’s how the contradictions of desire are: they don’t ask permission, they don’t warn you, they just appear and leave you not knowing who you are when you thought you had it all figured out.

My name is Marcos. I’m forty-six, though people put me at ten years younger. Sport has been my religion since I was twenty: weights in the morning, cycling on weekends, no alcohol during the week. Dark hair, short beard, a body that still turns heads on the beach. My wife Silvia says I’m far too aware of that. She’s right, but she looks at me that way too.

I am, or was, a very traditional man. Not in politics, but in everything else. In the way I understood family, relationships, roles. I have two children: Rodrigo, fifteen, and Lucía, eighteen. With Rodrigo everything was easy. With Lucía the conflict started as soon as she turned sixteen.

I couldn’t stand the idea of some boy coming near her. I know. It’s irrational. But fathers are like that, or at least I was. Every friend she brought home was a suspect until proven otherwise. None had proven otherwise by then.

Karim showed up on a Tuesday in October. He came to pick her up for the cinema and my daughter introduced him to me in the hallway like someone introducing a bomb while knowing it’s going to go off. North African features, brown skin, eyes a green that didn’t match the rest of his face. Very black hair, short. The collar of his T-shirt stretched over shoulders far too broad for his age.

—Good afternoon, Mr. Marcos —he said, offering me his hand.

—Hello —I replied, without really taking it.

I didn’t give him a chance to prove anything. I’d already decided I didn’t like him before he even opened his mouth.

The following months were a cold war of looks and monosyllables. Karim was polite to excess, which irritated me more than if he’d been rude. Always “Mr. Marcos,” always asking if I needed help with anything, always with that calm smile I interpreted as arrogance.

In May Silvia’s birthday came around. Fifty years old. We decided to celebrate at the country house we have in the mountains, two hours from the city. There’s a pool, space, and the neighbors are far enough away not to be a nuisance. Some of her family came, some of mine. Karim came too, of course.

That morning, when everyone was already out in the garden or by the pool, Lucía came over to me.

—Dad, Karim forgot his swim trunks. Do you have any he can borrow?

—I’ll look.

I went up to the master bedroom, opened the dresser drawer, and started searching. I only had briefs, because that’s always how I’ve swum. I grabbed a black pair with a white stripe and sat on the edge of the bed. A few seconds later, there were two knocks at the door.

—May I come in, Mr. Marcos?

—Come in.

Karim came in wearing sweatpants, his arms crossed over his chest. I held out the trunks without standing up. I wasn’t expecting him to change right there. He did it without thinking, with the naturalness of someone who has no issue with his body. He pulled down his pants and underwear in one motion and stood naked in front of me long enough for me to see everything. His cock hung heavy between his thighs, thick even at rest, with a brown foreskin and the glans just peeking out at the tip. His balls looked full, taut against the skin. He had a thick mat of black hair over his pubic mound that ran in a fine line up to his navel.

It was exactly how I’d imagined he’d be, in those moments when I didn’t allow myself to imagine such things.

—Is it okay, Mr. Marcos?

—Yes, yes. Do they fit?

—Perfectly. —He turned to show me—. Thank you.

When he turned, he showed me his ass. Firm, round, white where the sun hadn’t touched it. The two dimples just above the cleft, and that cleft splitting an ass that looked carved. I felt my cock moving on its own inside my pants and looked away as if I’d been caught.

The rest of the day I spent drinking more beer than I should have and watching, out of the corner of my eye, Karim come out of the water with my trunks clinging to his body and beads of sunshine running down his back. The bulge showed obscenely under the wet fabric. Every time he got out of the pool, I had to shift position on the lounger.

***

At bedtime, the problem came up. My brother-in-law had drunk too much and couldn’t drive, so he and his family stayed over. Silvia went off with Lucía. Rodrigo shared a room with his cousin. That left one bed free and Karim without a place.

—He can sleep with you —Silvia said, with that logic of hers that allows no debate at eleven at night.

—I’m not thrilled about it.

—Marcos, he’s a person. Not an animal.

There was no debate. The two of us got to the room, me first, him behind, in silence. I took off my jeans and put on my pajama bottoms. Karim took off his T-shirt and got into bed wearing only his underwear. It seemed perfectly normal to me and, at the same time, the opposite.

—I’m turning off the light.

—Fine by me.

We stayed quiet for several minutes. The house was silent. Outside, crickets.

—Mr. Marcos, can I ask you something?

—Depends.

—Why don’t you like me?

I took a while to answer. It was a direct, fair question, and I didn’t have an honest answer that wouldn’t make me look bad.

—It’s not you, Karim. It would be the same with anyone who was with Lucía. You’ll understand when you’re a father.

—But I haven’t done anything bad to you or to her.

—I know.

—Then can we talk normally? Use tu with me, if you want.

Something in his voice unsettled me. It wasn’t pleading. It was simply the question of someone who doesn’t understand the hostility because he hasn’t earned it. I was left without an argument.

—Yes. You can use tu with me too.

He was quiet for a moment. Then he came closer and gave me an awkward, spontaneous hug, the kind of gesture that isn’t calculated. His warmth hit me first, before I could decide how to react.

—Thank you —he said, and went back to his side of the bed.

I turned off the light. I tried to sleep. I couldn’t.

At midnight I woke up hot. Karim had shifted in his sleep and had his arm over my side, his body pressed against my back. I felt his breath on my neck. And I felt something else against my ass cheeks: his cock had gone hard inside his underwear and was pressing into the crack of my ass over the pajama pants. He was very awake below the waist, and that was no small thing. I could feel it thick, hot, throbbing slowly against me.

I should move away.

I didn’t. I stayed still, telling myself I didn’t want to wake him, that it was the sensible thing. But then I moved my hips slightly, pushing my ass back without thinking, and felt him respond in his sleep with a sigh and a slow thrust of his hips that jammed his hard cock between my cheeks over the fabric.

I was getting hard too. My cock was throbbing inside my pants, the tip already wet against the cloth.

Karim woke a few minutes later. He pulled away sharply.

—Fuck, sorry —he murmured—. You can’t control yourself when you’re asleep.

—It’s nothing.

—What you felt from behind wasn’t normal. I’m really sorry.

—Relax. Any guy gets hard in his sleep.

—At my age they say that changes.

—Not that much. I am right now too.

Silence. The kind of silence that weighs.

—Right now? —he asked.

—Yes.

—What a weird situation —he said, and laughed very softly—. Father-in-law and son-in-law in the same bed, both hard as rocks.

—Keep your voice down, please.

I don’t remember exactly when his hand moved. I only remember the pressure of his palm on my stomach first, and then lower, slipping under my pajama bottoms, pushing the elastic of my briefs aside with his fingers until he brushed the hair of my pubic mound. I froze. I expected it and, at the same time, I didn’t. When his fingers closed around my cock and started drawing the foreskin back slowly, leaving the glans exposed and wet, I clenched my teeth so I wouldn’t groan.

—Take your hand off —I said. But I didn’t pull away, and he noticed, because he kept stroking me with a confidence that left no doubt he knew exactly what he was doing.

—Do you want me to take it off?

I didn’t answer. He took that as an answer.

His fist moved up and down my shaft in a slow rhythm, squeezing at the base and easing off when he reached the tip, spreading pre-cum over the whole glans with his thumb. Every time he passed over that spot, a silent gasp escaped me. My cock had gotten so hard it hurt.

—Touch me —he whispered.

I slid my hand into his underwear. His cock sprang into my palm as if it had been waiting for hours. It was rock hard, hot, thicker than I’d estimated when I’d seen him naked in the room. The skin moved over the shaft when I closed my fist and pulled. The glans was wet already, slippery. I peeled him back slowly, feeling the weight, the thickness, the pulse under the skin. His balls were taut, lifted, heavy in his sack.

I started moving without anyone telling me to, stroking myself and him at the same time, and he did the same. The two of us stayed silent, breathing harder, moving slowly so we wouldn’t make noise. Every so often his hips lifted, searching for my hand. Every so often I pushed mine deeper into his fist. It was absurd and it was the hottest thing that had happened to me in years, and I didn’t want it to stop.

—I’m going to cum —he whispered in my ear.

—Me too.

—Hold on.

I couldn’t. I came first, biting my lip, feeling my semen spatter over his hand and run hot down my stomach and groin. My cock throbbed three, four, five times against his closed fist. He squeezed my base hard while I emptied myself. A few seconds later I felt his shaft swell against my fingers and he let out a muffled groan against my nape, and a thick, heavy load filled my hand and dripped between my knuckles.

We both ended up like that, holding in our sounds, motionless afterward, hands sticky, staring at the ceiling in the dark.

—What are we now? —I asked.

—The same as before —he said—. Just a little more honest.

***

For three months, nothing else happened. Karim grew more comfortable around me. I treated him better, although I didn’t fully understand why. Lucía noticed and finally stopped looking at me with that mix of irritation and exhaustion daughters have when their fathers are impossible.

What happened next was an accident, though not entirely.

One Saturday afternoon, Silvia and Lucía went shopping downtown. Rodrigo was at his cousin’s house. Karim had stayed behind, asleep for his nap in the guest room. I was in the downstairs bathroom, fixing a tap that had been dripping for weeks.

When I was just about done, the nut gave way all at once. The jet shot out and soaked both of us in a matter of seconds. Karim had appeared in the doorway just then, shirtless and with his hair messy from the nap, yawning.

—Jesus —he said, looking at the mess.

—Turn off the shutoff valve. It’s under the sink.

He turned it off. The water stopped. We were both soaked from head to toe.

I knelt to pick up the tools, and when I looked up I saw that Karim’s pants, wet, clung to his body in a way that left nothing to the imagination. He had nothing on underneath. His cock showed completely through the clingy fabric, thick, hanging over his left leg, with the glans outlined under the cotton. I realized he was looking at me while I looked at him.

—I’m cold —he said, not moving.

He said nothing else. He pulled his pants down and let them fall to the floor. He stood in front of me, less than a meter away, naked, his cock swaying between his thighs and that calm I still couldn’t tell was innocence or the complete opposite. It was already starting to fill. I watched it swell before my eyes, lengthen toward my face, rise to horizontal first and then point straight at me.

I reached out. I closed my hand around his shaft and felt it throb. I started stroking him slowly, pulling the foreskin back until the glans was bright and bare, then covering it again, feeling how with every pass he got harder. With my other hand I took hold of his balls, weighing them, squeezing them carefully in my palm.

—Come here —he said, in a low voice.

I got down on my knees on the wet bathroom floor. His cock was at my face level. He smelled of clean skin and something else, a young-man smell that hit me in the chest. I stuck out my tongue and licked his glans from below, tasting the salty pre-cum. Karim inhaled sharply. I ran my tongue along the whole length, from base to tip, and went back down the other side. When I filled my lips with his balls and sucked them one by one, his leg trembled.

And then I took him into my mouth for the first time in my life.

I didn’t think about anything except doing it well, which is the only way I know how to do things. Knowing what someone likes in his own mouth turns out to be an advantage I hadn’t considered until that moment. I took him as far in as I could, feeling the weight on my tongue, and started going up and down with my lips tight, sucking, creating suction. When I pulled back out I licked the glans with the tip of my tongue and swallowed him whole again. I sucked his cock the way I’d have wanted mine sucked, and from the way he started panting I knew I wasn’t doing it badly.

Karim rested his hand on my head, not pressing, just resting there. His hips began to move gently, fucking my mouth in a slow rhythm. I opened my lips wider each time he pushed, letting him in all the way, swallowing saliva around him. He moaned very softly, as if he didn’t want to hear himself too much either.

—Fuck, Marcos —he murmured—. Fuck.

When he reached the edge, he didn’t pull away. He stayed still, clinging to the sink, thighs trembling, and let it all finish in my mouth. The first spurts hit the roof of my mouth, hot and thick, and they kept coming, one after another, filling me until I had to swallow so I wouldn’t choke.

I tasted it. I swallowed all of it. I don’t know why I did it, but I also didn’t ask myself why at the time. When I pulled his cock out of my mouth, a white drop was still leaking from the tip, and I cleaned it off with my tongue.

Then I stood up, took off my wet clothes, and gently pushed him against the wall. He understood without my having to say anything. He knelt down. My cock ended up at his face, hard, the glans bare, pointing at his lips.

It took him a few seconds to find the rhythm, but he found it. And then it was impossible not to admit that it wasn’t the first time he’d done that. His lips and tongue worked with a precision that can’t be improvised: he sucked my glans with his cheeks hollowed, licked my frenulum with the tip of his tongue, swallowed me down to the base without gagging, his nose pressed against my pubic mound. He came out and went in, came out and went in, pulling my cock out shining with saliva to lick my balls and take me all the way in again in one motion.

I clenched my teeth so I wouldn’t make a sound. One hand was on the wall and the other in his hair, not pulling, just resting there. When he started stroking my ass with both hands, squeezing my buttocks and sinking a finger into the crack, I knew I wouldn’t last much longer. I shoved his head against my stomach just as I came, and he swallowed everything I gave him without moving an inch.

When I finished, he didn’t pull away either. He stayed with my cock in his mouth a little longer, sucking slowly, getting every last drop out of me.

***

After that I took him to the master bedroom. I laid him face down on the bed and spread his legs apart with my knees. I ran my hand down his back, over the curve of his waist, over the cheeks of his ass. I parted them with my thumbs and saw his hole, tight, brown, clenched shut. I leaned down and licked it without thinking. Karim moaned into the pillow and arched his back. I ate his ass with my tongue, soaking the opening, pushing into it with the tip until I started feeling it relax.

I took my time, unhurried. I used saliva, my fingers, his patience. I put one finger in first, to the knuckle, and moved it slowly in circles. When I felt him open, I put in the second, and then the third, listening to him start moaning without being able to stop himself. Karim tensed and then opened up, pushing his ass back against my hand, fucking my fingers all on his own.

—Put it in already —he said, his face pressed to the pillow—. Please.

I spit on his hole and spit on my cock too. I rested it at the entrance, pressing the glans against the muscle, and pushed. I went in slowly, controlling every centimeter so I wouldn’t hurt him. I felt his ass opening around my shaft, how it squeezed me, how it swallowed me until I was buried to the balls inside him.

—Like that —he said—. Like that, fuck, like that.

I started moving. Slow at first, coming almost all the way out and then thrusting back in to the hilt, and then faster when he started asking for more with his hips, pushing his ass back to receive every blow. I grabbed his shoulders and fucked him. I grabbed the back of his neck and fucked him. I grabbed his hips and fucked him, my cock going in and out wet from his ass, with the obscene sound of my balls slapping between his thighs each time I shoved all the way in.

—Don’t stop, don’t stop —he panted into the pillow—. Harder. Break me.

I gave him what he was asking for. I fucked him like I hadn’t fucked in years, as if I’d saved two decades of thrusts to put them all into twenty minutes. The mattress creaked. The headboard banged against the wall. Karim slipped a hand underneath himself and started stroking while I drove into him from behind.

I don’t have exact words for what I felt during those twenty minutes. I only know that when my cock swelled inside him and I felt I was about to cum, I grabbed his ass with both hands, dug my fingers into his cheeks, and emptied everything I had inside him, spurt after spurt, moaning against the back of his neck. He came almost at the same time, squeezing my cock with his ass as he spilled over the sheets. I collapsed over his back with no strength left, breathing as if I’d run ten kilometers, my cock still inside him, still throbbing.

Karim turned under me. He looked at me. My cock slipped out with a wet sound and a strand of semen dripped from his open hole.

—My turn now —he said.

I didn’t protest. I knew I wasn’t going to protest even before he said it.

I got on all fours in the middle of the bed. Karim positioned himself behind me. I felt his hands spreading my buttocks apart, and then his tongue, wet and warm, licking my hole from top to bottom. A moan escaped me that I hadn’t even expected from myself. He ate my ass with the same patience I’d used on him, soaking me, pushing the tip of his tongue in until the muscle loosened. Then came the fingers, one, two, three, opening me slowly, searching for that spot inside that made me clutch the sheets with my fists.

When he pressed the glans against my entrance, I tensed.

—Breathe —he said—. Relax.

I breathed. He pushed. And he went in.

It hurt. I’m not going to lie about that. The first seconds were hard, it burned, I felt my body opening around something too big, and I clung to the pillow and concentrated on breathing. But he was patient, much more patient than I’d been with him. He stayed still with his cock buried to the hilt, letting my ass get used to him, stroking my back and neck. When he felt me loosen, he started moving very slowly, with short thrusts, coming out only a little and sliding back in without pulling all the way out.

The pain turned into something else. Something new, loaded, dense, rising from my stomach to my chest. Every time his cock hit me inside, a gasp escaped me. When he found the angle and started rubbing my prostate with each thrust, I silently wondered why I hadn’t done this before. The question had no logical answer, so I let it go.

Karim took hold of my hips and started fucking me properly. Each thrust drove his cock all the way in, and his balls slapped between my thighs, and I pushed my ass back to take him deeper and deeper. I got hard again without anyone touching me, hanging and swaying under my belly with every thrust. Karim slipped a hand underneath, grabbed me, and started stroking me in the same rhythm he was driving into me.

—Cum with me —he panted against my ear, lying over my back—. Cum, Marcos.

I came before I could answer. I soaked his hand and the sheets with a discharge I didn’t know I had in me, and while I was shaking I felt him swell inside me and fill my ass with hot semen, moaning against my neck.

We stayed like that for a few seconds, him on top of me, inside me, both of us breathing like dogs. Then he rolled to one side and his cock slipped out slowly, and I felt his cum dribbling down the inside of my thigh.

When it was over, we lay on the bed staring at the ceiling, not talking. The afternoon light came in slanted through the blinds and drew stripes over the floor, over the tangled sheets, over our naked, sticky bodies.

—How long have you had this? —I asked him.

—A while —he answered—. And you?

—Today.

He laughed softly, without mockery.

—And Lucía? —I asked, because I had to ask.

—I love her. Really. This is different.

—How different?

—Different. Neither better nor worse. Just different.

I didn’t ask anything else. We got up, each of us showered, and when Silvia and Lucía came back two hours later with shopping bags and a report of everything they’d seen and bought, I was on the sofa watching football and Karim was in the kitchen making himself tea.

—Everything okay here? —Lucía asked, setting the bags on the floor.

—Everything’s fine —I said.

And for the first time in months, it wasn’t entirely a lie.