What He Discovered Under My Skirt That Dawn

Everything worth having in life starts out as a small drama. Some of those dramas, with a little luck, end up turning into love.

The club was called The Mirror and it was on a narrow street in Cartagena’s old quarter, far from the noisy places that filled the harbor. I used to go there when I needed to think without anyone bothering me, because the light was dim and the music was just low enough to hear the ice clinking against the glass. I’d put on the little black leather skirt, the fishnet stockings, and a silk blouse that left little to the imagination. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. Or so I told myself.

Iván showed up that dawn the way important things do: without warning.

I noticed right away that he liked me. I knew it from the way he kept staring at me from the bar, glass in hand and his back barely resting against the counter, as if he were trying not to look at me and failing at the trick. He was short, with black curly hair, and he wore his shirt open two buttons too far. Handsome in a messy way, the kind you only notice once you get close.

I was sitting in the round sofa in the back, the burgundy velvet one hardly anyone dared to use because it was too much in the bartender’s line of sight. My legs were crossed and my glass was resting on my thigh. I held his gaze a second longer than necessary and watched him shift his weight from one foot to the other, deciding. He decided.

He set his glass on the floor beside the sofa leg and leaned forward until his eyes were level with mine. He smelled of blond tobacco and a citrus perfume that wasn’t expensive, but suited him well.

—I’ve been looking for you for three nights —he said, and he said it seriously, without the smirk of someone rehearsing a line.

—Then you’ve been looking in the wrong place for three nights —I said back.

—I don’t think so. You’re here.

I smiled with that smile I use when I want to seem cynical and not feel it all the way through.

—And what exactly are you looking for so stubbornly?

—Something I wasn’t expecting —he said—. What you don’t expect is always the most sensational.

If only he knew, I thought. If only he knew.

He lifted his hand and caressed my cheek with the backs of his fingers, slowly, as if measuring me. His touch was warm and a little rough, the touch of hands that work. He slid it down my neck, followed the neckline, and stopped at the first button of my blouse. He looked at me, asking permission. I didn’t say yes with my voice. I said yes by letting him continue.

His fingers slid over the silk and enclosed one of my tits. He squeezed it with his whole palm; then, with his thumb, he found the nipple through the fabric and pinched it with a slowness that stole my breath. He did it again, this time harder, twisting it between his fingers until it hardened like a pebble beneath the silk. I arched in the sofa without meaning to, pushing my tit against his hand, asking for more without saying it. He looked down, smiled, and undid two buttons of the blouse to slip his hand inside. His hot palm against my bare skin, his thumb moistened with spit before torturing my nipple again, ripped a gasp from me. I laughed at my own clumsy body, at how fast he’d gotten me worked up.

—You’re in a hurry —he murmured.

—And you don’t know who you’re hurrying with.

I took his wrist. I gently pulled his hand away from my tit and guided it downward, beneath the hem of the skirt. My other leg uncrossed on its own, as if it had been waiting for the signal. I looked him in the eyes when his fingers brushed my stockings, when they slid up my thigh, when they reached the place where the fabric ended and skin began.

And where, just after the skin, something else began.

I noticed it first in his hand. The pause. That tenth of a second when the fingers hesitated, felt, confirmed what the brain took a moment longer to accept. Then I noticed it in his eyes. Iván opened his mouth to say something and said nothing. He looked down, then up, then down again. My cock had been hard since our conversation, trapped against my hip by the underwear, and now I felt it pulse under his fingers like a second heart.

I waited. It’s the moment when some people get up and leave without looking back. It’s the moment when others spit out something ugly and then spend three months regretting it. It’s the moment of truth, and we all know it.

Iván didn’t stand up. Iván didn’t let go.

What he did instead was close his fingers. He squeezed slowly, measuring the hardness, tracing the contour of my cock through the underwear soaked with the pre-cum that had already been staining my briefs for a while. A curious expression settled over his face. It wasn’t fear. It wasn’t disgust. It was that strange thing that happens when a piece falls into place where you never expected it to fit.

—I wasn’t expecting that —he said at last, and he laughed softly without letting go. On the contrary: he squeezed harder, milking me through the cotton, and I could feel the wetness spreading in the fabric.

—I warned you.

—You didn’t warn me about anything.

—I told you you didn’t know who you were hurrying with.

He bit his lip. I arched a little more on the sofa and opened my legs a little wider still. The music changed to a slow song, a guitar and a woman’s voice; someone, two sofas over, laughed at something that had nothing to do with us. Iván lifted the hem of my little skirt with his free hand, and the garment rose until it left me exposed. With two fingers he pushed the underwear aside and my cock jumped forward the instant the fabric stopped holding it, completely stiff, shining at the tip, with a thick drop hanging from the glans. He looked at it the way one looks at something one has already decided to take.

—Fuck —he whispered, and it wasn’t a question or a complaint. It was hunger.

He knelt.

The floor of the Mirror was cold tile, and he seemed not to care. He settled between my legs, placed both hands on my thighs, and lowered his head. I felt first his breath on my damp skin, then his tongue: a long stroke from base to tip, soft, almost exploratory, as if he wanted to understand what sort of body he’d been lucky enough to find. I shivered. He did it again, this time slower, pausing at the glans, barely sucking it with his lips and cleaning the drop of pre-cum from me with the tip of his tongue. He closed his eyes while tasting me. He opened them again to look at me, my cock against his cheek, and smiled as if he’d just discovered something better than what he had come looking for.

—Suck me properly —I told him, surprised by my own voice—. Suck me like your life depends on it.

He obeyed without a word. He opened his mouth and took me all the way in, until the tip struck the back of his throat and made him swallow reflexively. He didn’t pull away. He stayed there for a moment, lips tight around the base, barely choking, and only then did he begin to raise his head slowly. Every centimeter he came up left a trail of spit; every centimeter he took in again was deeper, wetter, filthier. Iván sucked my cock like he’d spent weeks thinking about exactly that, about lowering his head and stopping his thoughts. He moved up and down in a slow rhythm that would then speed up without warning; he ran his tongue along the base, returned to the tip, formed a circle with his lips, and took me all the way in. One of his hands held my hip in place so I wouldn’t thrash too much; the other squeezed my thigh with a force that would leave a mark the next day and I didn’t care at all.

I grabbed his hair. I wound it between my fingers, just a little, to set the pace. He moaned with my cock in his mouth and the moan shot up through me and made my legs tremble. I loosened the reins a little and he took it as permission: he let himself get fucked in the mouth, opened wider, pressed his lips around the glans when he came back up, and scratched the back of my thigh with his nails. A string of spit hung from his chin and mixed with my pre-cum on the front of his shirt. I saw him move his free hand to his own groin, squeeze over the jeans, search for relief. I didn’t let him for long: I yanked his hair upward, made him pull back for a second so he’d look at me.

—Keep going —I told him—. Don’t stop until I come in your mouth.

Iván licked his shiny lips and went back down. This time he found a different rhythm: he didn’t let go of the glans, he worked it with the tip of his tongue against the frenulum while he jerked me with his hand, squeezing hard, milking me from bottom to top. Every time his hand reached the head, his mouth welcomed it and sucked hungrily. His eyes were shining. His chin was shining. His whole mouth was shining.

I closed my eyes. I made myself not look at the bartender, not look at the two guys playing pool at the far end, not look at anything except the peeling plaster ceiling of the Mirror. I dug my nails into the velvet of the sofa. I clenched my teeth so I wouldn’t make too clear a sound. I held on as long as I could.

I couldn’t hold on long.

When I felt myself about to come, I tried to warn him. I touched his hair with my hand, a vague signal. Iván didn’t move away. On the contrary: he tightened his mouth around the glans, sucked harder, slipped his tongue underneath, and that was it. I came in a long shudder, with that contraction that starts in the back and ends in the legs. I let out a low sound, almost a growl, and the cum burst in hot spurts into his mouth, without pause, shot after shot, as if it had been stored up for months. Iván didn’t move away even when the first blast filled his throat; he swallowed, made a wet sound, swallowed again. The orgasm kept coming, and he kept swallowing, and when he couldn’t fit any more he let the rest slide from the corner of his mouth and down his chin. He kept sucking until the last drop spilled onto his tongue, with my cock already sensitive on the edge of pain, and only then did he release me with an obscene pop.

He raised his head slowly. His lips were shining, his chin wet with semen, and he wore a new smile. He ran his thumb along the corner of his mouth, scooped up what had escaped him, and put it in his mouth. He wiped the rest away with the back of his hand and looked at me with a strange calm, as if he had just solved an old problem.

—Come up here —I said softly.

He climbed up. He leaned over the sofa, knelt on either side of my legs, and kissed me. It was a long kiss, unhurried, a kiss that tasted like me. I tasted my own semen on his tongue, salty and thick, and it gave me a second, smaller jolt, a sort of echo, a delayed lash between my legs. I took his hand to his fly. Beneath the denim I felt a thick cock, longer than I’d expected, so hard the fabric bulged.

—You’re hard —I murmured against his mouth, and squeezed the bulge with my open palm.

—I’ve been hard for a while.

—And what are you going to do with it?

Iván kissed me again, shorter this time. He gently moved my hand away.

—Not today.

—Not today?

—Not today —he repeated—. I want to see you tomorrow. Without the noise, without the skirt, and without the sofa.

—You’re weird.

—I’m stubborn.

He wrote me his phone number on a bar napkin and left through the door without looking back. I stayed a while longer on the sofa, glass in hand again, smoothing my skirt as if nothing had just happened.

***

The next day, though, I called him. We met for lunch on a terrace near the wall, both of us dressed like any normal person on a Sunday at noon. I paid attention to him in a new way, without the light of the Mirror in between us. Iván had thick eyebrows, a small scar on his chin, and a way of stirring his coffee that made me smile.

We talked for four hours. About family. About what each of us did. About why he’d come up to me in the club knowing I wasn’t like the other girls, and wanting me anyway; or wanting, rather, for it to be me and nobody else. I asked him if he’d known from the beginning. He said no, but that he hadn’t needed to confirm it in order to come over. I asked if he’d done it before with someone like me. He said no.

—So then? —I insisted.

—So then nothing. Sometimes things happen and you don’t explain them to yourself until much later.

I kissed him right there on the terrace, in front of the waiter and an older couple drinking coffee with solemn faces. Iván blushed for the first time since I’d known him. I liked seeing him like that.

***

We kept seeing each other. Once a week, then twice, then almost every night. Iván worked for a shipping company at the harbor and lived in a small apartment near the dock, with a tiny kitchen and a huge bed.

The first night I went up to that apartment he fucked me as if he needed to make up for what had happened at the Mirror. We stripped in the hallway, leaving our clothes in shreds on the floor, and when I got to the bed he was already in front of it, waiting with his cock out, thick and stiff pointed at my face. I sucked him on my knees against the edge of the mattress, learning him: the uncomfortable thickness that stretched my lips, the thick vein running underneath, the heavy balls I weighed in my free hand while he ran his fingers through my hair and whispered how well a slut like me sucked his cock. He liked saying it to me and I liked hearing it. I asked him to call me more things. He called me whore, and princess, and anything else he could think of, and with every dirty word he pushed himself a little deeper into my mouth.

Then he threw me on my back on the bed and opened my legs with his hands. He licked my balls first, licked my cock, licked lower, burying his tongue in my ass until I moaned without being able to control myself, gripping the headboard. He ate me out slowly, sucking me, salivating me, putting his whole tongue inside, taking it out, pushing it back in, until my hole was completely soaked and throbbing. When I saw him get up and reach for the condom in the pocket of the pants still hanging from the door, I turned myself over, knelt down, stuck my ass out.

—Fuck me —I told him, my face pressed to the mattress—. Fuck me now, I can’t take it anymore.

He put the condom on while looking at me, spat on his cock and on my hole, and started easing into me slowly, pushing with his hips, gripping my hips with both hands. It hurt at first, it hurt just enough, and then it stopped hurting and became something else. Iván drove himself into me to the hilt and stayed still for a moment with his groin pressed against my ass, breathing on the back of my neck.

—Fuck, you’re tight —he murmured.

—Move —I asked him—. Rip me open.

He moved. He started slowly, coming in and out with long thrusts that made my back arch; then he increased the pace until I was just a continuous noise of skin against skin, of moans muffled into the pillow, of the headboard hitting the wall. He fucked me with his whole hip, gripping my hair with one hand and my waist with the other, pushing me toward him every time he thrust. I had my cock hard again, hanging between my legs, rubbing against the duvet with every shove; nobody needed to touch it for me. I came onto the sheets before he did, mouth open against the mattress, squeezing him inside so tightly that he gave two more thrusts and came with a grunt in my ear, biting my shoulder, emptying himself into the condom with his cock buried deep.

He collapsed on top of me, panting. We stayed like that for a long while, him not pulling out, me not wanting him to pull out. He ran his tongue over the nape of my neck. He whispered something I didn’t understand and I didn’t ask what it was, because sometimes it’s better not to know.

Iván learned my body slowly, without manuals, asking what he didn’t know and undoing prejudices he hadn’t even realized he had. He learned which nipple was more sensitive and how much he could bite it. He learned how I liked him to suck me on Sunday mornings, unhurried, until I woke up coming in his mouth. He learned to let himself get fucked too, face down on that same huge bed, with his face buried in the pillow, asking for more in a thread of a voice. I returned the favor in my own way, learning him, discovering what he liked done to him and what he didn’t. I learned to take him slowly, to wait for him, to make it last. I learned he loved coming on my tits, marking my skin white, and then licking it clean afterward.

It wasn’t all easy. There were hard conversations with his family. There was a dinner with his parents that ended in silence. There was a whole week when we didn’t see each other because one of us lacked the courage. But there were also dawns on his balcony, watching the ships come into the harbor, while he put his arm around my waist and told me he had never felt so calm with anyone. There were nights when he pulled it out right there on the balcony, with the city still dark, and jerked me off slowly while looking out at the sea, whispering filthy things in my ear until I came against the railing.

Months passed. A year passed. Another passed.

We got married at the civil registry office one March morning, with two witnesses and a bouquet of small daisies I bought on a corner ten minutes before. No one from his family came. That would keep hurting him for years. But we went out into the street hand in hand and ate a sandwich standing up in a bakery in the center, and at that moment I understood the meaning of the phrase I began this story with: everything worth having in life starts out as a small drama, and some of those dramas, with a little luck, end up turning into love.

We bought a small house, two bedrooms and a terrace with a sea view, in Sanlúcar de Barrameda. The kitchen is still tiny. The bed, enormous. We’ve been living there for five years now.

Sometimes, when I go down to the kitchen for a glass of water at three in the morning, I find him awake, reading on the counter with the book backlit, and he laughs without looking up.

—I knew you’d come down —he says.

And I laugh too, because some dramas never really end: they just change rooms.