Maid by Day, Slave to Two Women by Night

My name is Clara, although the two women who run my life today simply call me Clar. I’m 25, and what I want to tell you happened three years ago, when I was a country girl with no ambition beyond earning an honest living far from home.

I’m from a small town in the province of Burgos, near Aranda de Duero. When I was 22, I saw an ad: they were looking for a live-in maid to look after a house in Madrid. I called, got the details, and everything checked out — lodging, meals, and a salary I’d never see in my village. There were two ladies: mother and daughter. No children, no pets. It seemed like manageable work, so I decided to take it.

I started on the first Monday in March. The address was on Calle Serrano, in the Salamanca district. I arrived with my suitcase and was greeted by Mrs. Cristina: forty-four years old, tall, slim, dark hair pinned up, and manners I’d only seen in films. She showed me the house — high ceilings, marble floors, paintings that looked like they belonged in a museum — and took me to my room. Small, with its own bathroom, perfect. That same afternoon I got to work in the kitchen.

At noon, Miss Elena arrived. She was twenty-four, studied opera singing at the conservatory, and traveled often. She was slender, dark-haired, with the kind of confidence in her gestures that comes from growing up without ever lacking anything. She looked me up and down the first time and nodded without saying a word. She didn’t need to say anything.

From the start I knew I liked that job. Not just the cleaning or the cooking: I liked the order it brought with it, the clear hierarchy between them and me. I learned fast what each of them liked. Mrs. Cristina’s coffee: black, no sugar, with the newspaper folded on the left side of the tray. Miss Elena’s juice: freshly squeezed orange, never from a carton. The beds with perfect corners. Cristina’s clothes arranged by color; Elena’s, by season.

I addressed both of them formally, with a respect that cost me no effort because it was natural to me. I liked anticipating what they needed before they asked. I liked everything being in its place when they came in.

Mrs. Cristina had been separated for a year and lived off the rent from several commercial properties she owned. She had time on her hands, read a lot, took care of her body. There was a quiet loneliness in her that I noticed in the afternoons, when she stayed in the living room with a book and a glass of white wine. I used to take advantage of those moments to poke my head in and ask if she needed anything. Sometimes she asked me to lower the blind or bring her ice water. Sometimes she simply shook her head and kept reading. But she always looked up for a moment before returning to the book.

In addition to the Serrano apartment, they had a house in La Granja de San Ildefonso, in the mountains of Segovia. On spring and summer weekends we usually went there. I followed them, of course. My job didn’t end at the Madrid doorway.

***

It was in August that everything changed.

Miss Elena had gone to Formentera with her friend Laura. Mrs. Cristina and I were left alone at the mountain house: pool, garden, pines, silence. I looked after my employer as always. Breakfast ready before she came downstairs. Clean towels at the edge of the pool. The house aired out from early in the morning.

Mrs. Cristina lay in the sun every morning on the chaise longue, and I would go over every so often to ask whether she wanted anything. That morning she asked me for a cold beer. I served it to her in a glass with ice, just the way she liked it.

—And the appetizer? —she asked, without looking up from her book.

I had forgotten. I froze for a second.

—I’ll prepare it right away, Mrs. Cristina.

—It should already be here —she said, with a calm that was harder to endure than a sharp rebuke.

I ran to the kitchen and came back five minutes later with olives, a few slices of ham, and some salted crackers. I served them to her apologizing. She looked at me with that expression of hers, halfway between distant and slightly amused.

—You’ll have no dessert today —she said.

I didn’t protest. I lowered my head and answered:

—Yes, Mrs. Cristina.

That’s too little punishment for the mistake I made, I thought. And I was surprised to find myself thinking that way.

***

At lunchtime, when I already had my plate served in the kitchen, Mrs. Cristina appeared in the doorway. She looked at the plate. I had made a veal steak with salad.

—What is that?

—My lunch, Mrs. Cristina.

She came closer slowly, took the plate with both hands, and emptied it into the sink. She did it calmly, without anger, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

—You won’t have dinner either today. Mistakes have consequences, Clara. Without them, you learn nothing.

I watched her do it and said nothing. I didn’t protest. I felt something strange in my stomach that wasn’t exactly hunger.

—Yes, Mrs. Cristina —I said—. You’re right.

She nodded and went back to the living room without further explanation.

***

That afternoon, while Mrs. Cristina was watching a series on the sofa, she called me from the living room.

—Come here.

I walked over and stood in front of her.

—Kneel down.

She said it without inflection, as if it were the most ordinary instruction in the world. And I did it. I knelt on the wooden floor and waited.

—My feet —she said, stretching out her legs toward the stool in front of the sofa—. Massage them while I watch this.

I took her feet in my hands. They were well cared for: nails painted dark burgundy, soft skin. I began to work them with my thumbs, following the arches, the heels, each toe. I concentrated on doing it well, on not making the same mistake twice in one day.

I stayed like that for almost an hour. At forty minutes I started to feel it in my knees. I changed position very slowly, but she noticed.

—What’s wrong?

—My knees, Mrs. Cristina. They’re bothering me.

She watched me for a moment.

—That’s normal at first. You’ll have to get used to it if you want to learn to serve properly.

—Yes, Mrs. Cristina. Forgive me.

She went on with her series. I stayed on my knees until she told me I could stop.

—Kiss my feet and put my slippers on.

I did it. I kissed her feet calmly, one by one, pausing at each toe, even sucking on them without being asked, because I felt that was what she expected. I ran my tongue over the sole, over the arch, and gently bit the heel. I heard her let out a short approving breath through her nose. Then I tied on her slippers and stood up with numb knees and something moving inside me that I didn’t know how to name. My panties were wet and I was ashamed to admit it to myself.

—For a first time —she said—, not bad.

***

That night, after dinner, I went to the bathroom to gather the towels. There was a roll of toilet paper lying on the floor.

I hadn’t left it there.

I picked it up without saying anything and put it back where it belonged. Mrs. Cristina appeared in the doorway.

—What were you doing?

—Picking up the paper from the floor, Mrs. Cristina.

—It was on the floor because you didn’t do your job properly. Right?

I looked at her. I knew I hadn’t thrown that paper down. But I also knew, with a clarity that surprised me, that saying so wasn’t going to change anything. That probably that wasn’t what we were really talking about at all.

—Yes, Mrs. Cristina. I’m sorry.

I knelt right there on the bathroom floor. She took a step toward me and put a hand on my cheek: an almost tender gesture, before she gave me the first slap. Gentle at first. Then another, firmer.

—This has to be clear between us, Clara.

—Whatever you say, Mrs. Cristina.

—From now on you don’t call me Mrs. Cristina. You call me mistress. Or owner. Do you understand?

She said it without raising her voice, without any drama. And something inside me fell into place, as if it had been waiting exactly for those words for a long time.

—Yes, my mistress.

She slapped me hard. My head turned with the blow. I didn’t pull away.

—Good —she said—. That’s how I like it.

***

She led me by the hand to her room. She closed the door behind us even though there was no one else in the house. She switched on the bedside lamp and left me standing in the middle of the bedroom, looking at me the way one looks at something newly bought.

—Take off your T-shirt.

I took it off. My fingers trembled a little. I wasn’t wearing a bra underneath, because in the mountains, after working all day in the heat, I took it off as soon as I got to my room. My nipples stood hard instantly as the air in the room touched me, and she noticed.

—Look at you —she said—. They’re already standing up and I haven’t even touched you yet.

She came closer and ran the tips of her fingers over my chest very slowly, drawing circles around the areola without reaching the nipple. I could feel my pulse shooting up and my cunt growing wet beneath my shorts. When she finally pinched me, she did it without warning and hard. She took both nipples between thumb and forefinger at once and twisted them slowly, looking me in the face. I clenched my teeth but didn’t back away. I let her do it.

I let her do it because I wanted her to.

—Say you’re hurting —she ordered—. I want to hear you.

—Oh… my mistress, please…

—Please what? That I stop, or that I keep going?

—Keep going.

She smiled. She squeezed harder, pulled my nipples upward forcing me onto my toes, and I let her do whatever she wanted. When she let go, they were swollen, red, throbbing. She ran her tongue over one of them almost tenderly, for a second, and then bit down. I smothered a cry.

—Now the shorts. And the panties.

I stripped completely in front of her. I had never undressed like that before anyone, with another woman’s hands waiting. She sat on the edge of the bed and made me turn slowly, to see me from the front and the back.

—Open your legs. A little more. Like that.

She slid her hand between my thighs without warning. Her fingers found me soaked. She ran two fingers the full length of my slit, up and down, very slowly, spreading my wetness until I could hear the sticky noise my own body was making. I felt my legs weaken.

—You’re dripping, Clara. Dripping all over. Is this what turned you on? Being treated the way I’m treating you right now?

—Yes, my mistress.

—Say it properly. Use the word.

I swallowed.

—Yes, my mistress. It turns me on when you treat me like this. My cunt is soaked.

—That’s it. Let your mouth show what you are.

She parted my cunt lips with two fingers and touched my clit very slowly, with a precision that made me fold over myself. I pushed my hips without realizing it, seeking more. She pulled her hand away at once.

—No. You don’t make the rules here.

—Sorry, my mistress.

She made me spread my legs again. She touched me again. Every time I moved my hips even half an inch, she pulled her hand away and smacked the inner part of my thigh, on the soft inside where it stings the most. I learned in three or four tries to keep still like a statue while she handled me at her own pace. She slipped one finger into my cunt and left it there, unmoving, looking into my eyes. Then she pulled it out, ran it over her lips, and put it in her mouth.

—Tasty —she said—. Country-girl cunt, delicious.

My face burned. No one had ever spoken to me like that. And yet everything inside me tightened, as if those crude words were touching my clit directly.

She gently pushed me back onto the bed and made me lie on my back, with my legs hanging over the edge. She knelt on the carpet between my thighs and opened me as one opens a book. She looked at my cunt up close, with cruel calm, without touching it yet.

—It’s so pretty, Clara. Pink. All wet inside. And you couldn’t even hold out on your knees for forty minutes.

—Sorry, my mistress.

And then she buried her mouth in me. She licked my clit with a skill I, in my meager previous experience, had never imagined could exist. She went back and forth, changed rhythm, slid her whole tongue inside and then came back up. She sucked my lips, licked me slowly from bottom to top, stopped just before the clit and went back down. She was bringing me right to the edge and keeping me suspended there, not letting me fall. I gripped the bedspread with both hands, arched my back, bit the air to keep from screaming.

—My mistress, please… please…

She lifted her face. Her chin was shining.

—Don’t you dare come without permission. You hear me?

—Yes, my mistress.

She went back down. She slipped two fingers into my cunt and curled the tips upward, searching for a place I didn’t even know I had until that night. She found the exact spot and started rubbing it patiently, without stopping licking my clit. I began to tremble in a way I had never trembled before. My eyes filled with tears. My mouth fell open on its own.

—My mistress, please, let me, please, please…

She pulled away suddenly. Took out her fingers. Wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

—No.

She watched me shake on the bed, with my cunt swollen and throbbing, with my legs open and my nipples marked by her fingers. She looked at me for a long, long moment, and that look was almost worse than the refusal.

—You’re going to learn what it means to wait, Clara.

She stood up. She sat on the edge of the bed and hiked her nightdress up to her waist. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath. She made a two-finger gesture at me.

—Come. You know what I want.

And yes. I knew.

I knelt between her legs and did what she asked. I spread her thighs with the palms of my hands, breathed in her scent for a second before I touched her — expensive soap, mature woman, clean sweat — and ran my tongue very slowly over the whole length of her cunt, from bottom to clit, to find out what my mistress tasted like. She tasted of something between salty and sweet, dense, intimate. I felt my belly contract just from tasting her.

—Slower. No rush. I’m not paying you by the hour right now.

I slowed down. I licked her outer lips one by one, without touching her clit, waiting for the order I knew would come. When she said “there,” I went up and concentrated on the clit with the tip of my tongue, in small circles, tracing the same pattern over and over. I could feel it swelling under my tongue, getting hard and prominent like a little pearl.

—Take it deeper. Your tongue. As much as you can.

I obeyed. I pushed my tongue into her cunt as far as it would go, feeling how she closed around it, how hot and tight she was inside. I pulled it out, pushed it back in, did what I imagined you did with a cock, in and out, and for the first time she let out a full, long moan that raised the skin on my back.

—The fingers too. Two. Don’t be afraid.

I slid two fingers into her cunt while I kept sucking her clit. She was wetter than I was, and she told me so:

—See how you get me, Clara? See how your mistress gets wet with you too?

—Yes, my mistress.

—Well, you’ve earned that. Keep going.

I kept going. I curled my fingers the way she had done before, searching for the same spot she had searched for in me, and when I found it I felt her tremble in my hands. I sucked her clit harder, sucked it all the way into my mouth, dragging my tongue over it as if it were a little candy. I felt her hand close in my hair, pressing my head against her, guiding me without letting me breathe.

—There. There. There… don’t stop, fuck, don’t stop…

I heard my mistress Cristina swear for the first time since I had known her. And that sent a shock through me between the legs that nearly made me come without permission. I clenched my thighs and held on. I kept going. I ate her cunt with everything I had inside me, with all my own frustration, with all the wetness that was running down my thighs.

She came silently, with a long, sustained shudder, squeezing my head between her legs until I could almost not breathe. I felt her cunt throbbing against my mouth, contracting around my fingers several times, soaking my whole face. I stayed still, tongue pressed on her clit, not moving it, until she herself gently pushed me away, because she could no longer bear the contact.

I remained kneeling before her, chin shining, my cunt throbbing so hard it was contracting on its own. I looked into her eyes.

—Look at me —she said, though I was already looking at her.

I looked at her.

—Do you want to come?

—Yes, my mistress. Please.

—Spread your legs.

I did it right there, kneeling. I opened myself with two fingers, showing her how swollen I was, how shiny.

—Touch yourself. Gently. Without coming.

I began to rub my clit with the tip of one finger, barely. She watched me without blinking.

—Faster.

I sped up. A moan slipped out of me.

—More.

I was on the edge. I felt it rising. I looked at her, begging with my eyes.

—Stop.

I stopped. It was as if something were being torn from my body. My eyes filled with real tears. She watched me shake on the floor, with my hand still between my legs, with my cunt throbbing without release, with my breathing broken up.

—That’s your punishment for tonight.

She lay down on the bed and pointed at the floor with a gesture.

—You sleep here. Naked. And don’t you dare touch yourself while I’m sleeping, because I’ll know.

It was August, and it was hot. I lay down on the carpet, on my back, my whole body begging for relief that wasn’t coming. I squeezed my thighs shut hard to try to calm myself and only made it worse. It took me a long time to fall asleep. My body was tense, my cunt throbbing nonstop, and my head was full of questions I didn’t want to answer.

When I finally dropped off, I dreamed about her.

***

That’s how what has been my life ever since began.

Until Miss Elena came back, my mistress Cristina had me at her disposal for days. She humiliated me, punished me, made me kneel in more and more uncomfortable places. She made me eat her cunt in the mornings before coffee, and at night after dinner, seated on the sofa with her legs open while she watched television, barely looking at me, tugging my hair when I slowed down. Sometimes she let me come, if I had pleased her. Other times she kept me three, four days without permission, and I learned a need I didn’t know existed: the need for someone else to decide when my body was allowed to release. I endured all of it because I chose it. Every morning I asked myself whether I wanted to keep going, and every morning the answer was yes.

When Elena returned from Formentera, the dynamic didn’t take long to spread. Her mother didn’t explain the details: she discovered them on her own, in small gestures I couldn’t hide — how I lowered my eyes when Elena spoke to me, how I waited for a sign from her before leaving the room, how I kept a step away unless someone told me otherwise.

Elena took less than two weeks to take advantage of it.

***

Miss Elena is different from her mother. Younger, more impulsive, more capricious in her punishments. If Cristina corrects me with precision — a prolonged silence, a humiliating errand, denying me something precisely when I need it most — Elena does it with enthusiasm, as if she enjoys the process as much as the result.

Her favorite punishments are on the knees: on cold stone floors, on coarse salt, on crumpled aluminum foil. Once she made me write the same sentence three hundred times in a notebook she chose, kneeling on raw lentils, with classical music playing in the background. Another day she forced me to spend three hours with my arms outstretched holding a glass of water in each hand, without spilling a drop.

The first time she touched me, it wasn’t like her mother. There was no ceremony. She was coming back from a singing class, caught me folding towels in the hallway, pushed me against the wall, and slid her hand under my uniform skirt without saying a word. She ripped off my panties in one tug — literally tore them, and those panties stayed torn at the bottom of the basket for days — and shoved two fingers into my cunt up to the hilt, hard, without checking whether I was wet. I wasn’t. I told her so with a gasp.

—Then get wet —she answered, squeezing my throat with her other hand—. Think of my mother if you need to.

And she did it to me like that, against the hallway wall, her fingers going in and out faster and faster, sucking my neck, biting my nipples through my dress. In the end, once I was soaked against my will, she made me come in front of her, looking her in the eyes, moaning her name out loud — “Miss Elena, Miss Elena” — because that was what she demanded. I came trembling all over, my legs giving way, and she pulled her fingers out with a snap and put them in my mouth.

—Suck them. Learn what you taste like.

I sucked them. She wiped her other hand on my dress, contemptuously, and kept going down the hallway as if nothing had happened.

Elena uses me like that. Fast. When she feels like it. She penetrates me with her fingers, with the handles of hairbrushes, with a blue vibrator she keeps in the second drawer of her bedside table and that she sometimes makes me clean with my tongue afterward. She likes doing it in front of the bathroom mirror, forcing me to watch my own face while I come. She likes me to apologize while she does it, even if I haven’t done anything to her. She likes me begging.

And I, to my misfortune and my pleasure, like begging her.

There was a moment, a little over a year ago, when I was almost ready to leave. Elena had been especially cruel for a whole week for no apparent reason. But then Cristina arrived, saw what was happening, and with one look at her daughter made everything stop. She brought me tea, asked me quietly how I was, and put a hand on my shoulder for a few seconds before withdrawing. That night she made me sleep with her, in her bed, held from behind. No sex. Just her body behind mine, her hand on my belly, her breathing on the back of my neck.

That’s why I stayed. Because my mistress Cristina, when it matters, protects me.

***

Three years have passed. I’m still in the Serrano apartment. I still go to La Granja on weekends. I still call Cristina mistress and Elena miss, even though she has also claimed me as her own.

Miss Elena has been traveling a lot since last year: an opera company takes her to different European cities. There are weeks when I barely see her. Those weeks are calmer, though also emptier than I’d care to admit.

I don’t think about leaving. I’ve tried to understand why, and the conclusion I always reach is the same: because this is who I am. It wasn’t imposed on me. I chose it every time I could have chosen something else.

My mistress Cristina sometimes leaves her clothes on my bed: blouses she no longer wears, last year’s coat, linen trousers that had become too small for her. She does it without words, without explanation. That is her way of telling me I’m doing things right.

Elena, on the other hand, never gives me anything. She only leaves me throbbing cunt, torn panties, and a mouth full of her taste.

But that’s another story.