My Stepdaughter Taught Me What I Never Imagined I Could Feel

My name is Gabriela and I’m forty-two, though nobody gives me that age. I married Rodrigo four years ago: one of those businessmen who always have the phone glued to their ear and a suitcase ready by the door. Divorced, two children. A nineteen-year-old daughter, Valentina, and a twenty-six-year-old boy who lives in another city. When Valentina came to live with us three months ago, I thought the hardest thing would be living with a teenager. I was wrong.

I’m blonde, with shoulder-length hair, light eyes, and a figure that still holds up well in the mirror. I’m not perfect, but I’m certainly not lacking people who look at me when I cross a room. Valentina has a different kind of beauty: brunette, warm skin, dark hair down to her waist, and a figure that makes people turn around in the street without meaning to. Nineteen years old, a body that seemed drawn with a ruler, and black eyes that always seemed to be evaluating something.

She came to live with us because her mother caught her in her room with two people at once. Her mother didn’t take it well. She sent her to Rodrigo so he could straighten her out, and Rodrigo, who traveled more than he was home, delegated that task to me. Over the following weeks we grew closer little by little. She told me things: that she liked men and women, that she preferred women because they knew what they were doing, because it was like looking into a mirror that understands exactly where to touch. I listened without judging her. I suppose that’s why she started telling me more.

What I’m going to tell happened the weekend Rodrigo went to Milan for three days.

Before he left, Valentina had asked permission for a friend to stay over for the weekend. Rodrigo flatly refused. He said she was grounded, that this house wasn’t the place for her stories, and he told me to make sure she served her punishment. Valentina cried. She told him the friend was perfectly normal, that there was nothing to watch. But Rodrigo had already taken his suitcase and left for the airport.

I spent the afternoon taking care of things around the house. As night fell, I realized I hadn’t seen Valentina come out of her room in hours. I made her a sandwich and a glass of juice and went upstairs.

I knocked twice before opening the door. She was lying on the bed, her hair tousled over the pillow and her gaze lost on the ceiling. She was wearing a tight turquoise top and matching panties, both lace. The fabric gleamed a little against her brown skin. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen a woman in lingerie, but something about that image made me pause a second longer than necessary in the doorway.

“Are you here to watch me?” she said without moving.

“I brought you dinner,” I replied, setting the tray on the bedside table.

I turned to leave and she said:

“Don’t go.”

I sat down on the small sofa by the window. She propped herself up in bed, ate half the sandwich without saying anything, and looked at me. It was a slow look, the kind that travels from top to bottom without trying to hide it. Then she set the plate aside and asked:

“Do you like what you see?”

I didn’t know what to answer. I think I didn’t answer at all, because she was already getting up and walking toward the sofa. She sat down beside me, very close. She smelled of coconut shampoo and something sweeter I couldn’t identify.

“Can you hug me?” she asked. “I feel really lonely.”

Her eyes were still a little wet from crying earlier. I hugged her. At first it was a normal hug, the kind you give when someone is sad. But the moment her arm went around my waist and her cheek rested on my shoulder, I noticed my nipples hardening beneath my dress. I wasn’t wearing a bra. She noticed too.

She lifted her head and looked at me closely. Too closely.

“Do you want to play a game?” she said. “There’s one that calms me down when I’m like this.”

“Which one?” I asked.

She told me in a low voice, with a voice pretending to be smaller and more innocent than it really was. The game was simple: she would play the baby and I would be the mother. I know it sounds absurd. I know I should have said no. But the way she proposed it clouded my thoughts completely, as if someone had switched off a circuit somewhere in my head and left only the heat that was beginning to gather between my legs switched on.

I said yes.

I stayed sitting there without moving. Valentina settled on my lap, her head resting against my chest. In a small, fake voice she asked for my breast. Before I could react, she slid the strap of my dress down with two fingers. My breast was exposed. My nipple was fully erect, and she circled it slowly with her lips, without hurry, as if she had all the time in the world.

I closed my eyes.

I don’t know when I started moaning. It was involuntary, something that came out on its own. She intensified the pressure and with her free hand pulled the other strap down and began stroking the other breast with a skill I wasn’t expecting. Her fingers knew exactly what to do: how hard to squeeze, how far to glide, when to stop just before the sensation became too intense. She licked me, sucked the tip with obscene patience, and I was already panting like a fucking whore, my cunt burning inside my clothes.

She stopped for a moment and asked if I’d ever been with a woman before. I said no. I tried to cover myself, a silly reflex, but she gently moved my hands away and came closer to my mouth.

The kiss was long, wet, with real tongue. Her tongue slid in slowly and her hands went back to my breasts, kneading them, pinching my nipples with a precision that made me arch. My hands were on her back, stroking her without really knowing what to do with them, following instinct. The skin I touched was soft and warm, and I was completely out of control, breathing in broken gasps, my cunt throbbing and soaking wet between my thighs.

She stood up and took my hand. She led me to the bed. Halfway there she stopped and took off the rest of my dress. She was looking at me with a calm that was almost disconcerting: no rush, no nerves, like someone who knows exactly what is about to happen. She made a slow turn around me and said in a low voice that she had thought about this more than once.

Every word she said was like pouring gasoline on something that had already been burning for a while.

She gently pushed me onto the bed. She lay on top of me and began kissing my neck, my collarbone, my breasts. She alternated between mouth and hands without pause, creating a rhythm that made it hard to tell where one sensation ended and the next began. Her lips moved slowly down my belly, with a patience that drove me mad. She parted my legs with her knee, not with force, but with a determination that left me completely exposed.

When she reached my thong, she slid her fingers under one side of the fabric and touched me. The contact was sudden and precise at once. I let out a cry that she cut off with a kiss on the mouth.

“Easy,” she murmured against my lips. “Nobody can hear you.”

She took off my underwear and went down on me. Her tongue started working with a technique I didn’t know existed, or maybe I did know it but had never experienced it like that. She licked slowly at first, opening me with her mouth, licking from my entrance to my clit, exploring each fold with brutal precision, and then she narrowed in until I was no longer able to think about anything except what I was feeling. She sucked my clit, drove her tongue deep, slid two fingers inside me and moved them with a perfect rhythm until the orgasm exploded in my belly. I came with an intensity that left me breathless, my thighs shaking and my hands tangled in the sheets, moaning her name in broken gasps while she kept sucking me as if she wanted to wring out every last drop of sanity.

She lifted her head and looked up at me with a smile that was half satisfaction, half challenge.

“Now you,” she said.

***

She took off her top and panties and sat on my face. At first I wasn’t quite sure what to do, so I did what I had learned from her in the last few minutes: start slowly, pay attention to the reactions, let the other person’s body show me the way. Her hips began moving in a rhythm that told me I was on the right track. I opened my mouth, licked her from bottom to top, parted her lips with my tongue and went into her with hunger. The taste was strong, salty and sweet at the same time, and I felt her tremble when I found the exact spot. I worked my fingers in while I kept using my tongue, in and out of her soaking cunt, listening to her breath break into short moans. She started moaning hard, gripping the headboard, grinding her ass against my mouth with delicious desperation.

She came twice before pulling away. The second time made her arch and squeeze her thighs around my face, and I kept licking her until she forced me to stop.

We lay there in silence for a while, still breathing hard. Outside, the night was completely dark and quiet. At some point she turned toward me and rested her head on my shoulder, just like at the beginning, but different in every other way.

“See?” she said. “I knew you’d do it well.”

“I didn’t have any evidence to believe that,” I replied.

She laughed. A small, genuine laugh, without the calculation from before.

“Gabriela,” she said after a moment, “this can’t just happen once.”

I didn’t know what to answer. It was a statement disguised as a question, or the other way around. The truth is I didn’t want it to be just once either, and that was what scared me the most: not the act itself, not what it meant for my marriage or for living with Rodrigo, but that at that moment, lying in my stepdaughter’s bed in the middle of the night, the idea that it would never happen again seemed like the worst possible option.

“No,” I said at last. “It can’t just happen once.”

Valentina smiled without saying anything else and closed her eyes. I stayed staring at the ceiling for a long while before getting up and going back to my room.

That night I barely slept. Not because of guilt or regret, but because every time I closed my eyes, my body remembered everything with a precision that wouldn’t let me rest. It was as if something that had been asleep for a long time had suddenly decided to wake up, without warning, and no longer had any intention of falling back asleep.

The next morning, Rodrigo called from Milan to ask if everything was okay. I told him yes, everything was calm, that Valentina was serving her punishment without any trouble.

I wasn’t lying entirely.

The weekend that followed was the longest and the shortest I can remember. Rodrigo would be back Monday. In the meantime, Valentina and I had the house to ourselves. We didn’t talk much about what had happened. There was no need. There was a silent understanding between us, a new layer in our living arrangement that existed beneath the ordinary conversations, the meals, the television playing in the background.

On Saturday afternoon I went to the supermarket alone. As I pushed the cart down the aisles, I caught myself thinking about how her hair smelled, the exact weight of her hips, the sound she made when I did something she liked. I stopped in front of the yogurts for a full minute without picking up any.

This makes no sense, I thought.

And then I thought it didn’t really matter that much either.

On Sunday afternoon, when the sun was beginning to set, Valentina appeared in the kitchen doorway. She was wearing that same turquoise top from the first day, and she looked at me with that expression of hers, the one that already knows the answer before asking the question.

“Do we play again?” she asked.

I turned off the tap. I dried my hands with the kitchen towel. I looked at her for a moment, as if there were still something to decide.

“Yes,” I said.

And I headed toward the stairs in front of her.