Stranded at the Airport, Surrendered to Her

I was twenty-two when I took the first major work trip of my career. Six exact weeks before my wedding. A presentation in Valencia that wasn’t the triumph my boss had expected, but neither was it the disaster I had feared. I was heading back to Bilbao feeling like someone who finishes a match in a draw: nobody wins, nobody loses, everything stays the same.

Until the connecting flight at Barajas disappeared from the screen.

First “delayed.” Then “canceled.” A storm had shut down the northern airspace and there would be no more flights until the next morning. The airline counters were surrounded by furious people, and when I finally reached the front of the line, the girl in uniform looked at me with an apologetic face and told me that every hotel in the area was full.

My name is Sofía Ramírez. Sofi, to my friends. I’m five foot five, with shoulder-length dark hair and gray eyes I inherited from my Asturian grandmother. I’m slim, I’ve been running on Sundays for years, and I have the legs of someone who runs on Sundays. At that moment I also had an engagement ring on my finger and a boyfriend in Bilbao waiting for me with half the wedding preparations still unresolved.

None of that did me any good that night.

I wandered around the terminal for a while with my carry-on trailing behind me and my shoulders sinking lower and lower. The airport was full of people stranded just like me: families with crying children, executives with phones glued to their ears, retirees staring at the screens with the expression of people who couldn’t quite understand what had happened.

I found a small bar at the back of the terminal. Every table was taken except one, and at that table there was only one person: a red-haired woman in her thirties with a half-finished glass of white wine and a closed book in front of her. She looked up when I approached.

“Looking for a seat?” she asked. Her voice was calm, like someone who isn’t in a hurry for anything.

“If you don’t mind,” I said.

“Not at all. Sit down.”

I ordered a white wine when the waitress came by. The red-haired woman pointed to her glass and said to bring another bottle, since she was already halfway through hers. The waitress nodded.

“Elena Vidal,” she said, extending her hand.

“Sofía Ramírez.”

“Bilbao?” she guessed from my accent.

“Bilbao,” I confirmed.

She smiled. She had a calm smile that didn’t promise anything in particular, but also didn’t lie. She turned out to be a lawyer at a firm in Madrid. She was traveling to London for work and had also been caught by the storm. We talked about the situation, about the airport chaos, about how absurd it is to build an entire civilization of flights and have a storm bring it all crashing down in a matter of hours.

I told her about the presentation in Valencia and she listened without interrupting me, which already counts for a lot. By the time we finished the second glass, the bar had gotten louder and I felt considerably better than I had an hour earlier.

“Do you have somewhere to sleep?” Elena asked at one point, with no special tone in her voice.

“They say there isn’t a room left anywhere.”

“I have a suite in the terminal hotel.” She took a card from her jacket pocket and set it on the table. “There are two beds. It makes no sense for you to spend the night in a terminal chair.”

I hesitated. She was a stranger. We’d been talking for less than two hours, and that didn’t change the fact that I didn’t know her at all. But the airport was packed, I was sleepy, and I had wine in me, and she hadn’t given any sign of being dangerous. Quite the opposite.

“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll take it.”

***

The hotel was one of those functional, expensive places that serve exactly what they’re for: sleeping a few hours between one flight and the next. Gray carpet, a generic painting on the wall, two double beds with decent mattresses.

I never got to see them properly.

By the time we entered the room, the wine weighed on me more than I had calculated. I sat on the edge of the bed intending to take off my shoes, and the next thing I knew I was kneeling in the bathroom with my forehead resting on the toilet.

Elena appeared in the doorway without saying a word. When I looked up, I found her watching me with an expression that wasn’t pity exactly. It was something harder to decipher.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m not used to drinking.”

“I figured,” she said, calm. “Can you stand up?”

She helped me to my feet. She took me to the shower, turned on the tap, and put me under the cold water with my clothes on. I screamed. The spray was icy and jolted me all at once, but she held me by the arm and didn’t let me out until I stopped shaking from the wine and started shaking from the cold.

When she turned off the tap she wrapped me in a towel and rubbed my back hard. Then she helped me out of the wet clothes and put me in bed wearing one of her T-shirts, which was two sizes too big on me.

I fell asleep almost before she switched off the light.

***

I don’t know how long I slept. Long enough for the alcohol to wear off a little, not long enough for my head to stop spinning.

I felt her weight on the bed when she climbed in.

She’s cold, I thought. She showered and she’s cold and she’s gotten into my bed because she must be cold.

Her hand slid over my hip and kept going under the borrowed T-shirt, open palm on the bare skin of my belly. I wasn’t wearing panties: she herself had taken off my wet clothes and hadn’t put anything underneath.

I protested. Or tried to protest. I said something with the thick voice of sleep and wine, and she answered with a light but firm pressure that made it clear she knew exactly what she was doing.

“Stay still,” she said. That was all.

Her hand found the inside of my thigh and squeezed, marking me with her fingers. My lungs tightened.

“I’m heterosexual,” I said, and it sounded more ridiculous out loud than inside my head.

“I know,” she replied. “And in ten minutes you’re going to be coming in my mouth. Both things can be true at the same time.”

She didn’t stop. Her hand moved up, slid through the pubic hair, and her fingers parted my lips without any ceremony. She found me wet. I didn’t want to be wet and yet I was, and she noticed and let out a short laugh against my neck.

“Look at you,” she murmured. “Mouth protesting and your cunt saying something else.”

I closed my thighs. She slid her knee between them and opened them again without effort, like someone unfolding a napkin. Two of her fingers ran over me from the entrance to the clit, spreading my own moisture with calculated slowness. They traced circles around the hood, barely grazing it, until the first gasp slipped out between my clenched teeth.

“There it is,” she said. “There it is.”

There was something in the way she touched me that didn’t resemble anything I had felt before. She wasn’t clumsy or impatient. She was methodical. Like someone who knows a territory and crosses it without hurry because she knows where every path leads. Her fingers returned to the same point again and again, pressing a little harder, withdrawing before I could finish arching my back, forcing me to rise in search of them.

I resisted. I closed my knees. She opened them. I asked her to stop. She didn’t stop. At some point I insisted harder and she gave me a short, dry slap that cut the words off in my mouth.

I went still.

I should get up and leave, I thought. I should grab my suitcase and get the hell out right now.

But I didn’t leave.

Two of her fingers sank into me all at once, all the way in, and the moan that escaped me didn’t feel like mine. She moved them slowly, curling them upward, searching for and finding a point I hadn’t even known existed. With her thumb she kept working the clit, steady pressure, tight circles, while the other fingers fucked me in a rhythm that rose and fell without giving me any respite.

“Listen to how you sound,” she said near my ear. “Listen to how soaked you are. You can hear it from here.”

You could hear it. I heard it. The obscene splashing of her fingers going in and out, my broken breathing, a sob that came from nowhere near pain. Shame rose through my chest at the same time pleasure rose through my legs, and the two met in my throat.

“I’m going to…” I began to say.

“I know. Come. Now.”

And I came. On her fingers, with my hips lifted off the mattress and my hands clutching the sheet, shaking in a way I had never done with anyone. She didn’t pull her fingers out. She kept them inside, still, feeling how my cunt closed and opened around her knuckles, and she watched my face while I came with a calm, almost professional attention.

The shame arrived at the same time as the first orgasm, the two mingled until I couldn’t tell one from the other.

“Now you’re going to kneel,” she said. “And you’re going to eat me until I tell you to stop.”

And I knelt.

***

The night was long. Longer than any previous night of my life.

Elena lay on her back, opened her shirt, and pulled her panties down to her knees with one hand, never taking her eyes off mine. Her tits were small and very white, with pink, erect nipples, and a triangle of reddish hair between her thighs that I had never seen up close on any woman before.

“Come here,” she said, grabbing me by the nape of the neck. “Slowly. Learn.”

She lowered my head between her legs. I had never done this before. I didn’t know where to put my tongue or how to breathe or what to do with my hands. She guided me with her palm in my hair, lifting and lowering me, setting the rhythm, squeezing when she wanted more pressure and easing up when I needed to come up for air.

“Tongue flat,” she murmured. “Lick from bottom to top. Like that. Again. When you get to the clit, don’t bite it, suck it. Take it into your mouth like it’s a little cock. That’s it.”

I tasted her. She tasted different from me, denser, more adult. I licked her inner lips, slid my tongue between them, felt her give way under my mouth and grip my hair harder. When I found the clit and sucked it the way she told me to, I heard her let out a low grunt from deep in her chest.

“Like that, fuck,” she said. “Like that, girl. You learn fast.”

She put two of her fingers into my mouth alongside her own, so I’d understand how tongue and fingers combined, and then she guided my right hand to her entrance. I slipped one finger in, then another, clumsy at first, afraid of hurting her. She corrected the angle, bent my fingers upward, set the same rhythm she had used on me.

“Keep sucking. Don’t stop. Not even if I come. Especially if I come.”

She came four or five minutes later, with her thighs clamped around my head and one hand fisted in my hair so hard that tears sprang to my eyes. I felt the contraction around my fingers, the extra wetness running down my wrist, the tremor in her hips. I didn’t stop, as she’d told me. I kept sucking her swollen clit until she herself had to yank my face away because she couldn’t take it anymore.

She kept me in that position a little longer, with my hands crossed behind my neck and my knees spread on the mattress, while she touched me and I gradually, almost imperceptibly, stopped resisting, like someone shedding ballast without noticing.

At one point I tried to change position without permission and she put me over her lap, face down, ass up, and spanked me with her open palm. Ten, fifteen, twenty times, alternating cheeks, unhurried, waiting between strikes for me to breathe. My eyes filled with tears and I let out the air I’d been holding for what felt like forever. Between spanks, her hand would drop to check between my legs, and every time she found me wetter, running down my thighs.

“Look at that,” she said. “The more I hit you, the more your cunt gets soaked. See what a slut you are, and you didn’t even know it.”

She didn’t say anything else. She didn’t need to.

Then she laid me on my back, opened my legs all the way by placing my heels against my ass, and knelt between my thighs. She looked for a moment without touching me, like someone admiring something she had just won.

“You’re completely open,” she said. “I don’t even have to part you with my fingers. I can see your whole cunt.”

Her mouth moved down my belly, continued along my hips, reached the insides of my thighs. She bit me right where the thigh meets the groin, a short bite that made me jerk, and then her tongue settled on my clit and didn’t leave. I closed my eyes. Not because I wanted to avoid what was coming, but because I didn’t want to see my body give in like that, with such ease, to a woman I didn’t know at all.

Her tongue worked in slow circles, very soft at first, not letting me get ahead of her. I moved my hips looking for her and she pulled back a few millimeters so I couldn’t reach her. When she finally gave in and sucked my clit whole, taking it into her mouth, I’d already been panting like a bitch for five minutes. She pushed her tongue deep inside, pulled it out, went back up to the clit, down to the entrance, all in a pattern that seemed designed to keep me right at the edge without letting me cross it.

She brought me to orgasm two more times with her mouth. The first caught me by surprise: a hard suck on the clit and two fingers going in all the way to the bottom, and I came screaming into the back of my own hand. The second time I clutched the sheets and groaned into the pillow with my teeth clenched, and I didn’t know whether what I felt was pleasure or relief or something I still didn’t have a name for. I felt my own flow run down my perineum, soaking the sheet beneath my ass, and she licked that too without the slightest disgust, moving from my anus to my clit with a broad, hot tongue that made me shudder all over.

“One more,” she said. And her mouth went back down.

When she finished, she wrapped me in her arm, laid my cheek against her chest, and let me sleep. I was still trembling, my cunt swollen and the skin of my ass hot from the spanking, and I fell asleep smelling her neck and the mixed scent of the two of us on the sheets.

***

In the morning the bed was empty.

I showered, got dressed in the clothes from the day before, and took the first flight back to Bilbao. For the two-hour flight I didn’t speak to anyone. I looked out the window at the clear sky over the coast and tried to sort what had happened into some familiar category. I couldn’t find one that fit.

I got home. I hugged my boyfriend. I had dinner with him as if nothing had happened.

Four days later, I gave him back the ring.

I didn’t give him much of an explanation. I told him I couldn’t go on, that I was sorry, that it wasn’t his fault. All of that was true, even if it wasn’t the whole truth. The whole truth was that ever since that night in the hotel, it had become impossible for me to imagine myself married to him or to anyone even remotely like him.

A week later I got fired. The Valencia presentation had been worse than I thought, and my boss had been waiting for an excuse for some time. The argument was long and shouty, and when I left the office I realized I didn’t care nearly as much as I should have.

I spent three days without leaving the apartment. I didn’t call anyone and I didn’t answer the phone. I ate whatever was in the fridge and slept too much and not enough.

***

The envelope arrived on the eighth day.

No sender. My name written by hand in tight, very vertical letters. Inside there was a train ticket to Madrid and a folded paper with an address in the Salamanca district.

I didn’t tell anyone. I packed a small suitcase, returned the apartment keys to my landlady, left most of my things unpacked. I closed the bank account and kept the cash in the inner pocket of my backpack.

I arrived in Madrid on a Tuesday afternoon with the sky overcast and the smell of recent rain on the pavement. The address was an early twentieth-century building with an intercom and a cage elevator. I rang the bell for the fifth floor.

Elena opened the door after a moment and looked at me from the threshold. She was wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow and her hair loose. She looked exactly as I remembered her.

I stopped before going in.

“First I need you to promise me something,” I said.

“What?”

I took a deep breath.

“When you get tired of me, promise you’ll pass me on to someone. That you won’t just leave me out on the street.”

Elena tilted her head slightly. There was something in her eyes that could have been surprise or could have been satisfaction. Or both at once.

“I promise,” she said. “When that moment comes, I’ll find someone who deserves you. I’ll do it calmly and carefully, the way I do things. And you’ll be present when I close the deal.”

I nodded.

I crossed the threshold and she closed the door behind me.