Stranded in the Airport, Seduced in Her Bed

I was twenty-three and had only just started my job when I was sent on my first major trip. Five days in Seattle, representing the marketing consultancy where I’d been for barely eight months. I didn’t want to go: I had a wedding in two months, mine, and the preparations weren’t going to organize themselves. But I couldn’t say no to the first serious assignment they trusted me with.

My name is Valeria. Vali to my friends. Fresh out of university, slim, shoulder-length brown hair, hazel eyes, and brown skin that tans with three hours of sun. I’m five foot five. I’ve never lacked confidence in my body, though I’ve never put it on display either. My legs are what get the most comments: long, well-shaped, always the last to get tired when I went running with Marcos through the park on Sunday mornings.

Marcos. My boyfriend of four years. The man I was going to marry on October twelfth.

The trip went well. The work did too, though it didn’t exactly shine. What came after, didn’t.

***

The storm arrived without warning. When I landed in Denver for my connection, the departures board was already blinking red for half the flights heading east. I waited an hour, then two. A flight attendant wearing an apologetic expression confirmed what we all feared: cancelled until the next day, adverse weather conditions across the entire Midwest corridor. I asked at the desk about hotel rooms: the answer was a polite smile and, “Nothing available within twenty kilometers.”

The airport was organized chaos. Families with sleeping children slumped over backpacks, men in suits with their tie knots half undone, groups of college students who had decided to turn the wait into a party. I walked the terminals for half an hour looking for anywhere to sit and found nothing until I reached a small bar at the back of Terminal D.

Most of the tables were occupied. I stood at the entrance, weighing whether it was worth trying, and that was when I heard the voice.

—Looking for a seat?

I turned around. There was a woman alone at a table for two, with the seat across from her empty. She looked about thirty-five. Dark, straight hair cut to her collarbone, clothes with impeccable tailoring: white blouse, black trousers, jacket folded over the back of the chair. Half a glass of white wine in front of her and a posture that suggested she’d been settled there long enough to be completely at ease.

I sat down. She extended her hand without any ceremony.

—Natalia Fuentes.

—Valeria Ortiz —I replied.

—Wine? —she said, nodding toward the bottle.

—Please.

She filled my glass without waiting for the waitress. It was a cold, dry white that tasted like relief after three hours wandering around the airport. We ordered a second bottle before finishing the first.

We talked for more than an hour. Natalia was a consultant for a private firm based in Washington; she traveled four or five times a month and had grown used to cancellations with a resignation I found almost admirable. I told her about the job, the wedding, the preparations waiting at home. She listened without interrupting, with that particular calm of people who don’t need to fill silences with their own stories. She looked at me a lot. Not in an uncomfortable way, but with a sustained attention that I found hard to ignore.

When we finished the second bottle I stood up more carefully than necessary. The floor had a slight sway I didn’t remember from before.

—I’m going to try to find somewhere to rest —I said—. Even if it’s on the floor.

—Not yet.

She took a plastic card from the inside pocket of her jacket with the logo of an international hotel chain. She held it between two fingers as if it were a playing card.

—I’ve got a room right next door, at the airport hotel. There’s a double bed and a single I’m not going to use. Get some sleep. The earliest flight leaves at seven.

I hesitated. It was eleven at night, I had two bottles of wine in me, and the alternative was sitting on the carpet by Gate C. I said yes.

***

I don’t remember the trip to the hotel very well. I remember the elevator, how I leaned on her arm because the floor was still moving beneath my feet, and how she held me without making any comment. The room was standard: two beds separated by a nightstand, dark wood desk, bathroom at the back on the right.

I went straight into the bathroom. I made it just in time.

When I finished vomiting, I braced myself on the sink and looked at myself in the mirror. My mascara was smeared under my eyes and my hair was plastered to my forehead. I looked up and saw Natalia leaning in the doorway, watching me with an expression that was not pity.

—I’m sorry —I murmured—. I’m not used to drinking like that.

—I’d noticed —she said. It wasn’t a rebuke—. Let’s get you in the shower.

She helped me stand. With efficient movements and without asking permission, she began unbuttoning my jacket. I stayed still. It wasn’t exactly resignation: it was that I couldn’t find reasons to move. She took my clothes off piece by piece and left me in my underwear in front of the tub. Then she turned on the tap.

I screamed when the water fell. It was cold, too cold for what I’d expected, and the stream hit my shoulders with a precision that stole my breath. Natalia gripped my arm hard and kept me under the water until the shudder of heat turned into a shudder of cold. Only then did she turn off the tap and hand me a towel.

She rubbed my back until I warmed up. Then she guided me to the nearest bed, threw the blankets over me, and switched off the bedside lamp.

—Sleep —she said.

I closed my eyes. I heard the bathroom water running again. I fell asleep before it stopped.

***

I don’t know how long I slept. When I felt someone pulling back the blankets, I opened my eyes and saw nothing: the room was completely dark. Only the pressure of the mattress dipping beside me, the weight of someone lying down next to me.

—What are you doing? —I asked.

—Be quiet.

Her hand slid along my thigh, firm, possessive. I protested, but she was stronger and I was still dazed from the wine and exhaustion. She yanked my underwear aside and spread my legs with her other hand, without asking anything. I felt the cold air between my thighs and then the heat of her palm moving over my skin, a slow touch that made my hips arch without meaning to.

—On your knees.

When I didn’t obey the first time, her hand came down on my thigh with a sharp crack that drew a gasp out of me. It wasn’t a violent blow. It was precise, calculated. I sat up unsteadily and ended up kneeling on the mattress, my knees sinking into the sheet and my heart pounding in my throat.

—Hands behind your neck.

I laced them together. My nipples had hardened completely and my cunt was throbbing with absurd urgency, as if my body knew before I did that there was going to be no clean way out of this.

I felt her move between my legs. Her fingers found my clit with obscene certainty, a slow, exact stroke that made me let out a broken moan. Natalia leaned in, put her mouth to my ear, and spoke in a low, dry voice with not a drop of tenderness.

—That’s it. Don’t give me that tough-girl act. I want to hear you properly.

Her hand never rushed. She parted my lips with two fingers, traced them, sliding through my wetness, soaking me until the heat of desire climbed up my belly. She licked a breast through the darkness, then barely bit the tip of the other while she kept working my cunt with cruel patience, in such a precise way that my shoulders kept folding every time she touched exactly where I needed it.

—Please —I said without thinking.

—What do you want?

—More.

—Say it properly.

—I want you to fuck me.

I heard her let out a satisfied breath. Her fingers pulled away, and for a second I felt a fierce, almost painful emptiness. Then her hands shoved me face-down onto the mattress. She lifted my ass high with humiliating firmness and made me open my legs wider. Wetness was running down my thighs.

I heard the sound of her belt unbuckling, the rustle of clothes being lowered, the small thump of the mattress as she knelt behind me. The head of her cock brushed my entrance and sent a full-body shiver through me. It was bigger than I’d imagined in that darkness, hard and hot, and when she pushed into me all at once I lost my breath, with a groan so loud it surprised even me.

—That’s it —she said—. What a tight little cunt you’ve got.

She held me by the waist and started fucking me slowly at first, pushing just enough for me to feel every centimeter. Then she sped up, driving deeper, making my bed move with dull thuds under our weight. The sound of her breathing mixed with the sound of my body taking her: skin on skin, the wet smack of her cock sliding out and in, my own gasps becoming dirtier, more desperate.

She slid a hand under my belly and pressed my clit with two fingers while she kept pounding into me from behind. The orgasm hit me at once, brutal, ripping a scream out of me that was smothered against the pillow. I came shaking, spasms running through my whole back, and she didn’t stop; she kept moving inside me until she made me cry. Not from pain. From an intensity that left me empty and full at the same time.

—Again —she ordered, and gave my ass a sharp slap—. Don’t you dare collapse on me now.

At some point in the night I resisted harder. I don’t remember exactly when, only that I stopped obeying. Then she put me over her lap, immobilized my hips with one hand, and spanked me with her open palm, over and over, until I stopped struggling. The sting of each blow surged between my legs like a hot current, and the more she punished me the wetter I got, until I felt sticky, open, unable to think of anything except the next touch.

Then she laid me back on the mattress on my back. She lowered her mouth down my neck, my collarbone, the line of my belly. She paused at my navel, spread my thighs with both hands, and went down without hurry, licking first over the top, then sliding her tongue between the lips of my cunt until I was trembling. Her mouth was voracious and methodical at once: sucking, licking, returning to my clit, opening me with her fingers while she ate me with a patience that undid me.

—Look at you —she murmured against my skin—. You’re soaked. It’s all running down your ass.

I couldn’t answer. My hands were gripping the sheets, my back arched, my legs trembling open without control. When she pushed two fingers inside me and worked them deep, grazing a spot that made me see stars, I came again with a muffled moan, so hard it hurt my throat. She didn’t let me rest: she kept licking, kept sliding her fingers in and out, taking me back to the edge until she ripped a third orgasm out of me, then a fourth, each one messier than the last.

Then she mounted me again. She grabbed my waist, turned me slightly, and made me lean forward over the pillow. She entered me from behind once more, harder, faster, until I lost any sense of the edges of my body. I still felt the pressure of her cock opening me inside, filling me to the bottom, and she spoke in my ear with short, dirty, precise words, telling me how she wanted to find me, how much she liked my cunt clamping around her cock, how she was going to keep fucking me until she stripped away every last bit of pride.

When she came, there was no ceremony. Just one last thrust, deeper, and her breathing breaking at the same time as I felt the heat of her load filling me inside, thick, heavy, sliding in warm pulses that left me trembling. I stayed still, panting, my body still shaking with the remnants of orgasm and the feeling of having been opened in a way I was never going to forget.

I fell into the deepest sleep I can remember.

***

The next morning, the bed beside me was empty and perfectly made. On the desk there was a coffee machine voucher card and nothing else. No note. No phone number.

I showered, dressed, and took the 7:15 flight.

During the four-hour flight I tried to think about Marcos, the wedding, the preparations waiting at home. I couldn’t. Every time I tried, my mind went back to the darkness of that room, to the pressure of her fingers, to the way my body had responded before I’d finished deciding whether I wanted it to. I looked at my hands in my lap and didn’t recognize the person who wore them.

I called Marcos from the airport when I landed. I told him the trip had gone well. I didn’t tell him what had happened in Denver.

***

I called off the wedding eleven days later. I gave Marcos back the ring in the same café where he’d proposed to me, three years earlier. He asked if there was someone else. I told him no. It was true and not true at the same time, and I couldn’t find a way to explain the difference to him.

Ten days later I had an argument with my boss over something I would have let go under normal circumstances. I didn’t let anything go. They fired me that same afternoon.

The envelope arrived two days later.

White envelope, no return address, my name written by hand. Inside was a plane ticket to Washington for the following Friday and a paper with an address in the northwest of the city. Nothing else. No phone, no explanations.

I spent two days staring at that paper on the dining table. Then I called my landlord and told her I was leaving the apartment. I closed my bank accounts. I sold the car to my younger brother for half what it was worth. I left my clothes in bags beside the dumpster on the corner.

On the day of the flight I packed the essentials into a small backpack: documents, a change of clothes, some underwear. Nothing more. I didn’t need more.

***

I arrived in Washington on a Friday in July. Humid heat, the kind that sticks clothes to your body the second you step out of the airport. I took a taxi to the address on the paper.

It was a colonial brick house on a quiet, tree-lined street. Neat front garden, worn stone steps, black lacquered door. I rang the bell.

Natalia opened it. She was wearing a white linen shirt and her hair was tied up in a bun that hadn’t tried to be perfect. She looked me up and down, unhurriedly, as if she had all the time in the world to assess what was standing at her door.

—You’re on time —she said.

She didn’t invite me in yet. She waited.

—Before I come in —I said—, I need you to promise me something.

She lifted an eyebrow. Waited in silence.

I took a breath.

—When you get tired of me, I want you to pass me on to someone else. Don’t just let me go. I want to keep belonging to someone who knows what they want.

Natalia studied me for a few seconds. Then she smiled: a slow smile, with no surprise in it, as if she’d already known since the night at the airport.

—All right —she said—. When that moment comes, there’ll be a selection. You’ll be there. I’ll choose someone who knows how to appreciate you, with all the terms laid out on the table. No sentimentality. —She paused—. Understood?

—Understood.

She stepped aside.

I crossed the threshold.