The Artist Taught Me What I Didn’t Know How to Desire

Valentina Suárez had spent two decades doing exactly what she wanted. You could tell in every corner of her studio: the unfinished canvases leaning against the wall, the jars of pigment open on the worktable, the dark velvet armchair where she told me to sit without asking whether I wanted to sit. She was the kind of woman accustomed to people doing what she decided, and the curious thing was that it didn’t feel like an imposition so much as a relief.

I was twenty-three and had a recorder in my hand.

“So you work with ‘Ámbar Revista’?” she asked while she put the water on to boil.

“More or less. I’m working on my thesis and the editor let me use the magazine’s credentials to get this interview.” I noticed my voice sounded too formal, too much like a student afraid of making a bad impression.

“At least honest.” She turned from the counter and held my gaze a moment longer than the situation required. “Have you read anything of mine?”

“Everything I could find. Your installations in the ‘Bodies Without Permission’ cycle are the most interesting thing I’ve seen in years. Though some critics consider them provocative without purpose.”

“Critics consider many things.” She smiled faintly, without fully parting her lips. “And you?”

I fell silent for a second. That question wasn’t in my notes.

“I think you know exactly what you’re doing.”

Valentina brought the coffee, set it down on the coffee table, and sat opposite me with that calm people have when they don’t need to fill silence with words. She watched me while I adjusted the recorder, checked my notes, crossed and uncrossed my legs looking for a posture that didn’t exist.

“Your thesis is about erotic art as political discourse,” she said, quoting what I’d written to her in the introductory email. “Have you had experiences in that area?”

“With erotic art?”

“With eroticism. The art comes after.”

I didn’t answer right away. She didn’t wait for me to.

***

She got up from the armchair with that effortless fluidity people have when they’re never in a hurry, went to an old cabinet in the corner, and came back with an unlabeled cardboard box. She put it on the table between us and opened it with the same naturalness as someone opening a family photo album.

They were photos. But not exactly family ones.

The first were artistic in the most conventional sense: black-and-white nudes, careful composition, studied lighting. Elegant, almost academic. But as Valentina turned the album pages, the images became more explicit. She appeared in many of them, recognizable even when the framing was deliberately partial. In one she had her legs spread on a wooden chair and her fingers sunk between the lips of her cunt, glossy with her own juices. In another, two women were licking her tits at the same time while she grabbed their hair. In another she was on her knees with a huge cock shoved down her throat and tearful eyes looking at the photographer.

I felt heat rush to my face and a throb between my legs that I didn’t know how to hide.

“Is there any kind of digital manipulation?” I asked. It was the only thing I could think to say.

“None.” She looked straight at me. “I’m a body artist. Not a computer artist. Everything you see in those photos was done to me, or by me, exactly as you’re seeing it.”

We reached a photograph where Valentina was holding something in her hands that at first I mistook for a sculpture. When I understood it was an erect dick, a real thick cock sticking out of a body cut by the frame, I felt the heat that had started in my face slide down my neck to my chest and keep going until it soaked my panties.

“I call that one ‘The Argument,’” she said. “Does it seem exaggerated to you?”

“No,” I answered. And it was true.

The silence that followed was different from the previous one. Denser. Valentina closed the album slowly, set it aside, and kept looking at me with an expression that wasn’t exactly a question but was waiting for an answer.

“Does talking about this make you nervous?” she asked.

“A little.”

“Just talking?”

I looked away toward the window. Outside was a normal street with normal cars and people going to completely normal places. I looked back at her.

“Not just talking,” I admitted.

“Are you wet?”

The question landed so directly I lost my breath for a moment. I nodded without opening my mouth. She smiled faintly.

“Good. That’s information too.”

***

I don’t know exactly how the transition happened. It was gradual, like when a song’s volume rises so slowly you can’t point to the exact moment it stopped being a whisper. Valentina stood, went to the cabinet again, and this time came back with something different. She set it on the table with the same ease as before.

It was a black vibrator, thick, bigger than I’d expected, with a slightly curved tip and a wide base. She put it there, between the photo album and the coffee cups, like it was a completely ordinary object.

“Tell me what you feel when you look at it,” she said.

“Valentina...”

“I’m not asking you to do anything. Just to tell me what you feel.”

I licked my lips. My throat was dry and my panties were soaked.

“Curiosity,” I said. “And something that isn’t exactly fear but is a lot like it.”

“That’s anticipation.” She sat beside me on the armchair, not opposite me as before. So close I could smell her perfume, something woody and something citrusy I couldn’t have named. “Anticipation is the most honest part of desire. It happens before the brain interferes and complicates everything. Can you picture it inside you?”

“Yes.”

“Say it.”

“I can picture it inside me,” I whispered, and I felt my cunt clench on its own as I said the words out loud.

Her hand found mine on the armrest. She didn’t take my hand all at once, just brushed her fingertips over my knuckles slowly, from knuckles to wrist. From the wrist she moved up my forearm, my elbow, my bare arm, until she reached my shoulder. It was such a slow path I could have stopped it a thousand times.

I didn’t stop it.

“I haven’t done this before,” I said.

“With a woman, or with anyone?”

“With a woman. Not much with men either. Two, three times, and always awkward.”

“Has no one ever made you come?”

I shook my head, embarrassed. She laughed softly, without mockery.

“Then today you’re going to come so many times you’ll lose count.”

I turned to look at her. She was very close. She had dark, almost black eyes, and those lines around her mouth that come from a life spent smiling a lot. When she leaned toward me, she didn’t do it abruptly. She let me decide.

I decided not to move.

Her lips brushed mine barely, as if checking something. Then she pulled back a centimeter and waited. I closed that centimeter and she slid her tongue into my mouth with a slowness that made me moan against her teeth. She tasted like coffee and something darker, more adult. She sucked my lower lip, bit it, pushed her tongue back in deep, and I let myself fall against her, no longer able to hide how badly I wanted her.

***

What followed was neither awkward nor rushed. Valentina knew exactly what she was doing, and I let myself be guided with a mix of nerves and something very close to relief, like finally saying out loud something you’ve been keeping in for weeks and the world doesn’t end.

She took off my jacket calmly. She slid her fingers along my neck, my shoulders, and I learned the rhythm of her hands, which were never hurried but never stopped either. There was something in that contrast that felt completely new to me and, at the same time, like the most natural thing in the world.

“Close your eyes,” she said.

I closed them.

I felt her lips on my neck, then on my collarbone, then lower. Her hands opened the buttons of my blouse one by one, without clumsiness. When she reached the last one, she opened my blouse like someone opening a gift and looked at my tits covered by the cheap lace bra I’d put on that morning without thinking I’d be showing it to anyone.

“So pretty,” she murmured, and ran her tongue along the edge of my bra before sliding it down with two fingers.

My nipples hardened in the studio’s cool air. She gave a soft laugh and took them into her mouth one after the other. She sucked my right nipple hungrily, barely biting it with her teeth, tugging on it until a sharp moan escaped me that I couldn’t control. Then the left. She alternated them, licked them, squeezed them with her free hand while she kept sucking the other. My hands were clenched on the edge of the armchair because I didn’t know where to put them.

“Put your hands in my hair,” she said without letting go of my nipple.

I obeyed. I sank my fingers into her thick black hair and pressed her against my tits, and she sucked harder, more eagerly, with a wet sound that made me clamp my thighs together searching for friction.

“Tell me if you want me to stop,” she said against my skin.

“Don’t stop. Don’t stop, please.”

I lay back in the armchair when she told me to with a slight pressure on my shoulders. She took off my shoes one by one and then moved up my stockings with a measured slowness that set my whole body tense without my being able to help it. She spread my legs with both hands, without asking, and looked at my skirt bunched up and my soaked panties with a proprietary smile.

“Look at you,” she said. “It’s showing right through.”

She ran her index finger over the fabric, pressing lightly against my cunt. The cloth gave way, sank between my lips, and I lifted my hips seeking more pressure, unable to stop myself.

“Breathe,” she said.

I breathed.

She hooked her fingers into my panties and slid them down my legs slowly, never taking her eyes off my face. When she had them in her hand she brought them to her nose, smelled them with complete shamelessness, and smiled.

“Delicious,” she said, and threw them to the floor.

She knelt on the rug between my open legs. She looked at my cunt up close, with the same attention she gave her canvases, and I felt my face burn with shame and want at the same time. No one had ever looked at me this closely. No one had ever really looked at me.

“You’re gorgeous down here,” she murmured. “Pink, tight, everything all snug. Can I?”

“Yes,” I gasped.

She opened the lips of my cunt with two fingers and ran her whole tongue from bottom to top, from my asshole to my clit, in one long hungry stroke. I arched completely. I screamed. I didn’t recognize my own voice.

Valentina laughed against my cunt and went back down. She started licking me with a patience that was almost cruel, sucking my lips one by one, pushing her tongue inside me, pulling it out to lick above, to suck my clit with the tip of her tongue, to sink back in again. She ate me like she had all the time in the world, as if there were nothing more important in the studio or the neighborhood or the city than my wet cunt pressed against her mouth.

“Please,” I moaned, not knowing what I was asking her for.

She sucked my clit harder, trapping it between her lips and flicking it with the tip of her tongue, and at the same time she slid one finger into me. Then two. She curled them inside, searching for a spot I didn’t even know existed, and when she found it and pressed there I screamed so hard the vibration of my own voice surprised me.

“There,” I stammered. “There, there, there, don’t stop.”

She moved her fingers faster, in and out with an obscene wet sound, while she kept sucking my clit without a pause. I had her head gripped with both hands and was coming before I even realized I was coming. I came in her mouth trembling, screaming nonsense, with my legs clamped around her neck, and she didn’t move away even for a second: she stayed there, sucking me slowly, swallowing what came gushing out of my cunt, until I stopped shaking.

“One,” she said, lifting her head with her mouth shining.

She took the vibrator from the table and showed it to me. She ran it over my lips, smearing me with my own taste, and I stuck out my tongue without thinking and licked it.

“Such a good student,” she murmured. “Want it?”

I nodded, speechless.

She dragged it down my neck, over my tits still hard, over my stomach, until she rested the tip against my hypersensitive clit. I shuddered all over at the first contact. She switched it to the lowest speed and began moving it in slow circles around my clit, not penetrating me yet, watching my face while I clenched my teeth.

“Open wider,” she ordered.

I spread my legs as wide as I could. She lowered the vibrator to the entrance of my cunt and pushed it in just a little, not fully, letting the thick tip force the lips without yielding. I lifted my hips toward it, desperate.

“Ask me for it.”

“Put it in me, please.”

“What do you want me to put in you?”

“That. That cock thing. Put all of it in me.”

She smiled and slid it in slowly, very slowly, watching my cunt swallow it centimeter by centimeter. I moaned louder and louder. It was thick, much bigger than anything I’d ever had inside me, and yet it went in easily because I was so wet. When she had it buried to the base, she sped up and started fucking me with it, in and out at a firm rhythm, while with her other hand she rubbed my clit with two fingers.

“That’s it, my love,” she murmured. “That’s how I need to fuck you.”

The second orgasm hit me faster than the first. It was different: deeper, further in, something that shook me from the pit of my stomach. I came screaming her name, clenching around the vibrator in spasms I couldn’t control. She didn’t pull it out. She slowed down but kept it inside, moving it just a little, and looked at me with bright dark eyes while I trembled.

“Two,” she said.

“I can’t anymore,” I panted.

“Yes, you can.”

For the first time, she took off her own clothes without stopping the vibrator inside me. She pulled her black dress over her head in one motion and ended up naked above me, without a bra, with her big heavy tits hanging close to my face, her nipples dark and erect. Her stomach was marked by the lines of a life well worked, and a patch of black hair between her legs looked at me as if inviting me to something.

“Lick me,” she said, climbing onto the armchair, putting one knee on each side of my head.

I looked up and saw her cunt above my mouth, wet, shining, smelling like an adult woman and pure desire. I felt panic for a second. Then I stuck out my tongue.

She lowered her hips and pressed her cunt to my mouth and I started licking as she had licked me, trying to copy what she had done to me, with more enthusiasm than technique. She moaned for the first time all afternoon, a low grateful moan, and grabbed my head with both hands and started moving over my face, fucking my mouth slowly.

“Suck my clit,” she gasped. “There, like that, don’t stop.”

I sank my tongue into her cunt and tasted the strong, salty, intense flavor. I licked her from bottom to top, sucked her swollen clit, pushed my tongue in as deep as I could. Meanwhile she kept moving the vibrator in my own cunt with her free hand, nonstop. I was starting to build a third orgasm without even realizing it.

Valentina came first. She gripped the back of the armchair, threw her head back, and shook over my face with a long rough moan, pressing my mouth with her cunt. I felt a jet of hot liquid on my chin and neck. I swallowed what I could. She collapsed onto me for a moment, trembling, breathing hard.

“Good girl,” she whispered.

Then she moved without fully getting off me. She slid down my body, kissed my tits, kissed my mouth without caring about her own taste mixed with mine, and got back to my cunt. She took the vibrator out with an obscene sound and replaced it with her mouth, and I, who had thought I couldn’t take any more, felt my whole body tense up in the countdown to another orgasm.

I came a third time on her tongue. Then a fourth, with two of her fingers inside me and her mouth sealed over my clit. I lost count at some point, just as she had said. When she finally left me alone, I was trembling, sweaty, my hair plastered to my face and my legs unable to close.

***

I stayed still for several minutes. The studio ceiling had a long crack running from the window to the center, and I stared at it without really seeing it, letting my body return to normal temperature and my thoughts come back in whatever order they wanted.

Valentina got up naked without any shame, went to the kitchen, and came back with two glasses of cold water. She gave me one. She sat on the edge of the table, facing me, her legs just barely apart and her cunt still shining in plain view, and looked at me with an expression that wasn’t triumph but something much calmer.

“Are you still here?” she asked.

“I’m still here.”

“Good?”

“Yes.” I took a sip of water. “More than good.”

She was quiet for a moment, and so was I. It was the first comfortable silence of the afternoon, the first one in which I didn’t feel I had to say something to prove I was up to the situation.

“The thesis,” I said at last. “I suppose this is first-hand material.”

“I suppose so.” A brief pause. “Though I don’t think you can quote me directly.”

I laughed. It was the first time I’d laughed since I arrived. Valentina smiled too, that closed-mouth smile I’d seen when I walked in, only now it seemed different. Not calculated but genuine, like something that happened without her fully planning it.

“Are you in a hurry to leave?” she asked.

I looked at the recorder on the table. I’d been recording moans, gasps, and a voice that was mine saying things I had never heard myself say out loud for over an hour.

“Not especially,” I replied.

That night I didn’t go back to my apartment. We fucked two more times in her bed, once with her on top using the vibrator between us, the other with my face buried in the pillow while she licked my ass for the first time in my life and shoved three fingers into me until she made me cry from pleasure. At three in the morning I woke up with her mouth on my cunt again, starting over without haste, and I came before I’d fully woken up. Then I heard her breathing beside me with that absolute calm of someone who sleeps without guilt, and I thought that for a long time I hadn’t felt this little nervous anywhere.

The interview I turned in three weeks later to the editor at “Ámbar” was the best thing I wrote in my entire college career. None of what I included had anything to do with what I had recorded that afternoon.

Some conversations don’t need to be recorded anywhere. And there are people who teach you things for which no theoretical framework exists, no matter how many pages you write.