The Night with Another Woman That Canceled My Wedding

I was a few days short of turning twenty-four when I went on the first big trip of my career. I didn’t want to go, but refusing would have meant killing my career before it had even started.

The main reason I didn’t want to travel was the wedding. I had less than six weeks left until I got married, and the list of things still pending kept growing: the catering not yet confirmed, the dress needing a second fitting, the musicians waiting for the deposit. Mateo, my fiancé, had walked me to the taxi that morning with a tired smile and told me again not to worry, that he would take care of everything. I believed him.

My name is Lucía Vargas. I worked at a small consulting firm, lived my life according to a manual, and had a very clear idea of how the rest of it would go. I’m tall and slim, I’m five foot six and weigh 123 pounds. My hair was long and very dark, my eyes green. My legs had always been the first thing people noticed; I used them to my advantage without thinking much about it.

The trip itself went neither well nor badly. The presentation went over fine, the client signed something he would later fail to fully honor, and I spent three days in meetings in a city that said nothing to me. The problem started on the way back.

My connecting flight was canceled. A storm over the Atlantic had thrown half the airport’s schedule into chaos, and passengers from all over the world seemed to have landed in Santiago at the same time. There were no flights until the next day, and no rooms available in any hotel near the terminal. I confirmed it by calling five different places.

The airport turned into a refugee camp with ties. Families sleeping on suitcases, executives arguing with the counter staff, children crying in every corner. I wandered aimlessly for an hour until I ended up in a small bar at the end of the last terminal, nearly empty compared with the rest.

Nearly empty, but all the tables were occupied by noisy groups of men. I sighed and turned to leave when a deep, soft voice stopped me from a table for two.

—If you want, you can sit with me.

I turned around. The woman speaking to me was red-haired, in her early thirties, with a smile that seemed to know something I didn’t yet. She had a closed book on the table and a bottle of white wine half-finished.

I dropped into the chair with a sigh of gratitude that sounded more intimate than I intended.

—Thanks. Really. You have no idea what it’s like out there.

—I can imagine. I’m Mariana. Mariana Solís.

—Lucía Vargas.

She motioned to the waitress and ordered another glass. When it was served, she didn’t ask if I wanted it; she simply filled it to the top. We toasted to nothing in particular and drank in silence for a while.

Mariana turned out to be a lawyer. She worked at a large firm, handled cases she couldn’t name, and traveled at least once a month. I told her about my consulting firm, my project, the trip, and in the end, not really knowing why, I told her about the wedding. I showed her the dress photo on my phone. I told her about Mateo and the honeymoon already paid for.

She listened. She nodded in the right places. She smiled when appropriate. But at one point she said, without anyone having asked her:

—Are you sure?

The question hit me like a stone dropped into my stomach.

—Of course —I said, too quickly.

Mariana smiled with one side of her mouth and refilled our glasses.

By the time we finished the second bottle, I couldn’t feel my hands anymore. I left some bills on the table, tried to stand, and almost went face-first into the back of the chair.

—I’m going to look for some corner in the departure lounge —I said, speaking with the care of someone who knows she’s drunk.

—You’re not going anywhere like that. —Mariana held up a plastic room key card—. I have a room booked. There’s another bed. You’re not spending the night lying on the floor.

I hesitated. I knew I should say no. A stranger in a foreign city, a hotel room, a white wine that was already taking its toll on me. But the idea of the airport carpet scared me more than she did, and I nodded.

—Thanks. Seriously.

***

The hotel was three blocks away. We walked with her arm under mine. In the elevator I leaned against her without thinking and felt the perfume in her hair against my cheek; something sweet, with a leather undertone. I closed my eyes.

When we got to the room, the first thing I did was rush to the bathroom. I barely made it to my knees in front of the toilet before I threw up everything: the wine, dinner, the coffee from midday. I coughed, spat, and cried a little from sheer embarrassment.

When I lifted my head, Mariana was leaning against the doorframe, watching me with a smile I couldn’t read.

—Sorry —I murmured—. I’m not used to drinking that much.

—I noticed. Are you feeling better?

—I think so.

—Good. Now to the shower.

She came closer, helped me stand, and before I could protest, started unbuttoning my shirt. I stayed still. I let her take my clothes off piece by piece: shoes, pants, underwear. I didn’t feel shy. I felt a strange surrender, as if my body had understood something before my mind did. She took her time looking at me naked under the bathroom’s yellow light, her eyes traveling over my tits, my stomach, my shaved cunt, without the slightest embarrassment, like someone appraising something she already considered hers.

She put me in the bathtub and turned on the tap. The stream hit me icy cold, ripped a scream from me, and sent a shiver through me from head to toe. I tried to pull away, but Mariana’s hand closed firmly around my wrist and kept me under the water. She made me stay there until I stopped trembling. Until the alcohol began to leave me.

Then she turned off the tap and wrapped me in a huge white towel. She dried my back with an almost maternal strength, rubbing my arms, my legs, the nape of my neck. When I was dry, though still cold, she took me to the bed and tucked me under the sheets. I fell asleep almost instantly, listening to the shower water running again.

***

I woke to the weight of her body on the mattress.

Mariana had gotten into my bed, naked, her skin warm and still damp from the shower. I understood it when I felt her hand slide slowly between my legs, first over the sheets and then beneath them. Her fingers found my cunt with surgical calm, parting the lips, finding the clit on the first try, as if she knew by heart a map I still hadn’t finished drawing. I wanted to push her away, but the alcohol still weighed down my arms and the sensation, against all odds, was not unpleasant.

—Mariana —I murmured.

—Shhh. You’re already wet, Lucía. Look how your fingers slip.

She lifted her hand for a second so I could see it glisten under the light coming in from the street, then lowered it again. She kissed my neck, then my shoulder, and kept rubbing me with two fingers in slow circles, so close to my ear that I could hear her breathing against my lobe. My body responded before my mind did: a heat starting in my belly and spreading down to my legs, a breath that suddenly sped up without permission, my nipples hardening against the fabric of the T-shirt she still hadn’t taken off me.

—We shouldn’t —I said weakly.

—No, you shouldn’t —she answered, and kept going.

She pulled the sheets aside with one clean motion. She lifted my T-shirt to my neck and drew it off my arms as if she were undressing a doll. She told me to kneel on the mattress, to open my legs, to put my hands behind my neck. When I hesitated, her hand touched my cheek with a caress that was both warning and promise. The other hand squeezed one of my nipples until a moan escaped me.

—Like that —she said—. Open nice and wide. Let me see everything.

I knelt. I closed my eyes. She settled in front of me, ran her fingers through her mouth to wet them with saliva, and slid them back between my legs. First one, all the way in, turning inside me as if she were measuring me from the inside. Then two. Her palm pressed against my clit each time she thrust, and I clenched my thighs without meaning to around her wrist.

—Stay still —she told me—. Hands where I said.

I put my hands back behind my neck. She fingered me slowly, watching my face while I tried to keep my balance with my knees spread. Her thumb traced my clit, her fingers fucked me at a weary, deliberate pace, measuring how far she could torture me before letting me come. I reached my first orgasm in silence, biting my lip until I tasted metal so she wouldn’t get the pleasure. My thighs jerked, my whole belly contracted, and she didn’t pull her fingers out until she felt me tightening around them from top to bottom. I managed it with effort, but I didn’t give her so much as a moan.

—Good girl —she said, and the words sank into some new place in me—. Though you’re going to pay me for making yourself mute.

She pulled out her soaked fingers and ran them over my lips. When I opened my mouth, she pushed them all the way in. She made me suck them, taste myself whole, while with her other hand she squeezed a breast and tugged my nipple. My knees were trembling.

—Now you —she whispered, and lay back, opening her legs beneath me—. Down. Learn to eat pussy, Lucía. You’re going to have to do it a lot from now on.

I had never done it. I had never even considered doing it. But I lowered my head because her hand was already pushing on the back of my neck, and I met the warm, sharp smell of her open sex against my mouth. I stuck out my tongue without thinking and tasted. She shuddered with a low moan that shot up my spine like a jolt. I learned fast: up along the lips, around the clit, suck slowly, tongue in, then back up. Mariana pulled my hair, guided my rhythm, pressed my face against her until I could barely breathe.

—Like that, yes, deeper, you fucking bitch, like that —she panted, and came against my mouth with a long spasm that wet my chin, my neck, even the roots of my tits.

When she let me lift my face, my chin was shining and my eyes were watery. She laughed breathlessly and wiped me clean with her thumb before putting that thumb in my mouth.

The night grew long. She kissed me as if she had all the time in the world, with her whole tongue inside my mouth, tasting herself in me. She stroked my breasts until my nipples hardened without any decision on my part, then sucked them one by one, biting the nipples right up to the edge of pain. She fingered me again, now more slowly, with three fingers sliding in and out of my cunt while her thumb hammered my clit at a steady rhythm, until I couldn’t keep quiet anymore and started moaning loudly, begging without knowing what for. At some point I begged her to stop. She didn’t listen. She kept fucking me with her hand until I came a second time, gushing through her fingers, and then kept going, giving me no respite.

—Not yet, slut —she said in my ear—. You don’t even know what it is to really come yet.

When I tried to pull away with a little force, she flipped me onto her lap face-down, ass raised and face buried in the pillow, and gave me two sharp, loud slaps that went through my whole skin. Then three more. Then two on each cheek, harder. I sobbed with my face buried in the sheet, not from pain, but from a mixture of humiliation and desire I didn’t know where to put. Each smack made my tits jolt against her thighs and made my cunt tighten around nothing. Between swats, she slid two fingers into my ass, checked how soaked I was, and laughed.

—Look how much you like it. Look how you drip when I hit you. You’re going to make a gorgeous toy, Lucía.

Then she put me on my back, spread my legs wide open, and went down. Her tongue started on the inner thighs, very slowly, licking, biting, leaving purple marks near my groin. She climbed upward with a patience that nearly made me scream too soon. When she reached the center, I moaned without hiding it. She sucked my clit whole, wrapping it with her lips, circling it with her tongue, and at the same time she slid two fingers into me and searched for the exact spot inside that made me arch my back until my ass lifted off the mattress. She brought me to orgasm three more times, one after another, with no break between them, until the fourth one hit me crying, my legs shaking out of control and a stain of my own discharge soaking the sheet beneath me. On the last one, she drove her fingers all the way in while sucking my clit and I felt something release inside me, felt myself expel between her fingers in a warm gush that soaked her wrist all the way to the elbow.

—Oh, look at that —she murmured against my cunt, satisfied—. You even know how to come properly. You didn’t know, did you?

I shook my head, with no strength for anything else. She climbed slowly up my body, ran her wet fingers over my mouth, and kissed me with my taste still on her tongue until I had no strength left to hold myself up and sank into a heavy, dreamless sleep, with her hand resting between my legs as if marking possession.

When I woke up, she was gone.

On the nightstand there was a hotel card, a small bottle of water, and under the bottle, a personal card with her name and an address in Buenos Aires. Nothing else.

***

I showered. I got dressed. I took the morning flight wearing dark glasses and with the feeling that I was walking inside a body that was no longer entirely mine. I could still feel the sting of the swats when I sat down, and my underwear stuck to a cunt that hadn’t finished calming down.

Three days later, I canceled the wedding. I gave Mateo back the ring in silence, sitting in his mother’s kitchen, unable to explain anything that sounded true. He cried. I didn’t. That was the worst part.

A week later, I was fired from my job after a screaming match with my boss over a comment I would have swallowed without a word at another time. I walked out of the building with my box of things under my arm and Mariana’s card in my coat pocket.

Two days later, an envelope arrived. A ticket to Buenos Aires and a sheet with the same address, this time written by hand. No return address.

I gave the apartment keys back to the owner. I told her to keep everything inside: the furniture, the clothes, the boxes I had never finished unpacking. I closed my bank accounts. I sold the car in one afternoon for half of what it was worth.

I arrived in Buenos Aires on January tenth, a hot, sticky day, the air heavy against my skin. I was wearing a cropped T-shirt, denim shorts, and worn-out sandals. In my hand, a small backpack with two changes of clothes and a toothbrush.

I took a taxi to the address. It was a low house in Palermo, with a gray facade and green shutters. Mariana opened the door before I even rang, as if she had been watching me arrive from the window.

She smiled when she saw me and stepped aside to let me in. I shook my head.

—Before that, I want you to promise me something.

—What?

I drew in a deep breath. I had rehearsed it so many times during the flight that it almost sounded like a learned line.

—When you get tired of me, you’re going to sell me to another woman. I want to keep belonging to whoever buys me.

Mariana laughed. A low, contained laugh that ended in a long smile.

—Is that all, Lucía? —she asked—. Of course. I’ll hold an auction the way it should be done. And I’ll drink champagne while I watch you leave with whoever pays best.

I nodded. I set down my backpack. I crossed the threshold.

And that’s how my new life began, in a house that wasn’t mine, with a woman who would never again resemble anyone else.