What Happened at the Boutique Owner’s House

That morning I left home early with a wad of bills in my handbag and an errand that made my stomach turn. Mr. Vargas, my husband’s boss, had been very clear about what he wanted me to buy: expensive lingerie, the kind he could tear off me with his hands without feeling like he was destroying anything cheap. I remembered how he had ripped my panties the night before, with that roughness that left me trembling between shame and something else I preferred not to name. I still felt the sting between my thighs from the way he had shoved it all the way in, without asking, his hand crushing my neck against the mattress while he fucked me and called me a dirty whore in my ear. I closed my eyes in the middle of the street and pressed my handbag against my belly because my pussy got wet again just from remembering.

I couldn’t take the girl to that shop. For once I left her with my sister-in-law Beatriz, made up a lie about a bank errand, and walked the six blocks to the avenue where, weeks earlier, I had seen a boutique with frosted-glass windows and mannequins dressed in clothes that cost what I spent in six months at the flea market.

The revolving door spit me inside as if it were pushing me. It smelled of vanilla and something else, cleaner, more expensive. A woman behind the counter looked up and I knew at once she had sized me up in two seconds: the knockoff handbag, the flat shoes, last year’s jacket.

“Good morning,” she said with a smile that didn’t quite seem real. “Can I help you with anything?”

“No, thank you. I just want to look.”

“I’m here for whatever you need. My name is Elena.”

I went to the back, where the panties and thongs hung like little works of art on padded hangers. There was one black lace pair so sheer that just looking at it made me lower my eyes. I put it back as if it burned.

“They’re gorgeous, aren’t they?” Elena had come up beside me without my hearing her. “Is this your first time in here?”

“Yes.”

“It shows a little, but not in a bad way. Hardly any young women come in here.”

She must have been in her fifties, I guessed. She wore a tight dark dress and small earrings that brushed her neck every time she turned her head. Her voice was low, unhurried, as if everything she said had exactly the right amount of time to be said in.

“Please don’t call me usted,” I asked her. “It makes me feel older than you.”

She laughed. It was a small, contained laugh, and I saw she wore a muted red lipstick, almost brown.

“All right, sweetheart. Are you looking for something special?”

“Something like that.”

“Does your husband like thongs?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and at once I realized how sad it sounded. “I haven’t asked him in a long time.”

Elena didn’t push. She took out four different styles—white, red, blue, black—and set them on the counter with almost religious care. Then she picked up the lace one again, the one I’d dropped as if it burned.

“This one’s on me.”

“Elena, no…”

“It’s a gift. And because I think you need it more than you realize.”

She led me to a full-length mirror and stood behind me, her hands just barely brushing my shoulders. In the reflection we looked at each other: me blushing, her calm, her eyes on mine.

“You’re beautiful, you know that?”

“So are you,” I said, and my voice came out lower than I meant it to.

***

I paid two hundred and ninety euros. I did it with Mr. Vargas’s bills and felt like each one carried a different kind of shame written on it. When I went out into the street with the bag hanging from my arm, I realized I couldn’t show up at Beatriz’s with that. How do you explain to a sister-in-law that you’ve spent your husband’s wages on lingerie for another man?

Elena must have seen my face from the boutique door, because she came out after me.

“Everything okay, sweetheart?”

I told her about the girl, about Beatriz, about the absurdity of the bag. She offered to keep it at her house until I could come by to pick it up.

“Friday afternoons I have an employee. You can come whenever you want.”

“You’re too kind to me.”

“Not that kind. I just want you to come back.”

She wrote the address on a little slip of paper and kissed me on the cheek when we said goodbye. I walked to Beatriz’s house with that sentence repeating in my head: I just want you to come back. I turned down the coffee, made up another excuse. I picked up the girl, fed her, put her to bed.

***

On the sofa I tried to close my eyes. The image of Mr. Vargas, his mouth open and my body on top of him, came back like a tide. I saw him again sprawled in the armchair in his office, with his thick cock out of his pants, ordering me to sit on it without saying a word. I saw my own ass lowering slowly until the tip opened me and he let out that satisfied animal growl. I saw how he dug his hands into my hips and forced me to move up and down to his rhythm, his cock going into me until I felt it hit deep inside. I slid my hand between my legs and found I was soaked, my pussy dripping through my panties. I pushed two fingers into myself and was shocked to find myself fucking them angrily, imagining it was him, imagining it was his thick cum filling me from the inside. I frightened myself when I realized I was about to come all by myself on the sofa thinking about my husband’s boss. I pulled my hand out, looked at it shining, got up, took a long shower with the water very hot. Under the stream I touched my nipples again and pinched them until they hurt, and I pushed the showerhead between my legs until my clit swelled up, but I didn’t come. I didn’t want to come alone. I gathered the laundry from the clothesline. Anything to keep from staying still.

And then I remembered the little slip of paper.

I took out my phone and texted her.

“Hi, Elena. It’s Carolina. I forgot to write you earlier.”

The reply took thirty seconds.

“I knew you’d write. If you want to come get the bag, I’m home.”

“Now?”

“Now.”

***

She opened the door wearing a blue satin robe that fell to mid-thigh. Her hair was loose, still damp, and she smelled of a different perfume than the one in the boutique, closer, more intimate. She let me in, we left the sleeping girl in a room at the back, and we sat in the living room facing each other.

We talked. About her business, my husband, my schedule. She asked my age: thirty-three, I told her. She was fifty-six. I confessed she looked quite a bit younger and she laughed the same way she had laughed in the morning, as if she doled out laughter by the drop.

“What is it that embarrasses you, sweetheart?”

“I don’t know. Everything.”

“Being looked at? Your body? Sex?”

“That I react too much. Anything makes me…”

“Turn you on?”

I nodded. There was no point in denying it after the whole morning.

“And your husband?”

“He hasn’t touched me in months. And when he does, he comes in two minutes and rolls over.”

Elena moved closer on the sofa. The distance between us suddenly felt too obvious. She asked me when was the last time I had truly felt desired, fucked like a woman, not rushed through like an errand. I didn’t know how to answer.

“When I was a teenager,” I said at last, almost just to say something, “I masturbated all the time. In the shower, before bed, under the school desk. I’d slip my hand inside my panties and rub my clit until I came, biting my sleeve so they wouldn’t hear me. I couldn’t stop.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m ashamed. When I finish I feel bad. Before I come, all I think about are filthy things. Things I’d never dare say to anyone.”

“What things, sweetheart? Tell me.”

“To have it in my ass. To be spat on. To be called a slut. To be forced to suck off a stranger while they watch me.”

I covered my face with my hands. I was about to cry and I didn’t know why. Elena got up from the sofa, sat beside me, and hugged me. Her neck smelled good, of perfume and something more her own. I let myself fall against her like a child.

“Do you want me to be the one to touch you?” she whispered near my ear.

I pulled back a little to look at her.

“I don’t like women, Elena.”

“Neither do I. I’ve never touched one. But I’ve been thinking about your cunt all morning, sweetheart, and how it is right now.”

I don’t know exactly what broke inside me when I heard that. I pressed my face back into her neck and kissed her skin, slowly, without thinking. My mouth was an inch from her ear when I asked her.

“Touch me. Touch my cunt, Elena, please.”

Her hand slid up the inside of my thigh as if she’d done it a hundred times. She laid her palm over the fabric of my panties and I felt the exact moment she discovered how wet I was: the soaked fabric, dripping, a hot patch that wet her fingers before she touched anything else. We both breathed at the same time. She let out a soft, almost frightened “oh, sweetheart,” as if she hadn’t expected to find me like that.

“My God, look at you.”

“Keep going.”

When she slid her fingers under the elastic and touched my skin directly, we both moaned at once, as if we shared the same sensation from opposite sides. She parted my pussy lips with two fingers and traced the center up and down, smearing herself with what was coming out of me. She found my clit with her thumb, swollen and twitching, and began making slow circles while with her other hand she hiked my dress up to my waist.

“You’re shaking,” she murmured.

“I know.”

She put one finger in. Then another. She curled them upward and pressed a spot inside me that made my mouth open without a sound. There was no urgency like Mr. Vargas’s, no hoarse clumsiness like my husband’s when he finally decided to touch me. Her movements were slow, exact, as if she already knew where what I needed was. She fucked my cunt with her fingers as if she were listening to what I asked for without my having to say it. I grabbed the blanket beside me and put it under me without thinking, almost by instinct, knowing what was going to happen.

“Spread your legs, sweetheart. Show me everything.”

I parted my thighs until one fell against the back of the sofa and the other hung over the edge. She dropped to her knees on the floor and looked at my cunt up close, with the concentration of someone who had never seen one opened like that before. I saw her tongue slip out between her painted lips, and before I could say anything she lowered her head and kissed me there. A long kiss, open-mouthed, with her tongue going in where her fingers had been before.

“Elena…”

“Quiet, sweetheart. Let me.”

She sucked my clit like her life depended on it. She held it between her lips, bit it gently, ran her flat tongue over it again and again while still pushing her fingers in to the knuckles. My hips lifted against her mouth without me meaning to, pushing myself against her face, clutching her damp hair with both hands. I felt her tongue drop down to the other hole and circle it, wetting me with my own juices, and when it came back up to my clit I couldn’t take any more.

And it happened.

I moaned without remembering shame. I moaned in her face while she didn’t let go, while she kept sucking and drinking everything that came out of me. The first gush surprised even me: I felt the hot liquid escape in a rush and splash her chin and neck. The second left me breathless and soaked the neckline of her robe. The third and fourth came one after another while Elena kept going without stopping, without getting scared, swallowing what she could and letting the rest run down her chin, looking at my face as if she had never seen anything like it.

“Elena, stop, I can’t anymore, stop…”

“Again, sweetheart. One more for me.”

And she ripped another one out of me by taking her fingers away and rubbing my clit with her open palm as fast as she could. I screamed into the cushion, bit the fabric, and came a fifth time over the blanket, which was left soaked with a warm puddle spreading beneath my ass.

When I stopped shaking, I curled up against her and kissed her cheeks, feeling them sticky with me. I didn’t kiss her mouth. Not yet.

“Are you okay, sweetheart?”

“I’m better than okay.”

***

She offered to let me shower in her bathroom. When I came out with the towel wrapped around me, she was in the bedroom undoing the tie of her robe. I stayed in the doorway, not really understanding what I was doing standing there, and looked at her.

“I’m going to pop by the shop for a minute. Do you mind if I change here?”

“No,” I said, and for the first time all day it was a no that hid nothing. “Change here.”

She took off her robe. Under it she was wearing a matching satin pajama set. She pulled the top off and I saw her breasts: smaller than mine, firm, with dark nipples and large areolas, already hardened by the air or by whatever had just happened. I didn’t look away. I didn’t want to. She didn’t look away either when she took off the bottoms and stood naked in front of me.

Her pubic hair was shaved, like mine. Her cunt was darker than mine, tucked between her thighs, with small, tight lips and moisture shining at the entrance. I thought she was a sensual woman and it occurred to me that I had never used that word, sensual, for another woman. I also thought I wanted to taste her, that I wanted to know what Elena’s cunt tasted like after feeling her mouth on mine.

Something pushed me. I dropped the towel.

We looked at each other naked for a full minute. We didn’t touch. It wasn’t necessary at first. Then it was. I stepped closer and put a hand on her breast, weighed it in my palm, pinched the nipple with two fingers and saw her eyes narrow. She ran her palm over my belly and down to my cunt, just to check that I was still wet, and smiled when she confirmed it.

“You’re still dripping, sweetheart.”

“That’s your fault.”

I guided her hand down to her cunt myself and pushed one finger in, clumsily, not quite knowing how, and she gave a short moan and closed her thighs, trapping my hand inside. She was as wet as I was. I rubbed her a little, imitating what she had done to me, and felt the swollen clit under my fingertip.

“Another day,” she whispered. “Another day you’ll do that to me with your mouth. Today was for you.”

We dressed slowly, stretching out every movement. When Elena was about to put on her bra, something inside me rebelled against the idea of not seeing those breasts again until who knew when. I stepped in without warning and hugged her. I hugged her hard, pressing my naked torso to hers, my nipples against hers, my heat against her heat. I felt hers harden at the same time as mine. I felt her breathing speed up. So did I. I found her hand and took it back to my cunt, just for a moment, just to let her say goodbye there with two fingers inside and her thumb brushing my clit. Another moan slipped out against her shoulder.

The girl’s cry from the other room separated us.

***

We went downstairs together to the entrance and said goodbye in the street, one heading back to the boutique, the other toward my house. Before I left, I whispered in her ear that the following week, if she wanted, I could come back another day. Any day. That I wanted to taste her cunt with my tongue the way she had tasted mine.

“Whenever you want, sweetheart.”

I walked pushing the stroller without really feeling it. The girl was asleep. The streetlights were coming on. I thought about my husband, who would arrive late as always, and how that night I was going to sleep with my cunt still smelling like another woman’s mouth beside his. I thought about Mr. Vargas and the expensive panties I had bought so he could tear them off me. I thought about Elena and the imprint of her fingers still warm inside me, about the stale semen taste of Mr. Vargas now mixed with her saliva, about the warm puddle I had left on her blanket.

I didn’t know what kind of woman I was from that afternoon on. I only knew I had three holes and all three had started to weigh on me, and that on Monday, or Tuesday, or Wednesday at the latest, I was going to call at that door again with my panties already wet before she opened it.