I Crossed the Hall Nude to My Father’s Room

We had ended up the two of us alone, and neither of us dared say it out loud. My mother had left one winter earlier, without scandal and without too many explanations, and my brother had lived in Tarragona for years. My father and I carried on each in our own way, pretending nothing was changing, maintaining in our spaces a routine designed so that the silence would not be noticed.

He came to see me two afternoons a week. He did it of his own free will, and when he took too long I made up a dripping faucet or a shelf that couldn’t bear the weight of books, any excuse so that he would show up with the toolbox and then sit down to have coffee in my kitchen. Every Saturday he invited me to dinner at a restaurant in the center, and I returned the visit the following Sunday with some elaborate dish we ate in my flat, beside the window that looked out onto the park.

The two of us knew that balance couldn’t hold for long. It wasn’t reasonable, or comfortable, or economical, and it was starting to seem absurd in a city where rents had turned into knives.

The idea of living under the same roof made its way in slowly, without either of us naming it. We named it for the first time one night at the restaurant on the rambla, facing the black sea. Between the main course and dessert, he said —You could stay in the back room— and I nodded as if I’d been waiting for that sentence for months. By the time the coffee arrived, everything was settled: I would move in the following weekend.

I confess that the decision, though it made me happy, did not leave me calm. At thirty-seven I had built a solitary way of living, without too many obligations or witnesses. I walked lightly dressed around the flat, sometimes naked, left the bathroom door open while I dried my hair, and a whole weekend could pass without anyone knowing whether I was alive or dead. I had never shared a roof with a man, let alone one who had known me since I was a child.

***

Once we were settled in, I understood that the issue was not only the shared space. It was his presence. My father was a fifty-six-year-old man, vigorous, broad-backed, with a way of moving that filled the whole room. He didn’t give orders or raise his voice, but around him things took on a silent order that no one questioned. I accepted it willingly, because it made me feel protected, as if for the first time in years someone were making sure the doors were properly locked at night.

And yet, the first few nights I couldn’t sleep.

Knowing he was under the same roof, reading or breathing slowly in his room on the other side of the hall, caused me a strange unease I didn’t know how to name. I even thought of asking him whether the same thing was happening to him, but by morning I couldn’t find a way to formulate the question. I myself wasn’t clear about what was happening to me.

I thought time would fix that little bout of insomnia. I had almost forgotten it when the night came that I woke up agitated, my heart in my throat and my skin covered in sweat. I sat up, disoriented, and discovered that the sheets had fallen to the floor, that my nightgown had ridden up to my neck, and that I was completely naked. My cunt was throbbing on its own, swollen and soaked, with a life that seemed not to obey me. I brought my hand to my pubis almost without thinking and found my lips open, slippery, dripping down the inner sides of my thighs. Two fingers slid inside me without effort, so deep that a moan escaped me, and I noticed how my cunt squeezed them, greedy, asking for something thicker than two fingers.

Between sleep and wakefulness, I had awakened in the middle of arousal, an arousal deeper than anything I remembered having brought on myself in the shower or in bed, on Sunday afternoons. I began to rub my clit in tight circles, biting my lip so I wouldn’t scream, and I came in less than a minute, hips raised and fingers soaked to the knuckles, pressing the pillow over my mouth to stifle what came out of me.

I am not a woman who lies to herself. I switched on the lamp, took a deep breath, and accepted the obvious: the cause of that overflow was not some vague dream, but him. The image of my father sleeping a few meters away, separated from me by a hallway and by everything that, supposedly, two people like us are forbidden to cross. I smelled my fingers and shuddered. I sucked them one by one, slowly, and swore to myself that it wouldn’t happen again. Less than an hour later I was coming again, this time face down, riding the rumpled pillow between my legs, imagining it was him trapping me against the mattress.

***

In the days that followed, his figure began to slip into my head with an insistence that frightened me. While I waited for the bus, while I reviewed case files in the office, while I brushed my teeth, there he was. My body responded with a heat that was no longer only memory, but anticipation.

I looked at him differently. I no longer saw my father, but forearms covered in brown hair, the veins standing out in his hands, the thick lips he moistened when he read the paper in silence. I noticed his long fingers, the way he held a glass, the way he ran his palm over the back of his neck when something amused him. And I also noticed, unwillingly and willingly, the bulge marked under the waistband of his pajama pants when he came into the kitchen in the morning, still half asleep. I watched him sideways while he poured coffee and imagined the weight of that cock against my tongue, how it would force its way between my lips, how it would fill my mouth until it made me cry. And above all, I waited to find out whether he ever looked at me the way I looked at him.

Just once I thought I found something. I was wearing a white blouse that clung too tightly to me, a blouse I myself had considered provocative in the mirror before leaving. We were in the kitchen, he was slicing bread, and when he looked up, his gaze came to rest without disguise on my breasts, for just long enough for me to notice. He lowered his eyes immediately, cleared his throat, said something about the cheese. But I had seen it.

He had seen me.

From that point on, the house turned into a stage. On the surface, everything continued: dinners, soft conversation, the television on in the afternoon. Underneath, my inner life burned without anyone coming to put out the fire. In the office I would sit staring at the screen, imagining increasingly concrete situations: him coming into the bathroom while I was showering and grabbing my hair to fuck my mouth against the tiles, him dropping a hand onto my thigh in the middle of a film and sliding it up until he found me without panties, him saying in a low voice “open your legs, daughter” and me obeying without breathing.

I waited for him to make some move, to say something that would justify what was happening to me. Since that initiative never came, I ended up sinking into a kind of whirlpool I also didn’t want to get out of, even if it led me straight to hell.

***

Hell came to me without my fully seeking it. Or perhaps I sought it, but convinced myself otherwise.

It was the following Saturday. We had gone to the restaurant on the rambla, the same as always, the one with the black sea behind the glass. I drank more than I should. I let myself be carried away by the mocking look in his honey-colored eyes, by his low voice, by his parted lips when he told me an anecdote I no longer remember. I only remembered the sound. While he drove us back, I already knew with an almost calm clarity what I was going to do that night, and none of my convictions, by then almost worn out, was going to stop me.

I didn’t go to bed when I arrived. I locked myself in my room, filled the bathtub, and sank into the warm water with salts. I rubbed perfumed oil over my shoulders, my stomach, the inner sides of my thighs. I looked at myself for a long time in the closet mirror and forced myself to accept what I saw.

I don’t know if I’m a beautiful woman. The important thing that night is that I felt beautiful: insolent, shameless, desirable, with a heat in my lower belly pushing me to move. I didn’t dare say the word, but the word filled me entirely from the inside. I felt like a whore. And I liked it.

I turned off the lamp and stepped into the hallway.

Every barefoot step on the cold wood felt like breaking something beneath my foot. Fragments of my brakes, my modesty, the warnings I had been hearing for years were cracking under me. I moved slowly, with my black hair loose over my shoulders, wearing nothing, as if I were entering a procession I had myself summoned. I could feel the air licking my hardened nipples and the fluid running warm down the inner side of my thigh. I felt more woman with every step. More female. And more his, even before touching him.

I reached his door and stopped for a few seconds. I wanted him to have time to see me in full before any word was spoken. I pushed the door open. The light from the street came in slanted through the blinds, and he was awake, staring at the ceiling like someone who had been doing so for hours. He turned his head and saw me.

He said nothing. He didn’t tell me to go either.

I waited for his gaze to travel over me from head to toe, to remake my outline in the dimness. I saw the sheet rise over his belly, saw his cock standing hard against the fabric without him trying to hide it. I walked to the bed and slid under the sheets. He was naked. His skin burned. I ran my hand over his chest, over the coarse hair of his belly, and down to close my fingers around his cock. It was thick, hot, heavier than I had imagined, and it pulsed in my fist like an animal waking up. I squeezed it slowly, from the base to the glans, and felt a thick drop slick my fingers. I took it to my mouth without looking at him, and I heard him moan for the first time.

—Papá— I murmured, and the word burned as it left me.

I slid down the bed, pulled the sheet aside, and took him into my mouth at once, as much as I could, until the tip hit my throat and tears filled my eyes. I began to suck him slowly, salivating all over him, sucking the glans with tight lips and taking him down to the bottom again and again. I stroked his balls with one hand while with the other I caressed myself, already soaked, parting my cunt lips with two fingers. He grabbed my hair, not to force me, but to see me better, to see me sucking him, his daughter, with my mouth open and drooling over his cock.

—Come here— he said, his voice broken, and pulled me up toward him.

I didn’t faint. I didn’t want to faint.

I was awake as I had never been. Awake when his rough, careful hand covered one of my breasts and stayed there, measuring me, and then his fingers closed over the nipple and pinched until a whimper escaped me. Awake when he lowered his mouth and sucked first one breast and then the other, biting me, pulling at the nipples with his teeth until they were hard and red. Awake when his knees parted my thighs with a certainty that surprised me, and when his head kept moving down my belly until his face sank between my legs.

He ate my cunt like a man who had spent years imagining it. He opened my lips with his thumbs, licked me slowly from bottom to top, and lingered on my clit with the flat of his tongue, the tip, with sucking lips. I writhed against his mouth, clutching his hair, rubbing myself shamelessly, riding his face. He slid two fingers inside me and curled them inward while he kept sucking me, and I came with a scream I had to smother against the back of my own hand, soaking his chin and neck.

Awake when his weight came down over mine and crushed me against the mattress with the exactness with which I had imagined him for weeks. I felt the head of his cock pushing between my lips, slippery with my own release, seeking the entrance. He opened me with a single thrust of his hips, all the way in, and he felt everything inside me: every vein, every centimeter, the hot pulse against the walls of my cunt. I screamed against his shoulder and he stayed still for an instant, letting me feel him in full.

—You’re so tight, daughter— he whispered in my ear, and the word burned again—. You’ve been wanting this for months, haven’t you?

—Yes— I panted—. Fuck me, daddy. Fuck me hard.

He started moving slowly, drawing almost all the way out and driving back into me to the hilt, with long, deep thrusts that shook the bed. Then he sped up. He drove his hands into my hips and fucked me with brutal rhythm, crashing his pelvis against mine, making a wet, obscene sound that filled the room. I bit his shoulder, clawed at his back, begged him in a low voice not to stop, to put it deeper, to split me open.

I ran my hand over his back and pulled him against me. I needed to feel his weight, to confirm that it was happening, that the hallway had finally been broken and there was no way back to the other side anymore.

He turned me over. He put me on all fours in the middle of the bed, grabbed my hair from behind, and drove his cock into me again with a thrust. With his other hand he patted my ass, first softly, then hard, leaving the mark burning. I pushed my hips back toward him, searching for him, offering myself to him, my face crushed against the pillow. He brought two fingers to my mouth, wet them, and lowered them to touch my asshole with the pad, pressing without quite entering, and that single gesture made me come again, squeezing him inside with spasms he celebrated with a low groan.

—Stay— I murmured when he laid me back on my back and positioned himself between my legs again, and I don’t know whether I said it for that night or for all the ones to come.

He didn’t answer with words. He answered by pushing slowly, sinking into me until I stopped breathing for an instant, and everything I had forbidden myself to think shattered at once, in a tremor that still, even today when I recall it, runs down my spine. I felt him swelling inside me, gripping my hips with both hands and driving all the way in, and I felt the hot stream of his cum filling me from within, shot after shot, while he growled my name against my neck. He didn’t pull out. He stayed inside, throbbing, until his semen began to overflow and run down the cleft of my ass, soaking the sheet beneath us.

***

We didn’t speak about that night over breakfast. There was no need. He poured my coffee like any other Sunday, with the same spoonful of sugar as always, and I looked at him over the rim of the cup knowing that that same night I would cross the hall again.

The back room would remain mine on paper. But nobody would sleep there anymore.