My Daughter Came Home With Nothing and Ended Up in My Bed

My name is Damián, and I have a thirty-eight-year-old daughter. Her name is Mariana, and ever since she was a little girl I was the one who watched over her the most, though not always as much as I should have. Her mother and I split up when Mariana was nine, and ever since then I’ve carried the silent guilt of divorced parents: the feeling that every mistake she made as an adult was partly mine, for having been far away in the years that mattered.

Mariana got pregnant at twenty-seven by a guy named Esteban. A nobody with a salesman’s smile. When she told him she was expecting a child, he disappeared before the first ultrasound. My daughter raised Tomás alone, without child support, without a break, and without a single complaint. That’s why, I suppose, afterward it cost her so much to find someone who would love her whole, child included.

The men who showed up later never stayed. The last one, a fellow named Joaquín, lived off her office salary for two years and left the day she asked him to put both their names on the rental contract. My daughter called me that night at two in the morning, crying, and I listened in silence because I couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t sound like a bitter father.

Mariana is beautiful. I’m not saying that out of paternal pride: I’m saying it as an objective fact, because it has to be said for the rest to make sense. She has big, dark eyes, a mouth that always seems on the verge of smiling, and a body that motherhood barely marked. Men came to her for that and left for the other thing: the son, the birth scar, the responsibility she would not negotiate.

We lived in different cities. I was in the capital; she was in a coastal city seven hours away by bus. We called each other on weekends. She told me things she said she couldn’t tell her mother. Her mother was good, but rigid, and had never known how to listen without judging. I listened; that was all I knew how to do.

One afternoon in March, Mariana called me with a broken voice. The company where she worked — a pharmaceutical distribution firm — had shut down overnight. Three months of back pay, severance in installments, no horizon. She asked for help with a lump in her throat, as if she weren’t my daughter but a beggar.

—Come home —I told her—. There’s room here for Tomás and for you. End of story.

They arrived on a Saturday morning, with two suitcases and a cardboard box full of the boy’s toys. When I opened the door, the first thing I thought wasn’t paternal. Mariana was wearing a dark blue dress, fitted at the waist, and her hair was tied back in a ponytail that left her neck bare. She was thinner than the last time I’d seen her. I hugged her a little longer than necessary and thought I noticed she wasn’t letting go either. I felt her tits pressed against my chest through the dress, and for an instant my cock moved by itself inside my pants. It was half a second. Enough to know I was going to have a problem.

Tomás settled into the room I’d emptied for him. Mariana stayed in the guest room, at the end of the hall. My room is right across from it. That first night I slept badly: I heard every noise she made, every time she got up to drink water, every time the boy shifted in bed. I felt like a teenager discovering that the summer cousin was sleeping in the next room. I jerked off in silence under the sheet, thinking of my daughter’s bare neck, and hated myself when I was done.

***

The first few months were all adaptation. Mariana found a job as a secretary in a small law office twelve blocks from the apartment. She left at eight in the morning after dropping Tomás off at school and came back at five. She cooked for the three of us, washed dishes without being asked, thanked me for every plate, every made bed, every thing I took for granted. That gratitude made me uneasy. I didn’t want gratitude. I wanted, I suppose, something else, though I wouldn’t admit it to myself.

One Wednesday in June, she came back early. Her boss had given her the afternoon off. I work from home — graphic design for digital magazines — and I was in my room with the computer on, reviewing a layout. I heard the door. I heard her footsteps in the hall. I heard her hesitate before knocking.

—Can I come in? —she asked from outside.

—Come in.

She came in barefoot, with the first button of her white work blouse undone and her hair loose. She sat on the edge of the bed, not in the chair. I closed the laptop. Something in her face told me she hadn’t come to talk about the week’s groceries.

—I need to talk to you —she said.

—I’m listening.

And then she started telling me things she had never told me. That Esteban hadn’t just abandoned her, that she had lied for years out of pride: he had hit her when he found out about the pregnancy and she had left without looking back. That Joaquín, the last one, had asked her for money until the day he left. That she hadn’t slept with anyone in two years. That sometimes, at night, she cried from anger, not sadness. That her son was the only good thing she had and sometimes even that wasn’t enough.

I listened without moving. Or rather, I watched her. At some point I’d sat down beside her without noticing, and she was a handspan from my face.

—My mother was an idiot for leaving you —she said all of a sudden—. I would have given everything for a man like you.

She said it like that, without drama, looking me in the eyes. Like a conclusion, not a compliment. The sentence ran through me like an electric current and I heard myself answer without thinking.

—And I would have given a lot for a woman like you.

I stroked her cheek. It was a gentle gesture, paternal in appearance. But neither of us took it that way. My hand stayed there longer than a father’s hand should. It slid down to her chin. Up to her lower lip. She parted her mouth and sucked my thumb. It wasn’t an accident. She closed her lips around my finger and looked me in the eyes while she licked it, and in that look was everything that came afterward.

I kissed her.

It was a short kiss, almost a question. She answered with a longer one, parting her lips and letting me in. I felt her tongue against mine, thick and hot, and knew there was no turning back. Mariana had two years of hunger on top of her and I had been living alone for six. The arithmetic of loneliness had brought us to that bed. I slid my hand under her blouse and grabbed one of her tits directly, without a bra in the way, and pinched the nipple between my index finger and thumb. A moan escaped into my mouth.

—We shouldn’t —I said at some point, with my mouth already on her neck.

—I know —she answered, and reached for my zipper with her hand.

We didn’t stop.

***

I unbuttoned her blouse one button at a time. Mariana wasn’t wearing a bra. Her tits were small, firm, with nipples darkened and hardened by the pregnancy from eleven years earlier. I kissed them slowly, first one and then the other, and then sucked them whole, taking them into my mouth to the root while she held my head with both hands and pressed me against her chest. I ran my tongue around the areola. I bit her nipple carefully, then less carefully, and she answered with a low moan, a sound that came from her belly. I felt her breathing speed up and her nails dig into the back of my neck when I sucked hard on the right nipple until it was swollen and shiny with spit.

I pulled down her skirt. The underwear was plain, white cotton, nothing planned. I liked that. She hadn’t left the house that morning thinking about seducing me. What was happening was the result of months of things left unsaid, not of a plan.

I slid my hand between her legs over the fabric. Mariana sighed and arched her back. She was wet. Very wet. The panties had a dark stain in the center and clung to the lips of her cunt like a second skin. I moved the cotton aside and touched her directly. My daughter’s cunt was hot, swollen, soaked in a way that took my breath away. I parted the lips with two fingers and circled her clit with my thumb, slowly. She closed her eyes and parted her lips. I slipped one finger in, then two, and she started moving against my hand, wanting more, deeper. This isn’t done, I thought for a tenth of a second. The tenth of a second passed.

—Lock the door —I told her.

She stood up, turned the key, came back to the bed. She took off the last piece while walking. I saw her whole for the first time under the white light of the afternoon and was left speechless. Mariana was beautiful in a way I should never have been the one to notice. Her pubic hair was trimmed, not fully shaved, a dark narrow strip pointing toward her open, wet cunt.

She undressed me. Without haste, with the same concentration she used as a child to put puzzles together. When she pulled my cock out of my underwear, she looked at it for a few seconds, as if measuring it, and then bent down and took it all into her mouth without saying a word. She sucked me slowly, to the back of her throat, with her eyes closed and one hand at the base of my cock. I felt her tongue circle my glans, move up and down the shaft, play with the tip. She kept me like that for a few minutes, sucking me with delayed hunger, taking my cock out of her mouth only to lick my balls and then take it all back in. When the two of us were both naked, she pushed me onto the bed and climbed on top. I let her do it. I didn’t feel I had the right to direct anything. She was the one who had crossed the line with what she said about her mother, and she was the one who had to decide how far this went.

She decided all the way.

She grabbed my cock with one hand, set it at the entrance to her cunt, and lowered herself slowly, looking at my face to make sure I still wanted it. I felt her cunt open around my cock, tight, hot, soaked. Mariana threw her head back and moaned low, a deep sound I had never heard in my life. She stayed still for a few seconds with my whole cock inside her, breathing through her mouth, and then she started moving. I held her hips, setting a slow rhythm at first, more urgent after. Her tits rose and fell a handspan from my face. I bit one without thinking, and she shuddered and went faster.

—Fuck me —she whispered—. Fuck me like you would have twenty years ago.

I grabbed her by the waist, rolled her underneath me, and drove my cock all the way in with a single thrust. She screamed, covering her mouth with the back of her hand. I spread her legs wide, put her knees to her chest, and buried myself in her cunt with a hard, dry, relentless rhythm. The bed creaked. Mariana dug her nails into my back, bit my shoulder, begged for more in my ear with words I had never imagined coming out of her mouth.

—Harder, Daddy, fuck me harder, don’t stop, just like that.

The word stopped me for half a second. Not because of guilt. Because of something more complicated than guilt, something I don’t have words to name. Then I kept going. Harder still. I laid her on her side, one leg raised, and entered her from that angle while I stroked her clit with my thumb. I turned her over and put her on all fours, face against the pillow and ass raised, and grabbed one tit with one hand and her hair with the other while I fucked her from behind. Her cunt made a wet, splashing sound every time I drove all the way in. I slapped her ass and left my red handprint there. She moaned and pushed her ass back against me, wanting deeper.

—I’m gonna come —she said with her face pressed into the pillow—. I’m gonna come, Daddy, don’t stop, keep going.

I fucked her faster, holding her by the hips, watching her back arch and her tits swing underneath her. I felt her cunt clenching around me in spasms, her whole body trembling, a muffled cry escaping into the pillow. She came, soaking my cock and my thighs, and that squeeze sent me over the edge. I put her back on her back at the last second, opened her legs, and buried my cock all the way in. Mariana leaned forward, planted her hands on my chest, and kissed me with her mouth open while I dug my fingers into her thighs.

I came inside her. I hadn’t planned it. She didn’t push me away either. I felt myself shoot three, four thick spurts inside her cunt, and she pressed her legs against my waist so I wouldn’t slip out, so she could take all of it. I emptied myself completely. We stayed there, her on top, both of us breathing as if we’d climbed six flights of stairs. My cum started leaking down her thigh when I finally pulled out. I brushed the wet hair from her forehead and kissed her temple.

—I don’t regret it —she said, before I could say anything.

—Neither do I.

It was half a lie. But half-lies between two lovers are the only honest way to begin.

***

Tomás came back from school an hour later. Mariana got up, showered, changed, and went downstairs to open the door for him like any other afternoon. I stayed in bed listening to them laugh in the kitchen. Something had broken and something had begun, all at the same time.

That same night, after putting the boy to bed, Mariana slipped into my bed. She said nothing when she came in. She pulled back the sheet, settled against me, and found my cock with her hand. She grabbed it while it was still sleepy, soft, and worked it slowly until it was fully hard. Then she slid down my body and took it into her mouth again, sucking me in the dark, breathing hard. I felt her head moving up and down my cock, hearing the wet sound of her mouth in the silence of the hallway. When I was close, she let go and climbed on top of me. She took me in slowly, attentive to the hallway, and began to move in silence, her hands braced on my chest. I grabbed her ass with both hands and guided her from below, squeezing her cheeks every time she lowered herself. She bit her lip so she wouldn’t moan. When she came, she collapsed over me and muffled the cry against my neck. I came seconds later, inside her again, feeling her cunt squeeze me to the very last drop. When we were done, she fell asleep with her head on my chest and my cum dripping inside her. I lay there staring at the ceiling for an hour, wondering what kind of man I was.

The answer came the next day: I was the man who was going to do it again.

And we did. Every night for a month. After that we stopped counting. Mariana put Tomás to bed, waited fifteen minutes, crossed the hall barefoot, and came into my room. Sometimes we made love urgently, as if someone were about to take it away from us, and she climbed on top and fucked my cock with her eyes closed, biting her knuckles so as not to wake the boy. Other times, slowly, talking between touches, and I licked her cunt for half an hour, sucking her clit until she came two, three times in a row against my mouth. I learned she liked being kissed on the inner thighs and having me bite slowly as I moved up toward her cunt. That she laughed without meaning to when I bit her ear. That she liked me pulling her hair while I fucked her from behind. That she had a silent orgasm, a charged silence, in which she clenched her teeth and dug her nails into me, and another noisy one, rarer, reserved for when the boy was far away, a deep cry in which she begged me by name. I also learned she liked swallowing my cum, pulling my cock out of her mouth at the last second and taking the load on her tongue, showing it to me with a smile before swallowing.

I bought boxes of condoms discreetly, at the pharmacy in the next neighborhood. I didn’t want to risk a pregnancy, not for me — everything was already lost — but for her. For her life, for the complication. She laughed the first time she saw the box on my nightstand.

—You’ve got that many plans? —she asked me.

—All the ones you let me have.

That night I tore through the whole pack. I kept putting them on one after another, and every time I finished in one, she got my cock hard again with her mouth and asked for another. She let herself be fucked on her back, on her stomach, sitting on top of me, standing against the wall with one leg over my hip. At one point she sucked me with the condom on to take it off, then without anything, promising she’d let me come inside her that last time. She kept her promise.

***

We’ve been like this for almost a year. Tomás turned eleven and suspects nothing, or maybe suspects everything and doesn’t care. Children get used to the love they see, whatever it is. Mariana still works at the law office. I still design magazines. We’ve started talking about moving. Another city, one where nobody knows us, one where she can introduce herself as my wife without having to explain anything. It won’t be easy. Almost nothing that matters is.

But I look at her asleep beside me, naked, her hair spread over the pillow and her hand resting on my cock as if it were hers, and I think that what we are doesn’t resemble anything else I’ve ever known. Guilt comes, yes. Guilt comes and goes like the waves. But there is something stronger than guilt, and it’s called habit, and it’s called desire, and it’s called — though it costs me to write it — love.

And for love, a man is willing to do almost anything. Even learn how to be another man.