The Account My Daughter Didn’t Know I Followed

I’m forty-six years old and I’ve been living alone for four years in an apartment in Valencia’s Ruzafa neighborhood. I separated from Carmen without much drama: we had loved each other, we had our daughter, and at some point we stopped making sense to each other. Now she lives with her partner in the same city, and I spend my days between work, the occasional match on TV, and that parallel life I’ve always led in silence.

Because I’ve always had that parallel life. I don’t talk about it because there’s no way to explain it without people forming an image of you that isn’t exactly right but isn’t entirely wrong either. I like the things people don’t say out loud. I like knowing what’s behind closed doors, what people think when no one is watching them, what they desire and won’t admit.

I’ve been this way all my life and I’m not going to change now.

***

My daughter Claudia is twenty-two. She studied graphic design, works as a waitress on weekends, and has more worldliness than she should for her age, though that too came from me. She comes home to sleep from time to time, when it’s convenient to go out from my place or when she feels like having dinner with her father. We have a good relationship, the kind parents and children have when they don’t live together: no friction, no day-to-day wear and tear.

I followed her on Instagram like any father would. Photos with friends, the occasional sunset, the kind of content people her age post. Nothing that really caught my attention.

Until one November night, scrolling through my phone before bed, the algorithm suggested a profile I didn’t recognize at first. The username meant nothing to me, but something in the cover image stopped me. I zoomed in. Looked at it twice.

It was Claudia.

A different profile. Private. More than a thousand followers. And in the bio, a link.

It took me less than a minute to click.

***

It was an adult-content platform. The monthly subscription cost ten euros.

I stared at the screen for quite a while. Then I went to the kitchen, drank some water, came back to the sofa, and kept staring at the screen.

Close this and forget it.

I didn’t close it.

I created an account with a fake name, used a prepaid card I kept in my desk drawer, and subscribed.

The first video opened with Claudia sitting on the edge of her bed, wearing a cropped T-shirt and no bra, talking to the camera as if she were talking to a lover. She slowly pulled her shirt up, first exposing one breast and then the other, and pinched her nipples until they stood hard while she looked into the lens with a half-smile. Then she slipped a hand inside her panties and started touching herself, and you could hear her breathing, and you could hear the wet sound of her fingers moving between the lips of her cunt.

In the second video she was already naked, lying on her back, legs spread wide toward the camera. She licked two fingers and shoved them inside, working them in and out, arching her back, moaning softly. Then she took out a pink vibrator and ran it over her clit until she came for real, legs trembling and a long moan rising from deep in her throat.

In the third she was sucking off a guy whose torso was the only part of him you could see. She took his cock all the way into her mouth, down to the root, and when she pulled it out strands of saliva hung from her chin. She looked him in the eyes while she sucked him, never looking away, and every so often she’d pull it all the way out to lick his balls very slowly with her tongue.

It was her voice. It was the way she tilted her head when she was thinking. It was the small scar on her left shoulder from when she fell in the schoolyard at nine.

I watched four videos that night. I didn’t sleep well. I jerked off twice before turning off my phone and I couldn’t bring myself to look in the bathroom mirror afterward. The next day I watched five more.

***

I can’t explain exactly what I felt during those first weeks. The conflict is too obvious not to recognize, and at the same time there was nothing concrete to recognize because there was no action, no crossing of any boundary other than the ones inside my own head.

I only watched. I only thought. I only stayed alone in the apartment with the screen lit up and that image I couldn’t switch off.

I started frequenting certain forums where people talk about this kind of thing without giving their names. I wrote in one of them, very carefully, about the situation: that I had discovered my adult daughter had content like that and that I didn’t really know what to do with what I was feeling. The responses were varied. Most of them, predictable.

But one of the private messages I received was different.

It was from someone who called himself Rodrigo. Fifty years old, also divorced, also with an inner life he didn’t show at work or at family dinners. He wrote to me without judging, without advising, without asking questions that didn’t belong. He just said he understood.

We talked for weeks. First about general things, then more specific ones. It was he who, much later, told me about the possibility of doing something he called a controlled scene: a prearranged encounter with a person who explicitly accepts a role, within clear limits.

I didn’t consider it seriously until I started thinking that maybe it was the only way to get that out of my head, at least for a while.

***

Claudia kept coming over some weekends. We’d have dinner, watch something on TV, she’d tell me things about her life, just enough. Everything the same as before.

Except it wasn’t the same anymore.

One afternoon, after she left, I sat on the sofa doing nothing for quite a while. Then I got up, went to the door of her room, and stood in the doorway looking at the made bed, the desk chair with a forgotten T-shirt on it.

I didn’t go in. I closed the door and went to the other end of the apartment.

This can’t keep going on like this.

But it did keep going on for a few more weeks.

***

I found Valeria on an adult services platform. Her profile said she was twenty-four, discreet, open to talking before any meeting. I sent her a long message explaining what I had in mind, with all the care and precision I could manage. I waited for her reply with a mix of nerves and something close to relief at having said it out loud for the first time.

She answered the next day. Said she understood perfectly.

We arranged to meet at a bar before the appointment. Valeria had dark, straight hair, was just under five foot three, and had a way of moving that reminded me of Claudia from the very first moment, though they didn’t really resemble each other in their features. It was something in her posture. In the way she rested her elbows on the table when she listened.

I explained what I wanted. She listened without changing expression, asked a few specific questions, clarified her boundaries precisely. Then she said yes.

—One condition —I said before getting up—. You stay in character until I tell you otherwise.

—Understood —she replied.

***

Back at the apartment, I asked her to use Claudia’s room. I had left something on the bed for her to put on: an old T-shirt of my daughter’s that had been forgotten in a drawer, with no panties underneath. I waited in the living room listening to her footsteps, the sound of the door closing, the silence after.

When Valeria opened the door and appeared in the hallway, I stayed still.

It was the same room. The same bed with the dark bedspread my daughter had chosen two summers earlier. The same dim light with the blinds half-lowered. And someone who, from that angle, in those clothes, could be anyone I wanted her to be.

I went in slowly.

I sat on the edge of the bed and put a hand on her back. She was breathing calmly, eyes closed, not moving.

—I’ve been thinking about this for a long time —I said softly—. Longer than I should have.

No answer came. I wasn’t expecting one.

I talked to her for a while. I told her things I hadn’t told anyone, things I had kept in the darkest corners of that parallel life I’ve always led. Things I thought when Claudia left the apartment on Sunday afternoons and I stayed there staring at the closed door. Things that had nowhere to go.

After a long moment, Valeria moved slowly and turned toward me. She looked at me without saying anything. Then she extended her hand and rested it on my arm.

—Shall we go on? —she asked quietly.

—Yes —I said.

I lifted her T-shirt to her shoulders and bared her tits, small, with dark nipples already hard. I ran my tongue over one and then the other, very slowly, nipping at them, and she arched her back and let out the first moan of the night. I slid my hand down her belly to her cunt and found her already soaking wet, with swollen lips, and I shoved two fingers in at once. She was so wet you could hear the slick sound every time I pulled them out and pushed them back in.

—Daddy —she whispered suddenly, without me having asked her to.

My breath caught. I looked at her. She held my gaze without blinking and said it again, lower this time, almost against my ear.

—Daddy, please.

I laid her on her back and spread her legs. I knelt on the floor, my face between her thighs, and ate her cunt like I’d been waiting months for that moment. I licked from bottom to top, slow, stopping at her clit, sucking it between my lips, and she buried her hands in my hair and moved her hips against my mouth. I slid my tongue all the way inside her, as deep as I could, and felt her tighten. When she came, she did it biting her forearm so she wouldn’t scream, her legs closing around my head.

I got up, stripped completely, and climbed on top of her. She was right in front of me and I looked into her eyes, and for a moment I can’t properly describe her face was the face I wanted it to be. I grabbed her hair with one hand and guided my cock to the entrance of her cunt with the other. I pushed in slowly, feeling how she opened around me, how she swallowed me whole, until I drove it all the way in at once and she let out a long moan against my neck.

I fucked her slowly at first, with deep thrusts, looking at her face, searching in her expression for what I couldn’t find anywhere else. Then I put her on all fours, turned away from me, with her head buried in my daughter’s pillow and her ass raised, and I shoved my cock back in to the hilt. I grabbed her hips with both hands and started pounding her hard, without restraint, hearing my balls slap against her every time I went in all the way. I pulled her hair, ran my thumb over her asshole, squeezing it a little, gave her ass a slap that left the imprint of my hand on her skin.

—Keep saying it —I asked, my voice breaking.

—Daddy —she panted each time I drove into her—. Daddy, harder, daddy.

I put a hand on the back of her neck and pressed her farther down against the mattress while I kept fucking her. She slipped a hand under her body and rubbed her clit in time with my thrusts, and at some point she came again, squeezing my cock from the inside with spasms that almost made me finish right there.

I turned her over. I wanted to see her face for the end. I laid her on her back, lifted her legs onto my shoulders and sank into her to the hilt, so deep that she let out a little cry. I fucked her like that, folded in half, her face a hand’s breadth from mine, staring straight at her, and when I felt it coming I told her.

—I’m coming.

—Inside —she said without hesitation, following the script to the end—. Come inside, daddy.

I came in spurts inside her with an animal groan that tore out of some place I didn’t know existed. I thrust four or five more times, emptying myself completely, and stayed there for a moment, on top of her, my cock still inside, shaking. I clung to that instant with the same desperation with which one clings to dreams just before waking. It didn’t last long, but it lasted long enough.

I pulled out of her slowly and lay down beside her. I watched the semen stream down the inside of her thigh and stain my daughter’s dark bedspread, and instead of feeling sorrow or shame I felt a deep relief I hadn’t expected. Valeria stayed still beside me, saying nothing, her T-shirt still up and her breathing slow.

—Are you okay? —she asked after a while.

—Yes —I replied—. I think so.

***

We stayed talking for almost an hour. She changed clothes, I made coffee, and the two of us sat in the living room with that strange calm that meaningful conversations leave behind.

—Did it help? —she asked me at one point.

I thought about the answer before giving it.

—I don’t know if “help” is the right word. But it served some purpose.

Valeria nodded as if that made sense.

—Most of the people who come don’t want what they think they want —she said—. They want to be able to say it without anyone running away.

I didn’t answer. But it seemed to me she was right.

***

Claudia keeps posting content on her profile. I’m still subscribed, still watching the videos, still thinking about her in ways I’m not proud of and haven’t found a way to stop.

I still see Valeria once a month. Sometimes we do scenes. Sometimes we just talk.

My relationship with my daughter remains the same on the outside: dinners every two or three weeks, messages now and then, the kind of bond a father and daughter have when they love each other but no longer need one another to live. She doesn’t know anything. I’m still carrying what I know.

There are things that have no solution and no clean resolution. They only have the weight one learns to live with.

I’ve been learning for a long time.