The Afternoon My Daughter Decided to Take Care of Me

When Mariana and I signed the divorce papers, the only thing that truly hurt me was thinking about Aitana. My daughter and I had been partners in crime since she was old enough to walk: afternoons in the square, bad movies on Sundays, the secrets her mother never suspected. When I told her that her mother and I were separating, she didn’t cry. She pressed her lips together, nodded, and told me she’d known for months that this was going to happen.

She decided to stay with Mariana, and that seemed like the most sensible thing. I moved into a small apartment downtown, with two rooms and a window overlooking a noisy avenue. I thought it would be weeks before Aitana came to see me; instead, she showed up the following Tuesday with a cardboard box full of things for my kitchen: a new set of knives, two mugs, a checked tablecloth she had picked out herself.

—I’m not letting you live like a castaway —she told me, setting the box down on the counter—. I’m coming by often. Get used to it.

She had just turned eighteen. I watched her put things away in their place with a meticulous order that reminded me of her mother, and for the first time in my life I thought that my daughter was no longer a child.

The months passed, and Aitana kept her promise. She came two or three times a week, sometimes just for coffee, other times to stay for dinner and sleep on the sofa. She finished high school, took an administration course, and got a job at a travel agency six blocks from my apartment. From then on, lunch became routine. She rang the bell at exactly one, purse slung over her shoulder and heels already worn down from so much walking.

Meanwhile, I tried to put myself back together. I dated a coworker, Camila, a divorced woman like me, two years younger, who understood what it meant to start from zero. I introduced her to Aitana one afternoon, in neutral territory, over coffee, thinking that was the proper way to do things.

Aitana was polite. She smiled at the exact right moments. Ordered tea, didn’t finish half of it. When Camila got up to go to the bathroom, my daughter looked at me with that expression I had known since she was eight, the one she wore when she disliked something but hadn’t yet decided how to fight it.

—She’s not for you —she told me in a low voice.

—Aitana…

—She’s not.

That same week, the arguments started. Aitana would arrive at the apartment and, instead of saying hello, ask whether I’d been with her. She would find excuses to point out Camila’s flaws: the way she laughed too loudly, the nails painted a color that “didn’t suit her,” a comment about a coworker that my daughter found “weird.”

—You’re not seeing what I see —she would repeat—. Trust me. I know you better than you know yourself.

I held out for three weeks. Then, one night, I told Camila we couldn’t go on. She didn’t ask why. I think she already suspected.

***

The truth is, ending things with Camila didn’t destroy me. What I was looking for wasn’t a partner, not at that moment. What I needed was something else, something simpler and dirtier, someone I wouldn’t have to talk to afterward.

And that was the problem, because I couldn’t think clearly when it came to women. Not since Aitana had started dressing the way she dressed now. Short skirts that rode up when she sat on my sofa. Shirts that came open one button too many when she bent over to pour herself wine. That sweet, soft perfume she left on my pillow when she slept in my bed and I slept on the sofa because one of us had had too much to drink.

I admit it. One afternoon, after she left, I locked myself in the bathroom and masturbated thinking about my daughter. I did it quickly, ashamed, and then washed my hands as if I could scrub the image off my body. But the image came back. It came back the following week, and the week after that. I started waiting for the moment she left so I could slip into the bathroom and let out that tension I didn’t know where else to put.

I needed a lover. A woman I could use to shut all that off. A distraction.

I met Lucía at a coworker’s birthday party. Thirty-two years old, separated, an engineer. She had a frank laugh and a way of looking at me that made me think maybe she could save me. We started seeing each other on Fridays, and for the first time in months I slept through the night without dreaming about things I shouldn’t have been dreaming about.

I didn’t tell Aitana. I thought this time I could handle it better.

I was wrong.

***

It was a Sunday in the middle of the afternoon. Lucía had come for lunch. We were standing by the window, finishing our coffee, and she rose onto her toes to give me a short kiss, almost a brush of the lips.

The door opened at that exact moment.

Aitana had a key to the apartment. She never rang the bell.

She came in with a supermarket bag in one hand and stood in the middle of the living room, staring at us. Lucía stepped back instinctively. I didn’t move.

—Good afternoon —my daughter said, with a strange voice, too calm—. I didn’t know you had company.

—Aitana, this is Lucía.

—Nice to meet you —Lucía said, trying to smile.

—I’m his daughter. I came to drop off the groceries.

Aitana walked into the kitchen, set the bag carefully on the counter, and came back to the living room. She stood between Lucía and me, looked at the other woman, and said in that same calm voice:

—My dad already has someone taking care of him. You don’t need to come back.

Lucía looked at me. I didn’t know what to say.

Five minutes later we were alone.

I took my daughter by the arm, not hard but firmly, and led her to the sofa. I asked her to sit down. She sat, crossing her legs, and her skirt rode up to mid-thigh. She didn’t smooth it back down.

—You can’t keep doing this —I said—. You have no right.

—No right to what?

—To decide who I date. To stick yourself into my life.

—I stick myself into your life because you don’t know how to take care of it by yourself.

—Aitana, I’m an adult man. I have needs. You can’t expect me to live like a monk just because you don’t like any woman I know.

I spoke without thinking. When I finished saying it, I regretted it, because the word “needs” had come out loaded with more than I wanted. Aitana heard it and didn’t say anything for a long while. She looked at her knees. Then she lifted her head and looked at me with an expression I had never seen on her before.

—Needs? —she repeated.

—Yes.

—What kind of needs?

—Don’t do this to me.

—Tell me.

I sighed. Ran a hand over my face.

—Sex, Aitana. I need to have sex with someone. I need a woman in my bed. Is that enough for you?

I wasn’t expecting her to smile. But she did. A brief smile, almost melancholy, as if she had been waiting for that sentence for months.

—We can fix that too —she said.

It took me a while to understand what she had said. When I did, the blood drained from my body.

—What?

She stood up from the sofa. She came closer to me, leaned in, and kissed me on the cheek, very near the corner of my mouth. I smelled her perfume, the same as always, and something else beneath it, something warmer, closer.

—Come with me to the bathroom —she said.

***

I don’t know exactly when I decided to follow her. I know my legs moved before my head could stop them. The bathroom door closed behind us and I stood against the cold tiles, my back pressed to them, my hands shaking.

Aitana knelt in front of me. She didn’t say anything. She looked up at me, eyes open, waiting for me to say no.

I didn’t say it.

Her hands unbuckled my belt with a calm that didn’t seem like hers, not the girl who argued with me about anything, the one who got irritated if I poured my coffee wrong. She pulled my pants down to my ankles. Pulled down my boxer briefs. I was already hard, and I was embarrassed, and the embarrassment made me harder still.

—Daddy —she murmured, looking up at me.

—Aitana, this…

—Shh.

Her fingers were warm and soft, the way I remembered them from when we were something else, when she used to grab my hand crossing the street. She wrapped her hand around me. The sensation made me close my eyes. I rested my head against the tiles.

Then I felt her tongue.

She started at the tip, slowly, like she was tasting something unfamiliar. She traced the whole length with her mouth open, leaving me wet and sensitive to the bathroom air. She ran her tongue along the base, then back up again. Each movement was precise, unhurried, as if she had rehearsed it a thousand times in her head.

I tried to think of something, anything, a word, an image, whatever would pull me out of the place I was in. I couldn’t.

When she took all of me into her mouth, I groaned. I groaned without meaning to, too loudly. She kept going, taking me to the back of her throat and coming back up again, in a rhythm that felt studied. Her hands clutched at my thighs. I felt her nails through the fabric of my pants pooled around my ankles.

—Look at me —she said, letting me go for a second.

I looked down. My daughter was kneeling in front of me, my cock resting against her cheek, her eyes shining.

—Look at me the whole time.

I obeyed.

She took me back into her mouth and I watched her as she had asked. I saw every movement. I saw how her cheeks hollowed as she sucked, how she closed her eyes when she settled her breathing. I saw her free hand rise to my hip and stay there, pinning me against the wall so I couldn’t move.

I held on as long as I could. I felt everything gather at the base of my spine, the bathroom air turning thick. I tried to warn her. I opened my mouth and no voice came out. Aitana lifted her gaze at that moment, and I saw she already knew. She tightened. She sped up.

I came in her mouth with a tremor that made my knees buckle. She didn’t pull away. She held me through the last spasm, her mouth still, taking all of it. Then she swallowed. I watched her swallow, slowly, eyes closed, and thought I was going to faint against the tiles.

She stuck out her tongue and wiped a trace from the corner of her lip with a finger.

She got to her feet. She fixed her hair in the mirror, as if nothing had happened. She looked at me through the reflection.

—I hope you’re calm now —she said—. And I hope you don’t see her again.

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.

My daughter walked out of the bathroom slowly. I heard her footsteps in the hall, the apartment door opening and closing. The lock. The elevator in the distance.

I stayed pressed against the tiles, my pants still around my ankles, my legs shaking in a way they had never shaken before.

Outside, the avenue kept making the same noise as always.