The Storm That Left Me Alone with My Father

There are confessions that stay inside and never find their way out. This is mine, the one I never told the girls in the group even though every Wednesday we got together to tell each other things nobody should know. I told them about a kiss with a cousin. I told them about a threesome with two workshop classmates. I even told them about the literature teacher. But not this. This is mine and his alone.

I was nineteen that spring. We lived in a low house on the outskirts of Mendoza, with a long yard and a tin roof that rumbled when it rained hard. My mother had just gone to take care of my grandmother, who had come down with a nasty bronchitis and did not want to leave her house for anything in the world. I told Mom not to worry, that I could manage with Dad. And she left, calm.

My father’s name was Esteban, and he was the most serious man I ever knew. One of those men who never raise their voice and, for that very reason, command twice as much respect. The girls at the club always told me I was lucky to have a father like that, tall, broad-backed, with a smile that appeared every three weeks and disappeared just as fast. I laughed and changed the subject. A daughter does not think of her father that way. She shouldn’t.

The first night without Mom it started raining at nine. By eleven it was a storm. The wind came in through the old window frames and whistled down the hallways. I had dinner alone in the kitchen, washed the two plates, and went up to my room to read. But the thunder had my nerves in my throat. At two in the morning, still awake, I did what I used to do as a child when the power went out: I grabbed my pillow and went to my parents’ bedroom.

My father was asleep on his back, breathing slowly. I lay down on Mom’s side, turned my back to him, and closed my eyes. His smell was in the sheets. I fell asleep right away.

I woke up at three. The bed beside me was empty. A warm light seeped through the crack under the bathroom door, and from the bedroom came the low murmur of the television. I thought he had gotten up to use the bathroom and stayed up watching something so he wouldn’t have to go back to sleep. I turned toward the screen, still half asleep.

What I saw woke me up completely.

On the television, a girl about my age was riding a much older man. The camera lingered on the details, on the way she settled herself over him, on how she breathed with her mouth open. The man had a huge cock, thick, impossible to ignore, something that under any other circumstances would have made me change the channel on reflex. That night I didn’t change anything. I kept watching the girl take it down her throat with her whole mouth, drool over the shaft, choke and push it back in until it hit the back of her throat while he held her head. I stayed there, frozen, my heart pounding against my ribs and my cunt starting to burn.

I began to feel a heat that had nothing to do with the weather. The storm was still outside, the thunder still far off, but inside I was no longer hearing any of it. My hand went on its own to the hem of my nightgown, and beneath it, without thinking too much, it stayed. I bit my lips so I wouldn’t make a sound. I knew my father was only a few feet from me, behind the bathroom door, and instead of stopping me, that made me breathe faster.

The girl on the screen slid down the man’s body and started sucking him hungrily, licking his balls, massaging his cock with one hand while she buried it in her mouth again. I heard a creak in the hall. I pulled my hand away, covered myself up to the neck with the sheet, and pretended to be asleep.

My father came in without a sound. I heard him sit on the edge of the bed. He didn’t move for a long while. Then I heard his breathing change. I did not dare open my eyes. I did not want to confirm anything I was imagining.

“Are you awake?” he asked at last, almost without a voice.

I didn’t answer. I waited. I counted to ten. I counted to twenty. Then I turned my head and looked at him.

He was facing away from the screen, a towel crossed over his waist. The blue light from the television reached his profile. His eyes were closed, as if he were trying not to be there. I sat up in bed. He did not open his eyes.

“Dad,” I said, and my voice sounded completely different from the one I knew.

Don’t turn back. If you open your mouth again, you won’t be able to go back.

But my body had already decided. I knelt on the mattress, crawled to him, and pulled the towel away with two fingers. What appeared below made me hesitate for a second, not because of the image, but because of how absurd the situation was. He was my father. It was him. But the cock between his legs, hard, throbbing, pointed at me, left no doubt about what was happening in that room.

I took it in my hand first, feeling the heat of his skin, the pronounced vein, the foreskin tightening beneath my fingers. I licked it slowly, first the tip, then with my whole tongue, sucking the thick drop that beaded at the end. I couldn’t fit it all in my mouth, so I went down and kissed his balls, ran my tongue beneath them, gently bit the skin of his thigh. He breathed hard, once, as if he were just remembering he had lungs. And then he put a hand on the back of my neck. He didn’t push. He just left it there, heavy, setting a rhythm that was not a request but recognition. I took him deeper, choked a little, and felt his hips tense when my throat brushed the base.

I pulled down his clothes clumsily and moved away just enough to see him properly. His chest was rising and falling, his jaw clenched, his gaze lost somewhere on the ceiling. He spread my legs with a hand on my knee and I understood. I pulled my nightgown over my head and stood naked in front of him, my nipples hard, my skin burning with desire and shame. He looked me over without saying a word. Then he grabbed my waist and sat me on his face first, between my thighs, and ate me as if he wanted to erase all the fear left in me with his tongue. I moaned when he parted me with his fingers and found my clit, licking me slowly, insistently, until I was trembling.

I laid him back. I climbed on top. I settled over him carefully, letting the wetness open the way. It hurt a little at first when he pressed the head of his cock against my entrance and began to enter me slowly, stretching me open with a thick, hot, brutal pressure. Then it stopped hurting. And it became something else, something I had never felt with any of the boys I’d been with. I moved slowly, feeling how he filled me, how he rubbed inside me with a force that tore short gasps from me. I moved faster, leaned forward to feel him deeper, to make his cock hit that spot inside me that turned everything white. He held me by the hips, pounding up into me with firm thrusts, one after another, until I could no longer keep the rhythm and had to cling to his shoulders. When I came, it was a shudder that started in my legs and climbed to my shoulders, a discharge so strong it nearly folded me in half. I collapsed on top of him, pressed against his chest, my breathing shattered and my face wet with tears. I cried without knowing why.

He didn’t speak either. He stroked my hair. He kept moving inside me slowly, again and again, until he tensed all at once and let out a hot load that filled me from within, thick, overflowing between my thighs when he pulled out just a little. He switched off the television with the remote without looking. We stayed like that, not moving, until it stopped raining outside.

***

We showered together at dawn. The bathroom filled with steam and the water came down on us in heavy streams, sliding over our shoulders, our chests, between our legs. Before turning off the tap, I took his face in both hands and kissed him like any ordinary boyfriend. He kissed me back, pressed me against the wall, slid two fingers between my lower lips to check that I was still wet, and I arched, still sensitive from the night before. We didn’t say anything. Words would have ruined everything.

That day I went to college. In the midday huddle, the girls asked me why I was being so quiet. I made up a menstrual cramp. I laughed when someone cracked a joke about law professors. At three I checked the time. At four I started counting the hours until I could go home. At six I called him. I asked what time he was getting off. My voice came out like I was flirting with a stranger in a bar.

“At nine I’ll be home,” he said.

“I’ll have dinner ready for you,” I said.

I cooked something light, a salad and baked milanesas. When he came through the door, he slid a hand around my waist without greeting me first, as if we were something different from what we were. We ate without talking about the night before. He said only one sentence while pouring himself some water:

“Energy gets spent. We have to eat.”

I laughed harder than the line deserved. I felt ridiculous. I felt happy.

That night was different. The first time had been an accident dressed up as a storm. That night was a decision. We showered together, with no urgency, with soap and trivial conversation about the day. Then we got into bed, under the sheet, and started touching each other as if we had all the time in the world. He opened my legs calmly, licked me slowly until I was writhing, slid his fingers into me until I was panting, and when I wanted to return the favor, I followed the hardness already throbbing against his belly. I sucked his cock until I heard him losing control, until he told me to keep going, not to stop, in that deep voice that made my thighs clamp together. I rode him before he fell asleep, lowering myself onto him until I felt him enter me again, deep, brushing inside me as if he knew me by heart. He held me beneath the ribs so I wouldn’t fall. I came twice, back to back, with no rest, moaning against his shoulder. He held out until the end, and when he finished he said my name. He said it softly. That was the only thing he said to me.

***

Six days passed like that. Six days of coming home from college and checking the time. Six frugal dinners, six long showers, six nights in the master bed. I learned his body by heart: the mole on his shoulder blade, the old scar on his side, the way his thighs tightened before he came. Never in my life had I focused so much on another person. I learned the rhythm of his breathing when he was about to cum, the way he held my waist to mark the thrust, the pressure of his fingers on my hips when he wanted me to stay still while he fucked me deeper. I knew his face of pleasure, the hardened jaw, the tiny groan that escaped him when I kissed his neck or licked the base of his cock until he trembled. Sometimes I made him come in my mouth, hot and salty, and I stayed there watching him suck in air afterward, eyes closed, as if the whole world had shrunk to that room and the two of us.

On the seventh day, Mom called at eleven in the morning. Grandma was better. She wanted to come back. I told her I’d go pick her up myself. When I hung up, I sat on the kitchen floor and put my hands over my face. I didn’t cry. But I came close.

That last night we didn’t spend in the master bed. My father spent it on the living room couch, the television on mute. I, in my room, with the door open. We didn’t touch. We talked in whispers from one room to the other, like two kids staying up late at camp.

“There will be other moments,” he told me in the dark.

“When?” I asked.

“When we can.”

***

That was four years ago. I have a boyfriend named Mauricio, who is good to me and cooks better than I do. I love him. One day, if life gives me the nerve, I might even marry him. He suspects nothing. He has no reason to.

But every so often, when Mom travels for work or when there’s a weekend that happens to line up with Mauricio going out with his friends, I stop by my parents’ house. I let Dad know with a short call. I arrive, have dinner with him, shower. And I miss him even before I leave. I miss him when I’m with him. I miss him when I’m not.

The girls still get together on Wednesdays to tell each other things nobody should know. I still go. I still tell them about the cousin, about the workshop classmates, about the literature professor. I laugh with them. Sometimes I make up something new so I don’t fall behind.

But this, I’m never going to tell. This stays here, between whoever is reading and me, who for once in my life dared to write it down.