What My Mother Taught Me That Summer

My name is Andrés. I’m nineteen years old and I live in a gated development on the outskirts of Valencia, in a house with four bathrooms, a garden maintained by an outside service, and security cameras on every corner. The kind of house where the neighbors greet each other in the lobby and don’t ask anything else.

My father, Rodrigo, is an infrastructure consultant. He travels so much that sometimes I think airports are his real home. He comes home at Christmas with expensive gifts that never quite hit the mark and leaves before Three Kings’ Day. For him, we’re just another line item in the monthly budget: the house, school, Elena’s gym membership.

Elena, my mother, is forty-two and looks thirty-five. Three mornings a week at the gym, two afternoons with the nutritionist, and a discipline about her appearance that always struck me as almost martial. She’s one of those women who walk into a restaurant and make people turn their heads without quite knowing why. My classmates in college said it shamelessly when they came over. I pretended not to care.

***

It all started on a July afternoon.

I had brought home a girl from my master’s program, Sofía, one of those people who are too smart to be patient. What happened in my room was brief and, above all, embarrassing: I yanked down her panties with clumsy hands, shoved it in her with barely any wetness, and came two minutes later, with gasps that sounded more like an apology than pleasure. Sofía wiped my cum off her thigh with a tissue, left on the excuse of an expected call, and never answered my messages again.

Elena saw it from the upstairs terrace. She didn’t tell me that day. She saved it for dinner.

That night we ate alone, as we almost always did. She had opened a bottle of wine she reserved for important guests. She poured me a glass without asking.

—You don’t know what you’re doing —she told me, after a long silence, not lifting her eyes from her glass—. With women. You have no idea.

I didn’t answer. I kept looking at my plate.

—Your father never knew either. I suppose it’s something that runs in the surname. —She swirled the glass between her fingers—. I wonder if that girl today left here asking herself what she’d done wrong, or if she knew from the start that you were the problem. You came right away, didn’t you? I saw it on her face when she came down the stairs.

The humiliation was physical. It rose from my stomach to my face.

I stood up to leave. She stopped me with her hand on my wrist, a firm, dry grip.

—Sit down.

It wasn’t a request. It was the same tone she used when I was little and had done something I shouldn’t have. I sat down.

—I’m not attacking you. I’m diagnosing you. There’s a difference. —She set the glass down on the table—. If you’re going to move through the world with that surname, you need to learn how to fuck a woman. And they don’t teach you that at university.

***

What happened next wasn’t spontaneous or chaotic. Elena wasn’t a woman of impulses. She was methodical, calculated, and deliberate in everything she did.

She led me to her bedroom, that room that always smelled of cedar and something warm I never quite identified. She locked the door, a metallic, dry click that thundered in my chest. The bed was large, with white sheets, immaculate like everything else of hers.

She sat on the edge. Crossed her legs. Looked at me with the expression she used to assess contracts or restaurant menus.

—Take off your clothes —she said—. Slowly.

My hands didn’t cooperate. The belt took twice as long as usual. The shirt fell to the floor, then the trousers, and when I pulled down my briefs my cock was already hard just from her eyes on me. I stood naked in front of her, feeling small even though I was taller than her.

Elena didn’t move right away. She watched me in silence, head slightly tilted, like a professor reviewing a late paper. Her eyes traveled from my face to my dick without hurry, without comment, as if she were measuring a tool.

—The body is there. That’s something. You’ve got a good one, better than I expected. —She got to her feet and came closer—. The problem is you don’t know how to use it. You’re too impatient. You treat women as if their cunt were a finish line you have to cross in the shortest possible time.

She raised her hand and traced a line from my collarbone to the center of my chest, and from there kept going down until her open palm closed around my cock. She held it for a second, not squeezing, weighing it. I let out my breath sharply.

—Nothing’s going to happen tonight unless I decide it does. That’s the first lesson: control is yours when you’ve earned it, not because you shout for it.

She started jerking me off very slowly, with two fingers and her thumb, sliding the foreskin up and down with almost cruel calm. Every time I felt myself get fully hard, she loosened her grip. Every time I started to go soft, she sped up just enough to keep me on the edge again.

—See? —she said without looking at my face, eyes fixed on her own hand—. This is what you didn’t do to that girl. This is waiting.

My knees were weak and a clear bead was hanging from the tip. She caught it with her thumb and spread it over the glans with a slow, almost meditative gesture.

—Don’t even think about coming yet. If you come before I tell you to, the lesson ends and you go downstairs to your room. Understood?

—Yes —I said, my voice broken.

—Yes, what?

—Yes, Elena.

***

That first session was a constant correction.

She made me kneel on the rug. She lifted her skirt and slid off her lace panties without any ceremony, let them drop to the floor, and sat back on the edge of the bed with her legs open. Her pussy was almost completely shaved, with a thin strip of dark hair, and her lips were already shining.

—With your tongue. Start on the thighs. And don’t touch my clit until I tell you to.

I kissed the inside of her thighs, the warm, perfumed skin, moving up toward her mound. When I tried to go straight to the center, she yanked my hair back hard.

—I told you no. Around it. Brush my lips with your mouth closed. Let me know your tongue is there before I feel it.

I obeyed. I ran my open mouth over her vulva, breathing on her, biting her outer lips very gently. Elena started moving her hips toward my face, and that was when she loosened her hand in my hair.

—Now the tongue. Flat. Long. From bottom to top. Again. Again.

I licked her the way she dictated, sliding up the wet slit to the hood of her clit and back down again. I pushed my tongue inside her as far as I could, and I felt her shiver. The taste was clean, salty, and filled my mouth every time I breathed.

—Two fingers. Slowly. Curved upward. Find it inside, don’t pound at it.

I slipped in my index and middle fingers, pushing to the knuckle, and found that rough spot she made me press with a slow rhythm. Only then did she let me suck her clit, and I did it with the tip of my tongue, tight little circles, while my fingers went in and out of her soaked cunt. The sound was obscene, slapping and wet, and her head was thrown back but her eyes were not closed: she was looking down at me, controlling me.

—Harder with your fingers. Don’t stop with your tongue. Even if I come all over your face, don’t stop.

She came a few minutes later. Without shouting. Her chest lifted on a deep breath, her thighs tightened around my head, and I felt a warm surge spill over my chin. Even so I kept going, as she had ordered, until she herself pulled me away by the hair.

—Now —she said, breathing through her nose, perfectly composed—. Up. Lie on your back.

I climbed onto the bed. She positioned me in the center and straddled me. She pulled her blouse over her head without unbuttoning it and reached behind her to take off her bra. Two firm, medium-sized tits fell free, with pink, pointed nipples. She brought them to my mouth.

—Suck. One and the other. And use your teeth once in a while, very gently. Same as with the clit. Don’t bite too hard.

I sucked one nipple while pinching the other between two fingers, and she let out a low, guttural gasp, the first genuine reaction I drew from her all night. She grabbed my cock with her right hand, set it at the entrance of her cunt, and lowered herself slowly, impaling herself centimeter by centimeter, never taking her eyes off my face.

A wave of pleasure hit me so brutally that a sharp moan escaped me. Elena covered my mouth with her palm.

—Quiet. And look at me. Look at me or I’ll get up.

When I tried to thrust up into her, she stopped me with two fingers on my lips.

—No. Wait. Let me come to you.

When my hands moved to grab her ass, she calmly moved them away and placed them on her hips.

—Slower. Don’t go where you think you need to go. Stay where you are until I tell you.

She started riding me very slowly, rising until only the tip stayed inside and lowering again until I could feel her to the hilt. Her cunt was so wet every movement sounded like a splash. My teeth were clenched, trying not to come. She noticed.

—If you come now, I won’t let you into this bed again for a month. Learn to hold it. Think about something else. Tell me something boring if you have to.

She taught me to read her body as if it were a language I could learn but didn’t yet know. The exact pressure of my hands on her hips, the rhythm, when to speed up and when to stop completely. She made me look her in the eyes at all times, without exception, even when she herself put a hand on her clit and started rubbing it over my cock.

—Look at me —she would say when I closed my eyelids—. Don’t hide. You’re here with me, with your cock buried all the way inside. I want you to see who decides.

She came a second time, clamping down around me with contractions that made me bite my lip until it bled so I wouldn’t follow her. Only then did she get up, pull my cock out of her cunt, and sit down beside me.

—Now. On your knees in front of me. And come in my hand.

I knelt on the bed. She grabbed my wet cock and jerked me off quickly, watching my thighs tremble. I lasted three or four strokes. I came in spurts over her open palm, in long bursts that emptied me down to my knees. Elena watched my semen pooling in her hand with the same expression she’d worn while judging the wine glass at dinner.

—Better than I thought. But you’re still in a hurry. We’ll work on that tomorrow.

That first night lasted hours. By the end, I was exhausted, my muscles aching and my head completely blank. Elena, on the other hand, got up, put on her silk robe, and brought me a glass of water with the casualness of someone who had just finished a work meeting.

—Better —she told me, setting the glass on the nightstand. She brushed my forehead with her lips—. But there’s still a long way to go. We’ll continue tomorrow.

***

And that’s how summer began.

Rodrigo called on Sundays from some airport. Ten-minute conversations, schedule updates, nothing that really mattered. Elena answered him with the same distant courtesy she used with everyone else in the world, sometimes with my semen still drying inside her thighs.

In the mornings, we had breakfast together in the kitchen. Coffee, fruit, the paper on the tablet screen. She asked me about my master’s program, I talked to her about readings or pending projects. A normal family, from the outside.

In the afternoons, at the hour when the house was quietest, we went up to her bedroom.

The sessions changed week by week. The first ones were pure instruction: technique, posture, rhythm, control of breathing. She made me learn how to eat pussy until my jaw nearly came unhinged, how to fuck her standing up against the dresser while we watched ourselves in the mirror, how to take her from behind with her face down and her hands tied behind her back with her robe belt. Elena corrected without cruelty but without softness either, with the same precision she’d use to review an error-filled report.

—Hurry is the worst flaw a lover can have —she explained one afternoon, while watching me from the edge of the bed with her legs open and two of her fingers sliding in and out of her own cunt to show me the rhythm—. Women aren’t looking for someone who gets there quickly. They’re looking for someone who knows how to stay inside and hold out while they come.

Over time, the corrections diminished. I started anticipating what she wanted before she said it. I learned to distinguish her real reactions from the ones that were only courtesy. I learned when I was supposed to take initiative, grab her by the hair and drag her against the headboard, and when it was better to wait, motionless with my hard cock hanging in the air, until she decided.

One noon she called me into the bathroom while she was showering. I went in. She was kneeling in the stall, naked and wet, and she didn’t even give me time to speak: she pulled down my trousers and took my whole cock in her mouth at once, all the way to her throat. She held my gaze while I choked, eyes watering, lipstick smearing down her cheeks.

—Fuck my mouth —she said between gags, pulling back for a second—. With both hands on the back of my neck. So you know how it’s done from the other side too.

I grabbed her head and drove my hips into her face, in and out, hearing the wet sound of her mouth around my glans. When I was about to come, she took my cock out and put it between her tits, pressing them against me, and I finished over her neck and chin in a long release. She wiped herself with two fingers, sucked them clean without looking away from me, and turned off the tap.

—Get dressed. They’re coming to clean the house.

***

What I hadn’t expected was dependence.

Sofía stopped calling me after two weeks. There were other girls in the master’s program I could have gone out with. I didn’t. Comparing what happened in that room with anything else seemed absurd to me, almost insulting. No twenty-year-old girl was going to be able to come three times in a row on top of me without stopping giving me orders in a low voice.

I waited for the afternoons. I waited for that moment at breakfast when Elena looked at me a certain way and I understood that that afternoon the door would lock.

But what I waited for most, and took me a long time to admit, was her approval.

When she said “like that,” in that neutral tone that in her meant praise, I felt something nothing else had ever given me before. When she corrected me, I spent hours mentally going over what I’d done wrong, what detail had escaped me, in which thrust I’d lost the rhythm.

I stopped going out with my friends. I told them I had master’s work.

It wasn’t entirely a lie. I was learning a lot that summer.

***

In August, something started to change.

I was no longer just the student. I had learned her rhythms with such precision that sometimes I was the one who lay her on her back, spread her legs, and ate her cunt until she came twice before I put anything in her. Elena allowed it, though never with the feeling of yielding, but rather of granting something she had already decided to give.

But I started noticing other things.

When I mentioned at dinner that I’d had lunch with a female coworker, Elena changed the subject with a speed that wasn’t like her. One afternoon I got home half an hour late because I’d been talking with a neighbor in the lobby. That night, in her bedroom, it was different: she climbed on top of me with barely any foreplay, gripping my cock with both hands and driving it all the way in while whispering in my ear, “this cock is mine, do you hear me? Mine,” more intensely, more present, as if she were trying to erase something that had not happened yet. She finished by asking me to come inside her, something she had never allowed before. I felt her clench around my cock while I emptied myself in her cunt, and she bit my shoulder so she wouldn’t scream.

It took me a few days to put a name to it. It was insecurity.

Elena, who had always seemed impenetrable, had cracks.

***

The final proof came on a late-August afternoon.

We had had dinner together on the terrace. I had a glass in my hand and said, without having fully planned it, that I was thinking about renting an apartment in the center. That it was time to have my own space. That several classmates in the master’s program shared a flat near the faculty and that I’d been turning the idea over for weeks.

Elena set her glass on the table without making a sound. She didn’t say anything for several seconds.

—Whatever you want —she finally replied.

That night, when we went up to her room, it was unlike any of the others.

There were no corrections. No instructions. She undressed herself, without any orders involved, and lay on her back with her legs open before I’d finished taking off my shirt. She gave herself over with an urgency that didn’t seem calculated, as if the whole summer had been rehearsal and this was the real premiere.

I ate her cunt until she pulled my hair, asking for more. I gave her everything: my tongue, my fingers, the edge of my teeth on her clit. When I fucked her, I fucked her slowly, looking at her, just as she herself had taught me to do. She wrapped her legs around my waist and crossed them behind me, pushing me deeper every time I thrust.

—Deeper, Andrés. All of it. Don’t hold anything back. —She called me by my name several times, something she almost never did during our sessions—. Fuck me like it’s the last time.

I put her on all fours. I grabbed her hips and took her from behind with long, deep thrusts, watching her face sink into the pillow and the way her cunt squeezed me each time I pulled almost all the way out. She brought one hand to her clit and started rubbing it at the same rhythm I was fucking her. She came with a low moan, biting the sheet, and I still had to hold her with one arm around the waist so she wouldn’t collapse face-first.

I laid her back down. She clutched my shoulders with her fingers dug in hard. I went in and out faster and faster, feeling her wet cunt tightening around me, feeling the pressure gathering at the base of my spine. I came inside her in long waves, my forehead pressed to hers, and she didn’t let go for a long while after it was over. She stayed wrapped around me, my cock still inside her, softening, and my semen sliding very slowly down the inside of her thigh.

—Don’t go —she told me softly, in the dark.

It wasn’t an order. It was something completely different.

***

That was three weeks ago. I’m still here.

I’ve thought a lot about what that summer built. Elena taught me to be a patient lover, capable of reading a woman without her having to explain herself, capable of staying inside a cunt until she comes as many times as she wants. She gave me something I wouldn’t have found anywhere else. But she also created something I hadn’t fully anticipated: she created someone who knows her better than anyone else in the world.

I know when she’s nervous even if she seems calm. I know when she’s lying and when she’s telling the truth. I know what frightens her. I also know where to touch her so her knees go weak in three seconds, and she knows that I know it.

And she knows it.

We live in a strange balance, held together by something that doesn’t have the right name in any language. Rodrigo keeps traveling, oblivious to everything. When he comes back, the three of us have dinner and talk about the news and the roadworks on the highway and what the weather will be like on the weekend.

Elena and I look at each other sometimes during those dinners. Just for a second. Just long enough for her to remember what my semen tastes like and for me to remember how her thighs tense when she comes.

I don’t know what will happen when the master’s program ends. I don’t know how long something like this can last. But I do know neither of us is looking for the exit, at least not yet.

The summer began with a lesson. Now I’m not so sure who’s teaching whom.