What I Saw in the Hallway That Night at My Father’s House

My father had been widowed for almost a year when he started talking to me about Adriana. I was living in another city, finishing my degree, and I called him on Sunday nights, those brief calls where we never said anything important. That’s why I was surprised when, on an ordinary Tuesday, he was the one to dial my number.

“Come on Friday,” he said. “I want you to meet someone.”

I didn’t ask anything else. I bought the ticket, packed a small bag, and on Friday at seven in the evening I was getting off the bus with a strange knot in my stomach. It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t sadness either. It was something closer to the nervous curiosity of knowing who my father had decided to share his life with.

Adriana opened the door before I had finished ringing the bell. She had to be thirty-five, maybe thirty-six. Quite a bit younger than my father, in any case. She was wearing a cream shirt dress, no makeup, her brown hair loose to her shoulders. She smiled at me with a strange mix of shyness and firmness, like someone who had already rehearsed that moment several times in front of a mirror.

“You must be Mateo,” she said. “Come in, please. Your dad is setting the table.”

Dinner was quiet. Too quiet, maybe. She served baked chicken with potatoes, my father opened a bottle of red wine, and the three of us talked about unimportant things: university, the weather in my city, a series she was watching. Adriana asked precise questions, listened without interrupting, and had a way of leaning forward when she cared about the answer that kept me from losing the thread. She had deep dimples in her cheeks whenever she smiled. When she leaned in, the neckline of her dress opened just enough to suggest the beginnings of two heavy, white breasts pressed against a bra that could be guessed at as dark lace. I lowered my eyes to my plate and forced myself to chew slowly.

By eleven my father had started nodding off in his chair.

“Sorry, kids, I can’t do any more,” he said. “We’ll talk calmly tomorrow, son. It’s been ages since I’ve seen you.”

He said goodbye with an awkward hug and went off to his room. Adriana and I stayed silent in the dining room for a minute, looking at my father’s empty glass.

“Do you mind if I clear up?” she asked. “Stay in the living room if you want to check something. Your dad told me you brought some papers to sign.”

It was a generous excuse so I wouldn’t feel obliged to help her. I appreciated it. I took out the folder with the motorcycle insurance documents and sat on the sofa in the living room. From there you could see the kitchen perfectly, open to the rest of the space. The light was warm, yellow, and only the lamp over the counter was on.

Twenty minutes later, Adriana appeared again. But it wasn’t the same Adriana.

She had changed out of the dress into a gray cotton short that barely covered the tops of her thighs and a long-sleeved blouse, thin, fitted at the waist. No bra: her nipples showed through the fabric, two hard, insolent tips, pointing at me whenever she moved. She had tied her hair back in a loose ponytail and was wearing cloth slippers. She was more comfortable, of course. She was also, without meaning to be, infinitely more mine.

“I’m going to finish up in the kitchen and head to bed,” she said. “If you need anything, wake me up. Don’t be shy.”

“Don’t worry. I’m fine here.”

I looked down at the papers. Then up again. Down. Up.

Don’t look at her like that. She’s your father’s partner.

But I was looking. I watched her move around the kitchen island, open the dishwasher, bend down to put a pot away in the lower cabinet, reach up to hang a towel. Every time she bent over, the shorts rode up a couple of centimeters and I could see the white curve where her thigh began turning into something else. One time she bent down and the fabric wedged between her ass cheeks, exposing the lower edge of her butt, a round, firm half-moon that made me clench my jaw. She had wide, rounded hips and a waist so narrow the contrast was almost violent. She wasn’t a stunning woman. She was something worse: exactly the kind of woman a man thinks about two weeks after seeing her once, with a hard cock pressed against his pants and no idea when it got that way.

When she was done, she dried her hands and leaned against the kitchen doorway. The blouse clung to her chest and the nipples marked themselves again, hard, round as pits.

“Are you staying the night?” she asked. “Your dad asked me to insist. It’s too late for you to cross the city.”

I had planned to go back to sleep at a friend’s apartment. At that moment, though, all I wanted was an excuse not to leave, and an open folder on my lap to hide what was happening between my legs.

“If it’s no trouble.”

“Not at all. I’ll show you your room.”

We walked down the back hall. The room she had prepared for me was next to the main bathroom. It was a small room, with a three-quarter bed, a desk, and a window facing the yard. It smelled of lavender and freshly ironed clothes.

“There you have clean towels. The bathroom is across the hall. I’m going to shower in a bit, so if you want to go in first, go ahead.”

“I’ll go first. Then it’s all yours.”

I showered quickly, without thinking too much, or trying not to think. I grabbed myself for a second under the stream and let go right away, embarrassed. When I came out into the hall with the towel around my waist, she was in the kitchen pouring herself a glass of water. She looked up, held my gaze a second longer than necessary—letting her eyes travel over my chest, my stomach, and stopping right where the towel made a bulge that should not have been there—and looked away again.

“Good night, Mateo.”

“Good night.”

I went into the room, closed the door, and fell onto the bed. My heart was pounding like I’d run up four flights of stairs. My cock was throbbing against my belly, hard, defined, wet at the tip. I dried my hair, put on briefs and a T-shirt, switched off the ceiling light, and left only the desk lamp on. I picked up my phone and tried to read. I didn’t read a thing.

***

About twenty minutes passed before I heard the door to the master bedroom open and Adriana’s soft footsteps crossing to the bathroom. Then the lock. Then the distant sound of the shower running.

And that’s when I started doing something I still can’t fully justify.

I got out of bed, opened my door just a crack, and turned off the desk lamp. The hallway was left in darkness. The only light filtering through was the yellow line beneath the bathroom door. From where I sat on the edge of the bed, I could see the stretch of hallway between the bathroom and the master bedroom perfectly: three meters, no more. If she came out and walked those three meters, I would see her. If I stayed still in the darkness, she wouldn’t see me.

I told myself many things in those minutes. That I was being an idiot. That I would close the door any second. That I was twenty-two years old and had to behave like an adult. That she was my father’s partner and that alone, that alone, should have been enough.

I didn’t close the door.

While I waited, without even realizing it, my hand had already gone inside my briefs. My cock had swollen again until it hurt, taut against my palm, and I was gripping it slowly, not moving, like someone holding something that might explode.

The water shut off. I heard the shower screen squeal, bare feet on the ceramic floor, the dryer running for a couple of minutes, and then the long silence of someone getting dressed. Or not.

The bathroom light went out.

The handle gave way and the door opened inward. Adriana came out.

The first thing I thought, and I remember it with absurd clarity, was: she didn’t bother with the robe. She was only wearing the thin pajama blouse, white, open at the first button, long enough to barely cover the start of her ass. Nothing else. No panties, no pants, no towel. She was walking while drying her hair with a small towel in one hand, barefoot, her back straight.

Each step was something new. The thin calves, the firm white thighs, that deep hollow at the side of her hip, the sway, slight but unmistakable, of an ass that weighs nothing and at the same time weighs everything. The wet blouse clung to her back and traced the curve of her waist, and underneath, where the fabric barely reached, the two half-moons of her butt peeked out, white, moving against each other with every step. The dim hallway light lit her skin from one side and left it matte on the other, as if she were a black-and-white photograph.

And then something happened I hadn’t expected. She stopped. Halfway down the hall, right in front of my ajar door. She lowered the small towel, folded it against her chest, and stayed there with her back to me, looking toward the master bedroom. She didn’t turn her head. She gave no sign that she knew I was looking at her. But she stayed a second too long. Three, four seconds in which I stopped breathing. And in those seconds, very slowly, she shifted her weight from one leg to the other. That tiny gesture opened her ass just a centimeter, and between the two half-moons I saw, for a fraction of a second, the dark shadow of her cunt looking back, swollen from the heat of the shower, still wet, the lips peeking between her thighs like a split fruit.

Then she kept walking, opened her room door, went in, and closed it without a sound.

***

I stayed seated on the edge of the bed, in the dark, with the door still ajar and the image stuck to the backs of my eyelids. I closed the door slowly, locked it without quite knowing why, and let myself fall backward onto the mattress.

I thought I’d be able to sleep. I thought closing my eyes would be enough. I was wrong.

Every time I shut my eyelids, I saw that pause again. The towel folded against her chest. The seconds she stood still right in front of the door, as if she knew someone was watching her from the other side and didn’t mind. The white curve of her ass. The shadow of her cunt between her thighs. The blouse lifting slightly with her breathing.

I pulled my briefs down to my ankles with both hands and grabbed my cock. It was so hard that the foreskin hurt from pulling against the head, and at the tip there was already a thick drop of pre-cum that I used to lubricate myself. I started pumping fast, my right hand sliding up and down the whole shaft, my left hand pressing over my mouth because I was afraid a moan might slip out and she’d hear it on the other side of the wall.

I imagined her doing exactly that: on the other side. In her bed, on her back, with the thin blouse lifted up to her tits, her legs open, and her fingers buried between the lips of her cunt because she too had been left with something between her legs after crossing the hall like that. I imagined her wetting her fingers with her own spit and sliding them down again to push them in to the knuckle, biting her lip so she wouldn’t make a sound, thinking that a twenty-two-year-old boy was three meters away doing exactly what she was doing. I imagined her opening her cunt with two fingers and rubbing her clit with her thumb, her mouth slack, her eyes closed.

I came over my stomach, fast, almost guilt-ridden, pressing my mouth so hard that afterward my own teeth marks were left in my palm. The semen shot out in spurts all the way to my chest, warm, thick, two, three, four jerks that left me trembling. I didn’t care about finishing quickly. I cared about finishing. I needed to get that image out of me like someone needs to vomit something that went bad.

I didn’t get it out.

I wiped myself on my T-shirt and lay still, breathing through my mouth. Twenty minutes later I was hard again, my hand on me again, this time slower, letting myself sink into every detail. The ass. The hollow at the side of her thigh. The shadow of her cunt between her legs. The completely new idea that maybe she did know. That those three seconds in the hallway hadn’t been accidental. That Adriana, the woman who had come into my life an hour earlier in a cream dress and with a measured smile, was capable of this too.

I worked myself hard this time. With both hands: one on my cock, the other cupped under my balls, squeezing them gently. I licked my palm so it would slide better and imagined it was her mouth, Adriana’s mouth slowly taking the shaft, her eyes lifted to me, those dimples deepening when she closed her lips around the head and sucked. I imagined her hot tongue circling my tip, saliva running down her chin, my hand buried in her ponytail guiding the rhythm. I imagined thrusting it all the way to the back of her throat and her swallowing around it, teary-eyed, nose pressed to the ridge of my pubic bone.

Then I imagined her on her knees at the edge of the bed, with the thin blouse open and her tits hanging heavy, her hard nipples pointing at the mattress. I imagined myself behind her, gripping her waist, pressing the tip of my cock between her ass cheeks first, rubbing it against that open, dripping cunt, and her pushing her ass back, searching for me, asking for it without saying it. I imagined sliding into her in one go, all the way, and the rough moan that would have slipped out of her with her mouth against the pillow. I imagined fucking her slowly at first, measuring each thrust, and then harder and harder, grabbing her by the hair, the ass, driving it into her until my balls slapped against her while the mattress hit the wall of the room where my father slept.

I came again to that image. This time it took longer, I held out longer, and when I finally let the orgasm go it surged up from deep in my balls like someone had torn it out of me. Semen splattered my stomach, my hand, the sheet. I stayed with my cock in my hand until it softened, staring at the ceiling, breathing in broken bursts, my legs still tense.

I fell asleep after four in the morning, with the image still in my head and a fatigue that didn’t feel like sleep.

The next day I went down to breakfast late. My father had already left for the workshop. Adriana was in the kitchen, wearing another ordinary dress, her hair neat again. She poured me coffee without asking and sat down across from me.

“Did you sleep well?” she asked.

I looked up slowly. She was smiling with that same measured smile from the day before. But the dimples were deeper. Or maybe I was looking at them differently. When she leaned in to set my cup down, the dress parted for a second at the chest and I saw once more the beginning of those white breasts that had kept me company all night. She lingered a second too long before pulling back, just enough for me to catch the scent of her hair, still carrying the perfume of the shampoo from the night before.

“Like I hadn’t slept in months,” I lied.

“I’m glad,” she said. “You’ll have to come more often, I hope.”

And I, while thanking her for the coffee and looking down at the cup so she wouldn’t see my cock starting to show again under my pants, was already thinking about when the next long weekend would be.