What That Woman Did in Front of the Entire Car

It was six twenty when I went down the stairs at Catedral station. I was getting off work with that strange feeling of exhaustion that isn’t physical but mental, and all I wanted was to get home, drop the bags, and collapse onto the couch without thinking about anything. I had three records I’d bought at a record store near work during my lunch break, a heavy backpack with my laptop and wallet, and a shitty mood.

The subway was packed, as always at that hour. Line D moved north with its frantic anthill rhythm: people pushing without meaning to, others pushing without caring, and the sharper ones wedging themselves against the doors to get off first at the next station. I let the current carry me and, almost without choosing, ended up against one of the car walls, in one of those single seats by the door. I dropped into it with the bags on my lap and the backpack between my feet. The train lurched forward.

—Tribunales —announced the metallic voice over the speaker.

The doors opened and the passenger mass redistributed itself like liquid. Some got off, others got on, and the car ended up even more crowded. Among those who came in was a woman who appeared shoved along by the tide, almost apologizing without words. I saw her stay in the middle, without a seat, holding herself up as best she could from a pole she could barely reach with the tips of her fingers. Shoulder-length brown hair, half pulled back with a clasp that looked about to come loose. A rust-colored jacket over a long dark dress that covered everything but her wrists and neck. An imprecise age, one of those that carry themselves effortlessly.

I raised my hand to beckon her over.

—Sit down —I said.

She looked at me, surprised, as if she hadn’t expected anyone to offer her anything at that hour. It took her two seconds to decide, until she smiled sideways and made her way through the bodies. I stood up with the bags, she settled in, and before I’d even finished letting go of the seat she was already smoothing her dress down over her thighs and brushing her bangs back with her palm.

—Thanks. Really, thanks —she said.

—Don’t worry. I get off at Congreso —I lied. I still had about eight stops to go before mine, but I didn’t want her to feel awkward about having stolen the seat from a guy who was going to be standing for half an hour.

I settled my backpack against the car panel, set the bags to one side, and stood in front of her. The distance between us was about twenty centimeters. The crowd finished settling in and, because of the layout of the car, the people behind me turned their backs to me. We were left in a kind of bubble, she seated and I standing, separated by just enough air not to touch.

We met eyes. We smiled. Nothing strange: two strangers being kind for no reason.

—Callao —announced the speaker.

More people came in. The pressure against my back shoved me half a step forward, and my knees bumped hers. Mine stayed on the inside, hers on the outside. She didn’t close them. I didn’t move mine. The smile we’d both been wearing changed flavor. It was the first time anything in that car seemed to tell me: this isn’t by chance.

—Sorry —I said automatically.

—It’s okay —she replied.

But she didn’t move her legs.

The subway started up again. I put one hand against the car wall, over her shoulder, to hold myself up and not fall on top of her. My torso ended up almost suspended over hers. I could see the hairline at her scalp, her long eyelashes, the rise and fall of her breath under the high neckline of her dress. She smelled like a dry perfume, sandalwood or something like it, mixed with the smell of bodies packed together.

—Pueyrredón —said the mechanical voice.

And then it happened.

I felt a very slight brush at my hip. So slight I thought it was someone’s jacket. Then I felt the brush move up to my groin, and I stopped thinking it was a coincidence. I lowered my eyes without moving my head, slowly, until I found hers. They were locked on mine. She didn’t say anything. She only smiled a little, lips closed, and the hand she had free rose to rest on the fabric of my pants, at the level of my pocket.

I stayed still.

Not out of innocence, or discomfort. I stayed still because I didn’t want the gesture to break, and because I was afraid any movement of mine would make her pull her hand away. The people around us kept on with their own business: two young people with headphones, a woman reading on her phone, a man gripping the pole with his eyes closed. Nobody was looking. Or nobody wanted to look.

Her hand slid a little farther inward. Barely a centimeter. Then another. I felt her fingers searching for a shape beneath the fabric, finding it, tracing it without haste. And my body responded before my head had finished processing what was happening. The erection came fast, shameless, obvious. The fabric of my pants showed the shape beneath her fingers like a thick line. She kept moving her hand with a calm that seemed professional, squeezing the bulge with her palm and rubbing with her knuckles over the closed fly, as if she were making sure just how willing I was to play along.

I noticed her breathing deeper. She crossed her ankles just a little, arched her back against the seat, and let her jacket open a bit, showing the curve of her breast beneath the thin dress fabric. She wasn’t wearing a bra, or at least not one that restrained her much. Her nipple stood hard under the cloth as she looked at me, and her hand stayed there, steady, working at making me lose my composure with pressure that grew less and less shy.

—Do you like it? —she murmured, barely moving her lips.

I swallowed. I didn’t answer. I only tilted my pelvis forward a touch, just enough to offer her more than she was already taking. She understood instantly. The tips of her fingers found the zipper of my pants and began to slide it down, slowly, centimeter by centimeter, until the cold air of the car brushed my skin beneath the fabric. Her other hand came up to my waist, held me there, still, as if I were an object she wanted to take apart piece by piece.

My cock was burning against my head before she even took it out. The contact of her palm was leaving me breathless. When she slipped two fingers through the opening of my briefs and took my dick in her whole hand, I had to clench my jaw not to groan too loudly. Her touch was firm, hot, shameless. She moved her hand down once, slowly, from base to tip, then back up, testing the head with her thumb, slicking me with the moisture she was drawing out of my body through friction.

***

—Agüero.

The car emptied out a little. Enough for people to stop shoving me against her, but not enough for my position to change. I was still standing, one hand against the wall, the other around the strap of my backpack. She was still seated, one leg over the other, and her left hand was still doing what it was doing.

I looked up for a second. In the seat across from us, separated by the center aisle, a girl in a white nurse’s uniform had her eyes fixed on nothing. Or so it seemed. When I looked back at her two seconds later, her eyes weren’t on nothing: they were exactly between the woman’s legs and my waist. She didn’t look away when she realized I’d caught her. She only bit her lower lip, slowly, and kept watching. The woman in the seat noticed too; she lifted her gaze to the nurse and, without stopping the motion of her hand on me, held her stare with a clean insolence, the kind that doesn’t ask permission.

I felt my breath cut off for two different reasons. One, the hand of the stranger now gripping my cock more firmly, as if measuring me, circling the head with thumb and forefinger and making me feel every vein, every beat. Two, the nurse. The sensation of being watched slid up my spine and, instead of stopping me, made it worse. Harder, needier, more surrendered.

The stranger had seen her too. I knew because, without letting go of me, she turned her head a quarter of the way and gave the nurse a very short smile back. A kind of silent agreement between the two of them: I keep going, you watch. The nurse lowered her gaze to the floor for an instant, then lifted it again. Now she was watching without restraint, her legs crossed so tightly that the skirt of her uniform wrinkled at the crotch.

—Hold on —the woman in the seat whispered to me.

And before I could do anything, she opened her hand and pulled my pants a little farther down. The head came out all at once, red and throbbing, wet from its own pressure. The icy air of the subway hit the tip and made me shudder. She didn’t flinch. She leaned forward a little, lowered her head, and licked the head of my cock with an obscene slowness, as if she wanted to taste it before deciding. Then she opened her mouth and took it in as far as she could, wrapping her lips around me and pressing her cheeks against my pubic bone.

It wasn’t a delicate blowjob. She sucked me with hunger. Her tongue circled the head, brushing the frenulum, and every rise and fall of her head sent an electric jolt up my spine. I clenched my fingers around the subway pole, feeling the metal dig into my palm. She took me in and out of her mouth with dirty rhythm, swallowing my cock halfway, letting saliva run from the corner of her lips and disappear into the neck of her dress. When she wanted to tease me, she looked up at me from below while her tongue punished the tip with short, fast, almost insolent movements.

The nurse let out a tiny sound, something between a sigh and a moan. The woman by the cart farther back was still turned away, but she was no longer pretending: her head was tilted, listening to every sound, and one hand was tucked between the strap and her own thigh, squeezing herself openly. The whole car seemed to be holding its breath.

The stranger pulled back just enough to speak to me over the wet skin of my cock.

—Don’t come yet —she said—. I want to see you hold it.

I nodded, my jaw locked. I tried. I really did. But her tongue went back down to the base, licking where the foreskin opened and closed with each movement, and then she took me fully again, taking me deeper. I felt her throat contracting around the shaft, the slick heat, the perfect pressure. I started trembling from head to toe. My body was taut as a wire.

***

—Scalabrini Ortiz.

The car was almost empty. The few of us left formed a scene that seemed impossible to me: me standing, my pants open and a stranger’s hand working me patiently; her seated, her gaze split between my eyes and what she was doing with her hand; the nurse across from us, no longer bothering to hide, her legs crossed too and one hand resting on her thigh in a way that was anything but accidental; the woman by the cart, still turned away, but with her head just angled enough not to miss a thing.

The stranger changed position. She leaned a little farther forward. Her free hand, the one not holding me, slipped under the lapel of her own jacket, over the neckline of her dress, and began to squeeze her breast through the fabric. She did it with the same slowness she used on my cock. As if it were one rhythm, one choreography. Her fingers pinched the hardened nipple, twisted it through the cloth, and made her arch a little in the seat. I could see her thighs tighten beneath her dress, the way her mouth opened slightly when she pressed too hard.

I felt it coming. I felt it in the base of my spine, in my thighs, in my breath cutting off. I loosened my hand against the wall and, without thinking, touched her hair. Just barely. I ran my fingers along the side of her head once. She understood. She squeezed a little harder, then eased off, then squeezed again, playing with whether I would come or not. Every time she eased up, I breathed. Every time she squeezed, I stopped breathing.

—Plaza Italia.

The speaker seemed farther away and farther away. The woman by the cart finally got off. The nurse stayed in her place. Three or four people got on and remained at the far end of the car, not coming into ours. By some miracle, no one came near.

The woman in the jacket took my cock in her mouth again and this time it wasn’t brief. She sucked me deeper, taking me to the base, letting saliva run down her chin while she looked straight at me. Then she came off slowly, kissed the tip with wet lips, and rubbed me against her tongue in short circles, as if she wanted to prolong the torture. Her free hand kept squeezing her tits over the dress, and I saw her hard nipple stand out like stone beneath the fabric, pushing the cloth outward. The movement of her mouth was undoing me. I no longer felt the backpack, or the pole, or the car. I only felt her mouth, her hand, and the tremor climbing up my legs.

The nurse leaned forward slightly, hypnotized. The woman by the cart shifted at last, and I saw her skirt pulled to one side, her fingers sunk between her thighs, breathing as if she were about to come too. Everything was an indecent mix of looks and muffled sounds, leather, perfume, saliva, and fabric.

***

—Palermo.

It was there, between Plaza Italia and Palermo, when the stranger did something that finished breaking me. Without warning, she leaned even farther forward, until her head was almost level with my hip. The backpack I had slung over my shoulder served as a partial curtain. Anyone looking from a distance could only have seen two bodies together. The nurse, who could see, didn’t move a muscle. She only closed her legs and opened them again, and stayed there.

I felt the heat before the mouth. A short, warm breath that raised every hair on the skin of my lower belly. Then the tongue. One slow lick, tracing from base to tip. Then the lips closing. And everything else.

It wasn’t a long blowjob. It couldn’t be, there. Fifteen, twenty seconds at most, but they were enough. I’d already been loaded since Pueyrredón, held back by force of every one of her pauses. I drove my fingers into her hair without meaning to and tried to warn her with a broken sound in my throat, but she didn’t pull away. On the contrary. She squeezed harder. She grabbed my testicles over my clothes with her other hand, squeezed them with dirty precision, and stripped away the last control I had. I came right there, standing, on the D line subway car, with my head thrown back and my eyes fixed on the ceiling panel.

I felt my body going in waves. How the first jet hit her lips and another her chin and another the neck of the dark dress, which absorbed the stain without protest. How she, unalarmed, kept sucking until I was empty, squeezing me out with mouth and hand, and then finished with her tongue what the first spill had left outside. She pulled back just enough to swallow what she had in her mouth, wiped the back of her hand across her lips, and looked up at me with a smile that wasn’t provocative: it was grateful.

—Juramento —announced the speaker, as if nothing had happened.

***

—Congreso de Tucumán, end of the line. All passengers please leave the train.

The subway stopped. I was still gripping the rail as if my life depended on it. The stranger had buttoned my pants back up with the same skill with which she’d opened them, and she was standing with the calm of someone finishing a novel in their favorite chair. The nurse, now on her feet, passed by us without looking at either of us, but more slowly than necessary. Her arm brushed mine. It wasn’t accidental. She got off without saying a word.

The woman straightened her jacket. Smoothed her bangs. Ran her palm over her dress to see whether any trace was left. The stain at her neck had faded but was still there, dark on dark. She decided it was invisible.

—That was really good —she told me, in a low voice, still in the car.

No voice came out of me.

She came closer, kissed my cheek, unhurried. I felt the trace of my own smell on her skin, mixed with the dry perfume. Then she rested her hand on my chest, softly, like she was thanking me for the seat.

—Don’t follow me, okay? My son is waiting for me at the exit.

It took me a while to process the word. By the time I did, she was already walking toward the car doors with the firm step of someone who has someone waiting for her. She got off onto the platform without looking back. I stayed inside one second longer, holding the pole, putting the pieces together. Then I went out.

***

I saw her on the stairs. She was standing on the second step, her back to me, waiting for someone who was coming up. The someone was a boy of about twenty, backpack over his shoulder, headphones hanging around his neck. He smiled at her, kissed her, slipped an arm around her shoulders. She said something to him in a low voice and they laughed together. They passed by me without seeing me. I had the records in one hand and the backpack in the other and my eyes fixed on the back of her neck.

Just before disappearing into the corridor, she turned her head slightly. Just enough for our eyes to meet for an instant. She didn’t smile this time. She only held my gaze long enough for me to understand that what had happened had been exactly what had happened, and nothing more. Then she turned around and kept going up with her son on her arm.

I stayed on the platform for a while, until the next subway shoved me toward the exit with its crowd. I went up the stairs alone. Outside, the winter air hit my face like a slow slap. I walked home along a sidewalk I didn’t remember ever having stepped on, with a smile that wouldn’t go away even when I closed my eyes.