Upper plants

Upper plants

The hotel’s plenary hall smelled of cold coffee and a new folder. Outside, the Gran Vía was no longer an avenue: it was a corridor of broken neons and taxis that did not stop. Inside, there were only two laptops open, a roll of planes to roll and the buzzing low of the air conditioning.

Elena closed the laptop with a dry click. She was thirty-six years old, the wedding ring still shining under the warm light of the recessed lamps, and the certainty that the midnight train was no longer waiting for her. Her husband, Paul, would sleep face up on his floor in Chamberí, with the phone silently and the routine certainty that she “ended late with the client.” She did not lie at all. She lied enough.

"If you want, I'll leave this rolled up and I'll take it down to the reception," said Matthew.

He had a serious voice, without haste. Forty years, white shirt with unbuttoned neck, simple watch. He had been the interlocutor of the builder for three months of emails and video calls. Tonight, at last, they had really looked at each other: not as signatures in a PDF, but as two adults exhausted and too awake.

"You don't have to," she replied. "I'd rather get this off of me.

They looked at each other a second too much. He didn’t smile easily. He just bowed his head, recognizing something that could not be named in a corporate salon.

They went down the 11th floor corridor together. The carpets drowned the steps. On the walls, ancient Madrid lithographs seemed to observe them with dissimulation. The elevator took a while. As they waited, Elena noticed the heat on the back of her neck, the rubbing of the bag against her hip, the mild smell of cologne of him —wood and something citrus — mixed with that of the hotel shampoo that was still in her hair after showering in the courtesy room.

"I can ask you for a whisky downstairs," said Matthew, not looking at it at all. "Or not." You say.

She swallowed saliva.

• A scotch, and then I'll go.

He didn't leave.

The bar on the ground floor was almost empty. A reserve pianist played without desire in a corner. The bartender served them two glasses and asked no questions. Elena turned the ring with her thumb once, two, and left it still. Mateo did not look at the ring. He looked at her mouth when she drank, and that was enough for her chest to be squeezed with an exact mixture of shame and hunger.

"Pablo thinks I'm going over games," he said quietly, "as one who confesses to a petty theft and knows it isn't.

"My wife thinks I sleep in A Coruña until Thursday," he replied, as low. "I do not ask you to acquit us.

• He doesn't.

• I know.

The silence between the two was not comfortable. It was dense, adult, loaded with what they were not going to fix. Elena felt the whisky on her tongue and, underneath, another thing: the clear heartbeat between her legs, traitorous, insistent. She looked at the table. She looked at her hands. When she looked up, Matthew was already waiting for her.

"If you say no, I'll get up and leave you the elevator," he muttered. "If you say yes... only tonight. No stories. No promises.

She breathed deeply. “The bar, the low lights, the glass facing the wet street. The secret was already made in the head; the body only asked to execute it.

"Yes," he said. "With you. Now. And let us be clear: I too can stop whenever I want.

"Sure," he said. "As soon as you say.

They went up again. Not at eleven: at fourteen, where he had the working room. The hallway smelled of expensive air freshener and absent. The magnetic card slammed green. The door closed behind his back with a soft blow that sounded, Elena, like a verdict.

The room was not entirely luxurious; it was functional, with a wide bed, a table full of dossiers and the city lying on the other side of the window as a map of yellow dots. Mateo left the keys on the bedside table. He did not fall down. He waited for her to let go of the bag and take off her jacket. Then he approached slowly, held her face with both hands and kissed her.

The first kiss was a contained shock: dry lips, then wet, tongue that asked and received permission. Elena opened her mouth and heard herself release a low, almost ashamed sound. His hands lowered to her waist, attracted her, and the rubbing of the pants against her skirt ripped off a chill that swept her entire back.

"Tell me if I go too fast," he whispered against his neck.

"No," she replied, "no more air." Go on. I want to notice you.

They undressed without choreography. Elena unbuttoned her button-to-button shirt; he lowered her skirt zip and let it fall. Her black underwear — chosen that morning without thinking at all — was exposed to the warm light of the bedside table lamp. Mateo looked at her with a seriousness that was no reverence or mockery: it was attention. He passed the back of her fingers over the edge of the bra, waited for her assent and unbuttoned it. Elena’s breasts weighed free; he covered them with his palms, hot, and grazed her nipples to leave them hard, sensitive, almost painful from so awake.

She pulled off her belt. Mateo’s cock was branded thick under the boxer; when she was released, Elena felt a dry blow of reality: that was not a message, it was not a deferred fantasy. It was flesh, heat, the clean smell of a man who had sweated in a meeting and had showered half way. He took it with his hand, stroked it from the base to the tip, feeling it getting even more tense under his fingers.

"Fuck..." he replied, and the word, spoken in a snoring voice, made her squeeze her thighs.

She took her to bed. The sheets smelled like industrial laundry and nothing. Elena lay down and spread her legs when Mateo knelt between them. She kissed her thigh inside, slowly, and waited. She nodded again, with her gaze. Then she lowered her panties, left her hanging from an ankle, and put her mouth close to the already wet pussy.

It was not a clumsy gesture. It was methodical and hungry at the same time: flat tongue first, then tip against the clitoris, two fingers that came in carefully when she arched her back and let go of a drowned “yes”. Elena covered her mouth with her forearm for a moment—the hotel had fine walls, or she believed so—and then withdrew it, allowing her low moanings to be heard, slitted. The pleasure went up her belly in waves; the guilt bited her neck at the same time. She thought of Paul. She pushed aside the thought. Matthew sucked more firmly, curving her fingers inwards, and she ran at once, with her knees trembling and a scream choked against the pillow.

He was still gasping when he got up to his height.

"Are you still with me?" he asked, his forehead leaning on his.

"Yes. I want you to fuck me," she said, plainly, without ornaments. Slowly at first. Then... as you need.

He opened the drawer of the bedside table, pulled out a condom—new, from the hotel kit or from the bag; she didn’t ask—and put it with firm hands. He put it between his legs. The head of the cock rubbed the slippery entrance; Elena bit her lip and nodded once more. He went in an inch by an inch, filling it with a dense pressure that stole the air. When it was all inside, they stood still for a second, looking at each other. There was no tenderness of novel. There was mutual recognition of the boundary they had just crossed.

He began to move. Slowly, deeply, the pubis rubbed his clitoris on each attack. Elena hooked his heels on his thighs and attracted him more. The mattress creaked just. Outside, a distant horn. Inside, only the wet sound of their bodies and the breath cut.

"More," she asked.

Mateo held his wrists against his pillow—without over-squeezing, attentive to his face—and hit him harder. The hip stroke shook his breasts; each stroke ripped off a more open moan. Elena felt divided: one part counted the hours until returning home; the other only existed there, penetrated, hot, sweaty, with her pussy pressing her cock to each swing.

He let go of one hand, went down to the clitoris and rubbed it in clumsy and urgent circles. He noticed it and changed the angle, more direct, deeper. The second orgasm caught her in surprise: a long tremor, the vagina getting shaken around him, the vision clouded for an instant. Matthew cursed between teeth, accelerated and ran shortly afterwards, the rigid body, the severe groaning drowned in the hollow of his neck.

They stayed tied the right time so that the condom wouldn’t be a problem. He pulled out carefully, tied it up and threw it away. Elena stared at the roof. The air conditioning cooled her chest sweat. The ring weighed her back in the finger as if she had gained grams.

Matthew leaned aside, without holding her at all.

"Are you all right?" he asked.

She took a long time to answer.

"Physically, yes. Head-on... I don't know yet.

"I will not write to you later as if this were the beginning of something clean," he said. "It is not.

"I know," replied Elena. "I don't want it clean either. I wanted this. And now I have it. And tomorrow I will have to look Paul in the face.

He did not cry. He got up, picked up his clothes from the floor and dressed himself with precise movements. He did not try to stop her. He just put on the boxer and shirt without buckled, and accompanied her to the door.

On the threshold, Elena stopped.

"If the project again brings us together, let it be with more people in the room.

• Okay.

They looked at each other for one last second. There was no kiss goodbye. Just a short touch of fingers, which the two of them released at the same time.

The hallway of the fourteenth was empty. The elevator went down with a discreet buzz. In the lobby, the receptionist yawned on a keyboard. Elena crossed the revolving doors and went out into the wet air in the morning. A taxi stopped. She gave Chamberí’s address.

As the car went through traffic lights in amber, he still noticed the deaf heartbeat between his legs, the invisible mark of another man’s hands, the taste of whisky and someone else’s mouth. He pulled out the phone. A message from Pablo, from 11:30: “Are you coming soon? I left the dinner covered.”

She did not respond immediately. She leaned her forehead on the cold glass and closed her eyes. The desire had already had her night. The guilt, more patient, began just then to sit next to her in the back seat, without haste, without easy forgiveness, accompanying her down the street towards a conjugal bed that smelled of known detergent and the life she herself had chosen to break for a while, knowingly, under the low lights of some upper plants.

When the taxi braked in front of her portal, Elena paid, climbed the three sections and opened carefully. The house slept. She left her purse, took off her shoes and washed her face with cold water until the skin burned. In the mirror, her eyes still had that shine of who has crossed a line and cannot undo the stroke.

He went into the bedroom. Paul breathed deep, foreign. She slipped beside him without touching him. He looked at the family roof. No pious lies were told. He had wanted, had consented, had enjoyed, and now he would carry that in silence. Outside, Madrid was still half lit. Inside, the secret settled between the sheets as an invisible third, and Elena, at last, closed her eyes without yet finding the dream.