Note: This takes place after the events of The Girl From Lima. Familiarity with that is helpful but far from essential.
Winning his daily battle with his tenement building’s ancient latch, Patricio stepped out into the scorching July heat and took a deep breath. He instantly regretted it. The drains were on the fritz again, and the building’s custodian was under arrest for dealing smuggled contraceptives. Such was life in a town so Catholic, the Vatican itself had picked up the tab for its expansion.
Once he’d stumbled down the vertiginous stoop, dodging the candy wrappers and beer bottles that littered almost every step, Patricio turned to look at the old building and spat. In many ways, the tenement was emblematic of the sorry state of much of San Toribio’s oldtown. Nearly half of the most recent coat of red paint to be applied to its century-old façade had flaked off, revealing patches of the last four previous paintjobs.
At moments like this, Patricio was reminded he had more than enough money stashed upstairs to move out that afternoon if he so desired. And yet, after four long decades, the idea of fleeing for one of the shiny new housing projects that had replaced the old slums felt disloyal somehow. That, and it was easier to lay low in a place where his full name wouldn’t be written on his mailbox.
Patricio proceeded languidly down the empty, sunbaked street, his bald bronzed head gleaming in the Arizona sun. His ears pricked as he heard chattering voices up ahead. Passing the local laundromat, he glanced inside. Just like any day when there wasn’t a church service or grandchild’s school event to attend, the place was chockful of old women.
A dozen or so craggy-faced mestizo grannies sat in a loose circle, shouting over each other as well as the few washing machines in operation. A couple of the women balanced smartphone-wielding toddlers on their knees. Patricio wasn’t sure how many of them he’d helped get across the border –a daily half-bottle of mezcal hadn’t done wonders for his powers of memory — but it had to be something like half.
Noticing a glimmer of recognition in one of the toddler’s eyes, he sped up before the brat could point him out. Too many times when he’d passed this way recently, the grannies had mobbed him, appealing for him to help some relative or other complete their northward quest. Patricio didn’t dare tell them the truth, lest word reach some of his less savory former associates, but he’d been retired for two years ago.
He’d called it quits after he lost his nerve helping an unaccompanied teenager reach Utah from Mexico. Sadly, he couldn’t claim to have been playing the good Samaritan. The broker the girl had contracted with was fairly legit: a go-to guy for polygamists in search of cheap help for overworked wives. It was a pretty sweet gig for a kid like that, considering the possible alternatives.
Patricio’s problems started when he first met the girl back on a jetty in Guaymas. The very sight of her had roused a paternal instinct in him he was still trying to repress. To make things worse, she had been wearing a plaid jumper dress over a white blouse – her old school uniform, she later admitted — chosen because it was apparently the most presentable outfit she owned.
That admission alone had made Patricio want to turn the kid around and put her on a boat back to South America. He’d resisted that impulse, but only temporarily. The drive to the border gave him the thinking time he needed. Once in Arizona, he’d bought her soda, spiked it with a little something he kept on hand for nervous travelers, and ditched the comatose ingenue on the steps of a San Toribio convent.
The very fact he found himself still thinking about her two years after the fact was precisely why the old coyote had quit. He was terrified how he might react the next time he inevitably picked up a runaway teen traveling solo. Would he be able to remain professional, or would he really crack and end up trying to adopt them? The mere thought of him being a father-figure to anyone only intensified his thirst for mezcal.
The fog of the laundromat-induced reverie lifted as he reached his destination: a branch of Vivanco’s, a local convenience store chain. It was maybe the only business to have opened in the oldtown since San Toribio’s Vatican-funded extreme makeover. A buzzer sounded as he entered the pokey minimart. The clerk behind the counter, a portly teenage girl with light brown skin and wavy black hair, looked up in startlement.
A tad miffed at how flummoxed she seemed by his entrance, Patricio made a beeline for the liquor aisle. God bless any town where booze was more readily accessible than condoms. Grabbing the first bottle of mezcal that came to hand, he approached the counter. The girl looked distinctly less surprised to see him this time, though she seemed to be standing unusually straight.
“And twenty Marlboros,” said Patricio as the clerk, whose nametag read ‘Lucia’, scanned the bottle. Only then did he notice the tag was fastened to a close-fitting sky-blue polo shirt, bursa escort rather than the baggy red one he usually saw her in.
Her hands froze as she sucked in her lips and glanced over her shoulder at a padlocked cabinet behind her. Lucia slowly looked back round, her face a picture of sheepishness, “We, uh, had a bit of t-trouble with the key yesterday. W-we’re waiting on a new one.”
“What happened?” asked Patricio, cocking an eyebrow.
“It g-got bent in th-the lock,” she replied haltingly.
Bemused as to why she was channeling Piglet, but not entirely unsympathetic, the old coyote shrugged. He dropped $20 for the mezcal on the countertop and grabbed the bottle. Lucia took the money with a grateful smile, waving to him as the buzzer heralded his departure.
“Key trouble?” scoffed a voice from under the counter.
“Shut up!” hissed Lucia, slapping at the torso of the man between her legs.
the eighteen-year-old let out a sharp gasp, her braless chest bouncing as he bucked his hips in retaliation. She raised her hand to slap him again but hesitated, fearing further retribution. The advertisements plastering the shopfront windows afforded her some privacy, but she doubted anyone who walked in to find her bobbing up and down would believe she was on a yoga ball.
Not that they would be any more inclined to believe she was currently impaled on Dr Gregorio Aquino, but even with six inches of him inside her, Lucia was still digesting that fact herself. It had all happened so suddenly. One minute, she was furtively watching Mexican soccer on her phone. The next, the Honduran comes marching up to the counter, armed with a little blue pill and a proposition she was in no position to refuse.
In no time, she was removing her underwear at his command while he fashioned a bed out of upturned milk crates beneath the counter. It wasn’t quite how she’d envisaged losing her virginity, but if it stopped him telling the world about how her father was able to sell ‘premium’ Zacatecan mezcal for twenty bucks a bottle, she’d take it.
Although he taught at Zumárraga Prep, the school she still attended, the man over whose groin her blue-and-black plaid skirt was draped had nothing to do with why she was wearing her school uniform in July. Such was her mother’s determination to publicly shame her daughter for failing twelfth grade, she’d banned Lucia from wearing literally anything else until she hopefully graduated next year.
Having spent most of the last thirteen years of her life in school uniform, Lucia was only so bothered. The confiscation of her pajamas along with the rest of her wardrobe felt excessive, but she mostly wished her mother would’ve been more upfront about her motives. As it was, she’d spun some elaborate yarn about Lucia’s annual clothing budget being roughly equal to the donation her dad had coughed up to guarantee she got to repeat twelfth grade.
Mrs. Vivanco had subsequently undermined her own story by cramming Lucia’s closet and dresser with enough skirts and polos to clothe half her grade. Her underwear drawer hadn’t been restocked with the same zeal, but she wasn’t sure if that was deliberate or an oversight. She was equally unsure whether Dr Aquino expected the underwearlessness he’d insisted upon to become her new normal. Considering what he was getting her back for by doing this, it wouldn’t surprise her.
One year earlier…
In the foothills of the Sierra Soldado, the mountain chain that loomed large over San Toribio’s northern outskirts, a lonely Ram pickup truck sat parked at a lookout point. Its engine was idle, but its headlamps blazed bright. In the patch of ground near the edge of the precipice illuminated by the twin beams, a man lay flat on his back, head resting on his folded slacks. He grunted as a bottomless young woman slid up and down the greasy pole of his manhood, moaning into the darkness.
“Harder, coach!” she demanded between bounces, tossing back her mane of her black curls, “Harder!”
Dr Gregorio Aquino rolled his eyes. It was demeaning enough being blackmailed by a nineteen-year-old girl into driving up here for this alfresco rendezvous. Having to listen to that girl mouth off like they were shooting a porno, all while he was getting an assful of sand, was just embarrassing. Like hell was he going to put any extra effort in when she hadn’t even bothered to undress properly.
Given the locale, he could forgive her for keeping her white knee socks and black Mary Janes on. However, on a balmy August night like this, there was no excuse for not taking off her sky-blue polo. Between his posterior discomfort and her porn star patter, watching her unfettered breasts thrash about within the confines of the knitwear was the main thing keeping him stiff.
As she threw her head back to unleash another stentorian trill, Gregorio seized his chance. Propping himself up on one elbow, his free hand snaked its way up the front of her torso, between her dancing boobs. Then, having hooked his fingers in the collar of her fully-buttoned polo, he reclined. escort bayan Under the weight of 150lbs of descending Honduran, the front of the shirt came away like an old Band-Aid.
With a sly grin plastered on his face, Gregorio slapped his hands across her robust thighs to brace himself and belatedly granted her request for more active pelvic input. The shock of his assertive thrusting literally took the schoolgirl’s breath away, allowing him to watch her newly liberated breasts gyrate in relative peace. He made a conscious decision not to pace himself; after all the ridiculous noises she’d been spouting, a genuine orgasm was the last thing she deserved.
As such, by the time she had sufficient air back in her lungs to urge him to disingenuously fuck her ‘tight pussy’ (it was really quite capacious), Gregorio had already jettisoned most of his payload. The retribution he’d half-expected for this anticlimactic climax didn’t eventuate. With almost impressive nonchalance, the freshly-inseminated schoolgirl dismounted him, shrugged the torn remnants of her polo off her shoulders and sauntered towards the truck.
Shifting to a squat, Gregorio used the discarded polo to clean his ass crack. Once on his feet, he fixed his pants, gathered the sky-blue rags into a ball and tossed them over the precipice. As he climbed into the truck, the courtesy lights afforded him his first look at his blackmailer in all her glory. She hadn’t redressed. In fact, she’d already threaded her seatbelt between her bare, near-spherical breasts. In this light, they weren’t quite the flawless specimens they’d seemed in the gloom outside, but then, she had warned him.
He’d only met Marisela Mejia that afternoon, at the Zumárraga Prep’s girls’ overage soccer team’s first practice session of the year. Gregorio had ended up coaching the team, which was specifically for female students aged eighteen or older at the start of the school year, in exchange for the office vacated by his predecessor. That guy, a twelfth-grade biology teacher by day, had been shipped back to Paraguay over the summer after his advanced tutorials on human anatomy came to light.
This unfamiliarity hadn’t stopped Marisela spilling her guts to him on the drive up here from school. The circumstances of her arrival from El Salvador went undisclosed (there was an unspoken rule of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ on that subject among San Toribians) but she’d ended up as captain of the overage soccer team on account of seniority. Having taken four years to get through Zumárraga Prep’s middle school, she’d joined the team last year as an eighteen-year-old eleventh grader.
Not that she’d had much chance to play. It was scarcely autumn when she’d fallen pregnant with her daughter Feliciana. Marisela claimed to have carried the baby to term without missing a single day of school. Whether Gregorio chose to believe her on that, the state of her torso attested to her recent motherhood.
A caesarean scar smiled eerily up at him from just below her belly button, and her light-brown breasts, still in an inflated postpartum state, were already lined with pale stretch marks. The Salvadoran omitted to say why she was quite so keen to add to these so quickly.
“So, Miss Mejia,” said Gregorio, turning the keys in the truck’s ignition, “Where am I heading?”
“How about your house, coach?” replied Marisela like it was the answer he should’ve expected.
He raised an eyebrow. “Seriously, Miss Mejia, where do you live?”
“I’ll tell you once we’ve been to your place,” she said, flashing a smile as she brandished her smartphone.
“My place it is,” muttered the Honduran, narrowing his eyes at the device as he reached for the gearshift.
She’d wielded the same phone at him when ambushing him in the faculty parking lot. Onscreen had been a string of texts Marisela had exchanged with a fellow twelfth grader by the name of Lucia Vivanco. Somewhere between the memes and emojis, her friend identified Gregorio as father to the baby recently born to Xiomara Qinallata, Lucia’s erstwhile foster-sister and a recent Zumárraga Prep graduate, now back home in Peru.
On the road back into San Toribio, Gregorio found himself deliberately targeting as many potholes as he could. It was less about causing Marisela discomfort and more about seeing how high he could make her chest bounce. Alas, the closer to town they got, the smoother the roads became. Undeterred, he detoured through some neighborhoods notorious for the havoc they’d wrought on many a car’s suspension.
The ensuing jigglethon had Gregorio straining against the seams of his pants as they pulled into his driveway. Any passing thoughts about proposing a quick encore on the backseat stopped cold when he saw Marisela reaching for her door handle. Her blue-and-black plaid skirt still lay crumpled at her footwell. He frantically engaged the truck’s central locking.
“What the hell are you thinking?”
The naked teen shrugged, “It’s not like I’ve got anything to go on top.”
“What about your gym polo?” he asked. bursa escort She certainly hadn’t done soccer practice in her uniform.
“Screw putting that back on,” said the Salvadoran, wrinkling her nose.
While she shimmied back into her skirt, Gregorio rummaged under his seat until something plasticky came to hand. Pulling it out, he sighed as he beheld the 100% waterproof (and 100% transparent) poncho. Taking another plunge, he eventually dropped a Hi-Viz safety vest in her lap. Once she’d exited the truck, brazenly leaving the vest open at the front, he glimpsed her balled-up white panties still in the footwell and rolled his eyes.
Inside the house, Gregorio dared to leave Marisela downstairs unsupervised while he ran up to his bedroom. Going to his nightstand, he opened the top drawer where, resting atop the layer of assorted junk that accumulated in such places, lay a neatly-folded sky-blue polo shirt. It had been mailed to him on the first day of this semester, enclosed with a polaroid of a certain newborn baby.
Despite its provenance, Gregorio had struggled to invest any sentimental value in the garment. All it smelt of was the detergent the previous owner had used to wash out the cum stains it’d been covered in the last time he’d seen it. He was only storing it where he was so his new rent-a-maid didn’t happen upon it. Trapsing downstairs, he found the Hi-Viz vest discarded outside the door to the lounge.
Within, Marisela had parked herself on the green leather couch. She’d taken the time to shorten her skirt to her satisfaction — about two-thirds of the way up her thigh — which at this angle gave Gregorio an unimpeded view of her pantyless undercarriage. However, the teacher was more interested in the unfamiliar papers strewn over his rectangular glass coffee table.
“Homework?” he asked, throwing her Xiomara’s old polo.
“Not exactly,” said Marisela, wearing a wry smile as she stood up and grabbed one of the papers. She placed it in his hands as she brushed past him on her way to the bathroom, her nipples catching on his elbow.
Gregorio studied the letter-size sheet of paper. It was filled with five hand-drawn grids, each headered with the name of month between August and December. Most of the rows, which he presumed represented weeks, had the names of twelve players from the overage soccer team scrawled across them. Only Marisela and the starting goalkeeper Auxiliadora were missing.
His growing list of questions were momentarily forgotten as his blackmailer returned. He could remember the polo being a tight fit on the modestly-endowed Xiomara, but to call it ‘ill-fitting’ on the busty Salvadoran would be stretching the term almost as much as the sky-blue fabric was being stretched across Marisela’s chest.
“What am I looking at here exactly?” asked Gregorio, brandishing the handwritten calendar once he’d dragged his eyes away from the schoolgirl’s embossed nipples.
“A waiting list, I guess,” she replied, perching on one of the couch’s armrests, legs spread strategically, “Maybe schedule’s a better word. I dunno.”
“A schedule for what?” said her coach, glancing back down at the calendar.
“Your services, obviously,” said Marisela, like she’d wanted to add a ‘duh’, “I didn’t go to all that trouble for a quickie in the desert, coach. This is way bigger.”
“How much bigger?” asked Gregorio warily.
“Look, we know the scholarships this whole overage team is for are basically pipe dreams for most of us. Thing is, we don’t just want to give up soccer after this semester.”
“Then start a rec team!”
“Yeah, we thought about that,” said the schoolgirl coolly, grinning as she licked her lips, “But then I thought, why not try and do something we can actually make a living out of. The only trouble with starting an academy is, we’re going to need some kids to coach.”
Gregorio blanched, “Why come to me? I doubt you’d have trouble finding boys to volunteer.”
“Well yeah, but you’re not going to go tell half the goddamn school five minutes later,” said Marisela, “Besides, I thought broody twelfth graders were your type.”
“How did you get Lucia to tell?” he asked, biting back a riposte about how Xiomara was the one who’d initiated the sequence of events leading up to that afterschool tryst.
“I just asked why she stopped coming to church after Christmas. She was pretty pissed about that,” she said, getting to her feet. Leaving the papers untouched, she retrieved her backpack from beside the coffee table and headed out into the hallway, chest wobbling gently.
“How did you get so many of the others onboard with this?” he asked, following on.
“You’ll have to ask them. They just said yes,” replied Marisela, tossing him his car keys, “Now, if you don’t mind, we need to pick up my daughter.”
Two years later…
It was lunchtime at Archbishop Juan de Zumárraga Catholic Preparatory School. On the main school building’s fourth floor, all was quiet on. Even for the enterprising students embroiled in the school’s thriving black economy, built mostly on condoms and morning-after pills, the empty hallways and disused classrooms didn’t seem to appeal as a venue for peddling their contraband. Whatever their reasons, Lucia Vivanco wasn’t complaining. Their merchandise was useless to her anyway.