Que chille la chilla

I once was a chilla. My boss, older than me, more knowledgeable than me, married, a child at home. I told him I wanted to learn so he taught me. I was his apprentice. And nothing is as sexy as whispering, “ay jefe” in a man’s ear as he slips his hand inside your underwear.

It has to do with power.

Power over me: I, an adult, am making the conscious decision to fuck someone I know I should not. Someone who has the power to fire me as soon as I say no. Or as soon as She finds out.

Power over him: It’s amazing what a pretty smile and the confident offering up of some pussy can do to a man. He turns soft and when he’s hard he goes
right
inside
of me
And I take him and I make him forget things that should be impossible to forget. The child he made, the woman he goes home to make love to, his business, his employees. "Shh jefe, it’s okay," I ensure him, as if I’m the one writing the checks.

Temptation is powerful. I convinced myself that this was something I had to do. Everyday I saw this man, I wished for a way to find myself alone with him. I found myself brushing up against him as I passed to get to the storage room. For that split second of touch that would make my vagina so uncomfortably hot, make me so wet I couldn’t work because I just had to meet his eyes one more time.

Temptation makes you say:
To hell with his wife
She will never find out
I need to do this
Ay Dios, una vez na ma (even though you know STOP is not one of the words you will ever say to him)

Knowing something that others don’t know is powerful. When I met his wife—this was before we started having sex but after we began to flirt ceaselessly—I didn’t feel guilty or ashamed. In my head I kept saying, “can you tell that I’ve seen your husband’s cock? Can you tell that I am crazy to have it in my mouth?” When I saw him grip her waist and kiss her neck, I wanted to steal a moment with him in the bathroom to remind him of my lips and show him how they feel on his body. In other words, I felt jealous.

And this is the downfall of la chilla. La chilla has to live within the rules that are laid out by the man she is having an affair with. La chilla cannot call her lover in the middle of the night to talk to him about her bad dreams. The ones where the faces of devils grow out of her bedroom walls to stare at her, to laugh at her. La chilla cannot call her lover when she is horny because she cannot outwardly disturb the relationship her lover has with his family. La chilla must wait. She must be fiercely independent at all times. If one is meant to be a chilla then this is not a problem. I’m thinking now of Sabina in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. She is the mistress of two men, belongs to neither of them, and is content. She paints and never feels quite at home anywhere. Unsettled. So why settle with a man? That will simply serve to make you forget things you shouldn’t, namely that you are not at home and haven’t found a home yet.

There is something sexy about being the mistress of someone. The knowledge that you are satisfying a man in a way that his legitimate partner cannot. The secrecy. The fleeting intimacy. Knowing someone is giving you all he has for a couple of hours and that perhaps he is thinking about you and how you scream and how you arch your back in orgasm as he lays down with his wife.

Yet you know you are doing something undeniably fucked up. Not just to this woman with whom you have no beef at all but in general. You are supporting every man who leaves his wife to take care of his children while he fucks another woman. You are supporting that system of machismo that says women should wait: Las chillas esperan sus amantes mientras las esposas esperan un cambio que nunca vendrá. You are normalizing the destruction of marriages. But whatever. Maybe you don’t believe in marriage. I was never the girl who pictured herself in a white, wedding dress saying, “I do” to a faceless knight in shining in armor. As a child I just wanted to draw and be thin. There were no princes in my dreams.

But I’m not deluding myself into thinking that I was participating in something radical with my boss when we had an affair. We weren’t fighting against the injustice of marriage. We were fucking selfishly. I mean, we were fucking selfish.

It's been so long, jefe. But I still remember the thoughts that danced through my mind as I held your head in my arms. As you told me to behave myself(as you kissed my breasts)as you made me promise not to be trouble(as you bit my neck): what kind of father are you? What kind of lessons do you teach your son when you come home and place him on your lap, the scent of foreign sex underneath your guilty fingernails?