The Dress My Neighbor Chose to Use Me In

That Thursday I had other plans. A friend from Guadalajara was coming in for business and we had agreed to meet, because he always arrived with gifts: perfumes, lingerie, those silly little things that made me feel desired in a way I had long since stopped feeling at home. But in the middle of the afternoon my husband called me. He wanted me to pick up the kids from his mother’s house, because he couldn’t, because his mother had an appointment and they were going to take her.

I left work and drove to my mother-in-law’s with my phone vibrating in my lap. It was a message from Mateo, my neighbor. They were having a get-together with some friends that night and they were waiting for me. I didn’t answer. I picked up the kids, made a flying stop at the supermarket for milk and cereal, and went back to the building.

From the stairwell you could already hear the music coming out of the apartment across the hall. As I climbed, I heard them shouting my name between laughs, telling me to hurry up, that the party was better with me there. I felt heat in my face and quickened my pace without answering.

I fed my children dinner and, while I was at it, my husband called me. I told him they were eating. I asked him what time he was coming back.

“Between twelve and twelve-thirty,” he said. “Don’t wait up. Go to sleep.”

I hung up thinking my night had been emptied out all at once. Not the friend from Guadalajara, nothing. Just me, the dirty dishes, and that stubborn music on the other side of the hall.

***

I was putting the children to bed when someone knocked. It was Mateo, a university student from a college a few blocks away, with the face of someone who already had a plan in place. In one hand he had a beer and in the other a tiny pink dress, hanging from two fingers like a provocation.

“I’m not going,” I said before he could open his mouth.

“Look what I bought you.”

I took it. It was minuscule, almost transparent.

“What is this? It’s way too short.”

“That’s the idea,” he answered calmly. “It’s the kind of thing girls wear in bars for gentlemen.”

I should have closed the door on him. Instead I laughed, and that laugh was my first mistake. He handed me the beer, one of those new mixes with tequila, and with the first sip something inside me came loose. Years ago, when I was young, I used to drink submarines until I lost count. The taste brought back a version of myself I thought had been buried.

“Go on, try it on,” he said, leaning against the frame as if the decision was already his.

“Wait a minute.”

I went to check on the kids. I told them to go to sleep, that I’d be with the neighbor next door if they needed me. I locked myself in the bathroom with the dress in my hands and looked at it for a long while. Just for a little while, I promised myself. A little while and I’ll come back.

I took out of my bedroom the platform heels I hadn’t worn in years. The dress went on without anything underneath; any underwear would have shown through the fabric. I put it on and it showed everything through. I walked out to the living room.

Mateo’s eyes went straight to me. I saw him harden under his pants just from looking at me.

“You look good like a whore,” he said, and the word, instead of offending me, lit something in me I hadn’t expected.

He took my hand.

“Come on.”

“Just for a little while. My husband gets home in two hours.”

“Yeah, baby.”

***

I went into his apartment first. Inside there were three more guys, all university students, all young, all looking at me as if they had been waiting for me since before I decided anything. Almost immediately they started dancing around me and offering me their drinks, a murky mix in a plastic cup.

“What is this?” I asked after a couple of swallows, feeling my head get heavy.

“It’s a special drink for you,” one of them said, smiling. “To loosen you up.”

They turned off the lights and turned on colored ones, the kind from a club, sweeping the room in blue and violet and leaving everything halfway between shadow and glare. The music changed to something slower, dirtier. I kept drinking, kept dancing, and they kept pressing up against me from the front and the back. I felt hands squeezing my ass, sliding up my thighs, circling my breasts over the fabric. I didn’t push them away. I answered back, reaching for them over my pants, dizzy and hot in equal measure.

One part of me, the part that still counted the hours, kept repeating that this was only for a little while, that at any moment I’d say goodbye and cross the hall back to my life. The other part, the one that had been asleep for months, didn’t want to hear anything. That night the second part won, and I knew it the instant I stopped looking at the oven clock and let myself be led wherever they wanted.

Mateo cut the game short. He grabbed me by the arm and dragged me almost by force to his bedroom. He threw me onto the bed and pulled down his pants.

“Do your job,” he said, in a voice I didn’t recognize. “Your husband won’t be long.”

I got on all fours without thinking. He stayed standing at my side and I took him into my mouth while he held the back of my neck with one hand. He wasn’t gentle. He shoved himself all the way in, over and over, not letting me breathe at my own pace. He yanked my hair, made me swallow every inch of him, and when I thought I was going to choke, he did it again.

“Harder,” he ordered. “Like that.”

I obeyed. I don’t know at what point I stopped wanting anything other than to obey.

***

I felt my legs being pried open from behind and someone entering me in one brutal thrust. I hadn’t heard him climb onto the bed. I gasped, half pleasure, half surprise, and Mateo took me by the head again and buried himself to the hilt in my throat.

He pulled away. When I looked up, there was another one in front of me, another of the guys, waiting his turn in my mouth. Behind me, the first one was leaving my sex only to thrust against the other opening, against a place my husband had never touched. I screamed. Pain and pleasure mixed into the same scream, unable to tell them apart.

And I came. I came in a way I didn’t remember being capable of, with my whole body, with my blood boiling, feeling every hand and every thrust magnified by whatever they had given me to drink.

“Now you,” I heard Mateo say. “Give it to her hard.”

They changed my position. They sat me on top of one, bent me over another, filled me from every side at once. Two inside, one in my mouth, everyone’s hands everywhere. I came again, in torrents, and felt the room tilt.

The voices grew distant, as if they were speaking from behind a wall. They laid me down face down. The last thing I felt clearly were their hands opening me to enter again, and then nothing.

***

I woke face down on that same bed, my face pressed to the sheet and my whole body aching. I was covered in semen: in my hair, on my hands, running down the insides of my thighs. I didn’t know what time it was. I groped for my shoes and couldn’t find them. I tried to straighten my dress and discovered it had been torn on one side, soaked through, ruined.

I went out to the living room. The four of them were asleep, naked, sprawled over the couches and the floor. I looked at myself in the entryway mirror and barely recognized myself. I wiped myself as best I could with a towel, looked for my phone, and saw the time: two-thirty in the morning. Since twelve-fifteen my husband had been texting me. Missed calls, messages with no reply.

My stomach clenched. I wrapped myself in the towel, grabbed the bag with the torn dress, and left barefoot, stumbling, praying I wouldn’t run into anyone in the hallway.

***

I walked into my apartment in silence. My husband was snoring in the bedroom. I didn’t turn on any lights. I went straight to the bathroom and vomited until only the taste of beer and tequila mixed with everything else was left. I got into the shower with the water almost boiling, scrubbing my skin as if I could wash the whole night off me. I put the pink dress in a bag, tied it shut with a double knot, and hid it at the bottom of the hamper.

I lay down naked, slowly, careful not to brush against him. I fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, the kind that feels like a fainting spell.

By morning he was gone. He had gotten up early and left without waking me. Later he told me he had gotten home at twelve-fifteen, that he had texted and called me, and that when I didn’t answer he asked our son. The boy told him I was with the neighbor. That’s why he didn’t insist.

“I’m only asking you not to drink so much during the week,” he said afterward, suspecting nothing. “That woman is a bad influence on you.”

“You’re right,” I answered, lowering my gaze. “I’m going to stop seeing her.”

Days later I went up to see the neighbor and told her that now she was, officially, my bad influence. She laughed until she ran out of breath.

“Well, look at that,” she said, wiping away a tear. “The quiet lady from four.”

I laughed with her. But inside, every time the music started up again on the other side of the hall, I felt something tighten and open at the same time, like a question I preferred not to answer out loud.