The Night I Agreed to His Darkest Fantasy

We had been together for six years, and I knew perfectly well when Adrián was about to bring up something important. There was a specific way he would press against my back in the darkness of the bedroom, as if he needed physical contact to give himself that final push, and that night I felt it before he opened his mouth.

—I still want us to do it —he told me in my ear, while his erection searched for the space between my thighs—. The group. I’m still thinking about it.

I wasn’t surprised. He had been on about it for weeks. He had tried every possible angle: subtly at first, then more bluntly, and finally with that patient persistence of his when he got something into his head and couldn’t find the exit. Almost a month earlier I had given him a special lubricant as a tactical concession, convinced it would calm things down for a while. I was completely wrong. The only thing I managed was to drive the fantasy deeper into him, like a seed I had accidentally watered.

—You know everything that does to me —I replied, running my fingers through his hair—. I have more questions than desire.

—What if I can answer the most important ones?

—If you could manage that... —I hesitated—. I don’t know yet.

—At least that’s not a no —he concluded, with the voice of someone who knows he has gained ground.

No. It wasn’t a no. And both of us knew it perfectly well.

He said it just as he was penetrating me slowly, and I felt the little resistance I had left dissolve with the same ease as the heat between our bodies. It was a tactic and he knew it. To take advantage of a moment of complete arousal to wring out concessions he would never have gotten when I was thinking clearly. I hated it in theory. In practice, I loved letting him do it.

—Get everything ready and we’ll see —I allowed him, just as I felt him spill inside me.

***

It didn’t even take three weeks. On a Wednesday night, while he massaged my feet and put on the television a movie he had chosen for the first time in months, he told me he had sorted everything out. What a coincidence that the movie was precisely that Kubrick one about secret parties and hidden pleasures behind a mask.

—I think I’ve tied up all the loose ends —he said without taking his eyes off the screen, his hands working the arch of my right foot.

—How efficient you are when you want to be —I answered in the neutral tone I use when I’m pretending not to care and I do.

—I got in touch with a swingers’ club. The one we saw when we were on the coast two years ago. They handle the whole process.

—Define “the whole process.”

He talked nonstop, without pauses, as if he had spent days rehearsing the speech. He had explained who we were and exactly what we were looking for. The club took care of selecting the participants and making sure the setting was completely safe. They had an agreement with a private clinic that required full tests twelve hours before each encounter, for everyone involved without exception. They would reserve an exclusive room for us. I wouldn’t have to pay anything, drinks included. He would pay for his own drinks, and the rest of the men would pay the entrance fee to the venue.

I stayed silent. The sound of the film became a meaningless background hum.

When I had thrown down that challenge weeks earlier, I had done it convinced that the practical obstacles would eventually cool his enthusiasm. Health safety, logistics, finding suitable participants: I thought any one of those walls would be enough. But he had knocked them all down in one blow. What remained now was mine alone. The question was whether I truly wanted to do it, or whether I wanted to want to do it, which is not quite the same thing.

But there was something else. Something I couldn’t deny myself, even if I tried: the strange thrill of watching him lose his mind over me. Giving him something no one else in the world would ever give him. That peculiar kind of power you feel when you are the reason someone loses all control.

—Okay —I said.

I felt it immediately: his erection grew beneath my feet, which were still resting in his lap, under the blanket. A sigh escaped him that could have been relief or pure pleasure, and that made me want to play hard to get a little longer. I pressed harder, deliberately, with every intention.

—Okay —he repeated, softly, savoring the word as if it were the first time he had ever heard it in his life.

—And how many men have signed up? —I asked, feigning a more casual curiosity than I actually felt at that moment, while I began to slip my hands between the folds of his clothes.

—Seven. Eight in total, counting me.

—Eight —I repeated in a barely audible murmur.

Eight.

The number spun around in my head in a way I hadn’t expected. I thought of the only time we had done anything even remotely similar: a threesome with Bruno, a friend of his from years back, and I had barely been able to split my attention between the two of them. Eight was a completely different order of magnitude. Eight was a room full of people. Eight meant not having a free direction anywhere in space.

I pushed those thoughts aside and focused on what I had in my hands. I started moving over him more firmly, using the heat and pressure of my bare feet to bring him to the edge gradually. I loved doing it like that: feeling his hardness, the little contractions that ran through him, the moisture that gathered at the tip and that I collected with my fingers to stretch until it broke into thin, shiny threads. I held him firmly and guided him calmly, letting him set the pace when he needed to, until he finally came, hot, over the top of my foot and his own leg.

—And when would it be? —I asked in the dim light, waiting for his breathing to return to normal.

—This Saturday.

—What? This Saturday? —I couldn’t hide my surprise.

—We can get to the club around eleven at night. They’ve reserved the room for us from midnight to two.

—Jesus —was the only thing I could come up with.

—We have until Friday morning to cancel with no obligation. Think about it. I need you to be absolutely sure, because if you’re not, I’m not going to enjoy it either.

—There’s no need to think about it. We’ll go —I answered, with a firmness that surprised even me.

I said it with a lot more conviction than I actually felt at that moment.

***

I wasn’t completely sure I wanted to do it even when we had already been inside the club for twenty minutes, at eleven twenty on Saturday night. The drive over had been almost entirely silent, with the radio in the background spewing songs neither of us was listening to. Adrián had both hands tight on the wheel and was staring at the road with that excessive focus he gets when he is trying to look calm. I would have bet he was more nervous than I was.

We had deliberately arrived with plenty of time. We had dinner at a restaurant two streets from the club: bread, a charcuterie board, some meat we didn’t finish. Two glasses of wine each to soften what we were feeling in our stomachs. We talked about completely unrelated things for almost the entire meal: work, a series we were halfway through, the plan for the following weekend. As if that night were any other. I suppose that was the only way to get there in one piece.

The inside of the club was more discreet than I expected. No neon, no cheap movie aesthetic. A dark wooden bar, dim lighting, low music that didn’t get in the way of conversation. Other people were scattered around in different corners, but the atmosphere was calm, almost civil. We ordered something at the bar and waited.

The seven men arrived in small groups, at different times, according to what Adrián had coordinated so the introductions wouldn’t be overwhelming all at once. We naturally began grouping together, occupying stools and the space beside the bar, and for almost an hour we held conversations about nothing too important: work, travel, the game they were showing on a screen in the back. Different ages, different professions. The only thing they had in common, besides the reason they were there, was that they were decent. That they didn’t look at me as if I were an object someone had placed on the counter. That they seemed just as nervous as I was, even if none of them said it out loud.

That helped me more than I would have imagined.

At some point during that hour I realized I had started breathing normally. That my shoulders had lowered on their own, that I had genuinely laughed at some comment from one of them, that the knot in my stomach had become something different. Not exactly calm. Something more like resolve. Like finally having made a real decision from within, instead of merely saying it out loud.

At midnight, one of the club staff came over discreetly and explained the protocol in a low voice. The room was ready. I would be asked to go in first, make myself comfortable at my own pace, and when I was ready I would press a switch beside the door to let the rest know.

I went in alone.

The room was exactly as they had described it: immaculate, with no unnecessary decoration, and warm lighting that didn’t feel cold or clinical. There was a large padded surface in the center of the room and cushions scattered across the floor. The silence was complete. I stopped in the middle and took a deep breath, slowly, letting the air fill my lungs completely before letting it out.

I undressed without rushing. I let each piece fall away one by one, processing every second as if I needed that time to finish convincing myself of something I had already decided but that still hadn’t quite settled into my body. I kept only my thong on. I pulled my hair back off my face and neck. I placed a couple of cushions on the floor in case I needed them later.

I knelt for a moment with my eyes closed. The silence in the room had a weight of its own, a density you could feel against the skin. I thought of Adrián on the other side of that door, waiting, with that gratitude that changed his face when I gave him something he hadn’t expected to receive. I thought about how he had let me choose at every step. That he had never truly pressured me.

I pressed the switch.

On the other side of the door there was a changing room with lockers, so when the door opened, the eight men came straight in naked. Adrián was the last to cross the threshold. He found me with his eyes from the entrance and I held his gaze, unblinking.

The room changed in a second.

The air became denser, heavier, with that smell of hot skin that has no exact name but that the body recognizes before the brain has even processed it. Eight men closed the circle around me, blocking the light from the sides, becoming a physical presence that filled every corner of the room. The heat radiating from their bodies reached me like a wave that had no intention of retreating.

I didn’t move.

I looked at Adrián. He looked at me. And in his eyes I found something I hadn’t imagined I would find: it wasn’t triumph, or desire alone, or any of the things I had anticipated for weeks. It was gratitude. A gratitude without calculation, completely exposed, without any disguise. And that, for some reason I couldn’t explain at that moment, changed everything inside me.

I reached out to him first.

And the circle began to close.