Five Lovers Later, I Found the Real One

At fifty-two, a woman understands that the best years are not the ones she lived, but the ones she chooses to live. I learned that late, too late for some things, just in time for others. I spent twenty-eight years married to a man who treated me like another piece of furniture in the house, and another three learning not to need anyone. When I had already convinced myself that desire was a thing for young people, Marcos arrived.

But this story doesn’t begin with him. It begins much earlier, with the four men who came before him and who, without knowing it, prepared me to understand him.

The first was Esteban. I met him at a wedding in Mar del Plata when I had already been separated for a year. He was an architect, divorced too, and had that way of looking at me my husband had forgotten how to have. I invited him to my hotel room that very night and regretted it as soon as he took his clothes off. Not because of his body, it was attractive in its own way, but because everything about him was small and hurried. His cock was too short for my taste, the base skinny, the glans quick, as if he too were ashamed to last. I gave him oral sex out of courtesy, taking him halfway into my mouth, my tongue circling the tip while my hand finished off what my mouth couldn’t reach without effort. He came quickly, with a dry shudder, and I learned at once that there was nothing sadder than a man in a hurry in bed. I was with him three more times. Three polite times, with his dick going in and out without soul, just enough not to kill him of humiliation. After that I stopped returning his calls.

The second was Federico, a classmate from the yoga workshop. He was kind, talkative, even funny. But he never let me touch him. We made love with the lights off, and he took care of everything: putting on the condom, guiding me, finishing. I felt his body on top of mine, the restrained sway, the latex brushing with every thrust, but I couldn’t see anything. One night I told him:

—I want to see you, I want to know what you’re like.

He told me he was shy. A few months later I understood it wasn’t shyness, it was shame. And shame, in bed, is contagious. I left him because his fear was teaching me to be afraid too. Because even when I opened my legs, he was still hiding, and I couldn’t stand a man who wouldn’t let himself be looked at or truly touched.

The third didn’t even count. A man from the tennis club, widowed, pleasant, who invited me to his house one Sunday afternoon. He had a thick but short penis and, worse yet, it was hidden in a jungle of hair. When he pulled down my underwear, I felt like laughing. Not at him, but at the situation. The bulge down there seemed to be fighting with the thicket of hair, and I thought that before putting it in me he’d have to clear a forest. The moment I saw it, my arousal died. I invented a headache and left before the first real kiss. We said hello when we crossed paths at the club, but I never sat at his table again.

The fourth was the worst and the most recent, before Marcos. A colleague of my eldest son, twelve years younger than me. I thought youth would make up for the lack of experience. He took longer to put on the condom than to finish. As soon as he managed to get it in, he was already pumping in and out with ridiculous desperation, as if excitement were winning him over at the ankles and not in the head. I could feel the hard cock, tense, delivering short thrusts inside me, and in two minutes he was already finishing. And he even had the nerve to tell me I was too hot, that was why he hadn’t been able to hold out. I told him, and I’m ashamed I said it, to go find a dead woman if he wanted to get in cold. I showered alone and drove home without looking in the mirror.

***

Marcos appeared six months later, under absurd circumstances. He made deliveries for the neighborhood rotisserie. He rang the bell one Saturday at noon, handed over the chicken milanese napolitana and the salad, and stood in the doorway longer than necessary. He looked at my mouth, then my legs, then my mouth again, as if he were calculating something I still didn’t know. I asked him if he wanted a glass of water. He accepted. He came in. He sat at the kitchen table and asked me if I lived alone.

He came back two days later with a flimsy excuse about the previous delivery. And the third time he kissed me in the stairwell before leaving: a short, determined kiss, without asking permission. He caught my face with one hand and shoved his tongue in without apologizing, hard, slow at the same time, as if he already knew by heart where my mouth began and where my hunger ended. When he closed the door, I leaned against the wall and thought just one thing.

If he fucks like he kisses, I’m doomed.

I wasn’t wrong.

The first time I saw him naked, in my room, with the bedside lamp casting only a faint light across the room, my jaw almost dropped. And not because of the size, though yes, that too, but because of the shape. He had an harmonious body, not too thick, not too long, proportionate to his height and, as I would learn, exactly proportionate to mine. When he took off his pants and stood there with his cock standing straight out, hard, unashamed, I understood there would be no waste and no clumsiness. It was a cock made to go in and stay there, to rub where it should, to hit exactly the right spot.

—Do you like it? —he asked me, and there was no vanity in his voice, only play.

—I love it —I answered, and proved it to him with my mouth before I could even think about it.

I pulled down his boxer briefs slowly, took the base in my hand, and brought the tip to my lips. He smelled like a clean man, hot skin, and that mix of sweat and soap that drives a woman crazy when she no longer has to pretend to be proper. I licked the foreskin, ran my tongue down the shaft, sucked the head until he moaned, and he held me by the hair without rushing me, letting me set the pace. When I took him deeper into my mouth, he gave me just the slightest push, careful not to choke me, and I accepted that minimal control because I liked the way he breathed, broken, fiercely restrained. Then he threw me onto the bed, spread my legs with his hands, and kissed my belly, my pubis, my clit already wet, until he had me trembling before he even entered me. That night I had the first orgasm of my life with another person. I say it like that, without shame, because it’s the truth. I had learned to come alone, hidden, with my fingers and a folded towel under the pillow so I wouldn’t stain the sheets. But an orgasm with a man over me, with his face between my thighs, with his fingers opening my cunt, with his tongue insisting on the exact center of my pleasure, that was new. That was something else.

***

We’ve been together seven months. My husband, the official one, the one who signed the papers, never found out. Neither did my children. For everyone I’m still the prudent mother, the loving grandmother, the dignified divorced woman who rebuilt her life. And I am. I’m also that. But I am, furthermore, the woman who writes Marcos at three in the morning messages I would never have dared say out loud to anyone.

“My cunt wants your cock,” I wrote him yesterday. I laughed to myself when I read it again. Fifty-two years old and I’m still surprised by the words that now come out of me naturally. Before, they seemed vulgar to me. Now they seem precise.

I write to him at night, when he finishes his shift at the rotisserie. I tell him what I imagine, what he does to me, what I’d want him to do to me. I send him photos that I delete afterward. I confess that I think about him in the supermarket line, at the hair salon, in the doctor’s waiting room. Once I masturbated in the gynecologist’s office, waiting to be seen, thinking about his tongue. I had slipped my fingers between my legs, discreetly, under my handbag resting on my lap, and the wetness surprised me so much that I had to bite my lip not to moan. He answers me with audio messages. He loves sending me audio. His voice rough, slow, describing what he’s going to do the next time he sees me. I listen to them in the bathroom, earphones in, while pretending to shower.

—Pass me the coconut oil —he said last Saturday.

I was lying face down on the bed, with a towel under my hips, and he, kneeling behind me, was about to do something no man had ever done to me before. I handed him the jar without turning my head. I felt the warm oil on my back, then on my ass, then lower, sliding between my folds, soaking my cunt, opening my asshole with indecent patience. I felt his fingers draw exact circles in exact places, first around the entrance to my pussy, then lower, playing with the edge of my ass, testing, lubricating, slipping in just one finger, then two, and I understood that the word “delicate” could also apply to this, to a naked man massaging a fifty-two-year-old woman with the concentration of a sculptor.

—Is that okay? —he asked me.

My face was smashed into the pillow and my eyes were closed.

—Keep going —I told him.

He kept going. He put the tip of his tongue in my slit, licked me slowly, opened me with his fingers while his other hand caressed my nape, and I began to feel the heat rising through my belly, the tension shaking my legs, the first shiver dragging me toward a more raw need. When he finally pushed into me, first the tip, then all the way, I felt the sweet, brutal pressure of a cock filling me in a way that admitted no lies. The difference between a man who goes in to finish and one who goes in to make you lose your name. The rhythm started slow, with deep thrusts that made me open my legs wider, then firmer, wetter, dirtier. He grabbed my waist and fucked me from behind until the bed creaked and I started telling him yes, like that, deeper, don’t stop. When he turned me over, he lifted my legs and entered me again from the front, looking at my face while he destroyed me slowly. I felt his pubis against mine, his balls slapping my ass, his broken breathing at my neck. And I, who no longer believed in miracles, came twice in a row, once clenching his cock with my cunt and once trembling around his fingers, soaked through, lost, with shame completely defeated by pleasure.

That night I discovered that pleasure doesn’t end where you think it does. That there are layers, levels, places in the body that marriage never touches because marriage settles. That a man can look at you at fifty-two as if you were twenty-five, not because he’s stupid, but because to him, in that moment, you are twenty-five. That desire doesn’t age. What ages is the permission to feel it.

***

There’s something I still haven’t told Marcos, and I’m going to keep it to myself a while longer. I have a friend, Verónica, who boasts about being a sex expert, multiorgasmic, a devourer of men. I listen to her when we have coffee and nod as if I understand. But the truth is she never had what I have now. She had quantity. I have, for the first time, quality. And I wouldn’t trade it.

Sometimes shame creeps in on me, especially when I run into my eldest son and he asks how I am. “Good, sweetie, calm,” I tell him. And it’s true. I’m good. I’m calm. I’m also more alive than ever. But I don’t tell him that. Not because I’m ashamed, but because there are things a woman keeps for herself. My mother, may she rest in peace, had a drawer with embroidered handkerchiefs no one was allowed to open. I have Marcos. It’s the same thing.

The other day, while he was taking me on his motorcycle to a cabin we rented on the outskirts, I told him for the first time about the four men before him. I told him about Esteban, about Federico, about the man from the club, about my son’s colleague. When I finished, he fell silent. We were stopped at a traffic light. He took off his helmet, turned around, and said to me:

—Poor bastards, they had no idea what they had.

And he took off.

That night, in the cabin, he made love to me five times. Five. At fifty-two. Me, who three years ago thought my body was no longer good for any of that. Me, who thought the word “lover” was for novels and younger women. Me, who for twenty-eight years learned to pretend I felt nothing so my husband wouldn’t take so long to finish. The first time he grabbed my hips, turned me against the wall, and drove it into me from behind, deep, shaking my ass with every thrust. The second he made me kneel in front of the bed and filled my mouth while he kept pushing his fingers into my cunt, making me swallow spit and moans. The third was in the shower, with water falling on us, sliding over our bodies and making us more voracious. The fourth, on my back, with my legs over his shoulders, pounding my depths until he tore a muffled scream out of me. The fifth, already exhausted, was still filthy and delicious: he rode me slowly, made me hold his gaze, and took me to the edge until I came again, long and hard, my skin burning and my legs useless.

Five times. And the fifth time, when I couldn’t take any more, I told him:

—Stop, stop, no more.

But he understood before I did what I meant. He kept going. And I ended up asking him for more.

***

Marcos asked me something yesterday, seriously, without irony. We were in my kitchen, both of us in robes, drinking coffee at eleven at night. He asked me if I thought we were crossing some line. I told him that the limits had been set by others, in other times, for other lives. That at this point, with the children grown, with the first husband far away, with my health still on my side, the only thing I would never forgive myself for would be not having done it.

He stood up, set the cup in the sink, came over to where I was sitting, and put his hand on my nape. Barely rested it there. And I, who should already have been asleep, who have a dermatologist appointment tomorrow, who should be thinking about anything else, lifted my face toward him and asked him to take me back to bed.

This is what I discovered at fifty-two. Not sex, I knew that in part already. What I discovered is that a woman can start over. That she can have a lover at this age and enjoy him without guilt, without hiding from herself, without apologizing to anyone. That the betrayal of my former life was, in fact, the most honest loyalty I ever had to my present life.

And if someone asked me, which no one is going to ask me, but just in case, I would do it again. I am doing it. Tomorrow, when the bell rings and Marcos shows up with the rotisserie bag, I’m going to open the door as if it were the first time. Because, in some sense only we understand, it always is.