I Accepted That Date Knowing I Would Betray Daniel

The message arrived in the middle of the afternoon, while I was folding Daniel’s clothes on the bed we had shared for nine years. It was from a number I hadn’t saved, but I knew immediately who it was. “I booked the top-floor suite. If you don’t want to come, don’t. But I think we both know you’re going to come.” It was signed with a single initial: A.

I had met him three weeks earlier, at the opening of the gallery where my sister worked. Andrés had a way of looking at you that asked no permission and, at the same time, demanded nothing. We talked for twenty minutes beside the champagne table about paintings neither of us understood, and when he asked about my ring, I told him the truth: I was married and happy. He smiled as if that changed nothing.

I wasn’t lying. I was happy. That was the problem.

Daniel and I loved each other with the calm of a long-married couple, of long Sundays and comfortable silences. I lacked nothing. And precisely for that reason, the message burned in my hand: because there was no excuse, no revenge, no neglect to blame it on. There was only me, standing in my own bedroom, wanting something I had no right to want. Wanting, to be honest, a cock that wasn’t my husband’s, new hands on me, an unfamiliar mouth between my legs.

I deleted the message. Then I recovered it. Then I watched the time for an eternity.

“Is something wrong?” Daniel asked from the sofa without looking up from the game.

“I’m going out for a while with Carla,” I lied, and the ease with which the lie came out frightened me more than the lie itself.

***

The hotel was downtown, one of those glass buildings where the concierge doesn’t look you in the face. I rode the elevator with my heart pounding in my throat and the reflection of a woman I didn’t entirely recognize in the mirrored doors. I was wearing the black dress Daniel said he liked, and underneath it a lace set he had never seen: a tiny pair of panties, a bra that barely contained my tits. I wondered whether that made me a worse person or merely a bigger coward.

Andrés opened the door before I finished knocking. He was barefoot, his shirt open at the neck, and he smelled of something warm and clean that wasn’t my husband’s cologne. I remained on the threshold.

“I thought you wouldn’t come,” he said.

“I thought so too.”

He walked in without touching me, leaving the door open behind my back like a question. The room had a huge window overlooking the city lit up below, a wide bed, and two glasses waiting on the low table. Everything measured, everything waiting for me. I took one step inside and closed the door myself. That gesture, the dry click of the lock, was my first real decision of the night.

“If you regret it, you can leave,” he said, holding out a glass. “I have nothing to prove.”

“Don’t treat me like I’m made of glass.”

He laughed, softly and in surprise. And then I was the one who closed the distance.

***

The first kiss was anything but timid. I had spent three weeks imagining it, and when it finally happened, it was almost a relief, like setting down a weight I had carried in secret. Andrés held the back of my neck with one hand and let me set the pace, and I kissed him with an urgency I hadn’t known I was carrying inside me. I bit his lower lip, sucked it, pushed my tongue deep into his mouth. My own hunger surprised me. I was surprised not to feel guilt yet, only a sharp, unfamiliar clarity, and a warm wetness between my thighs that was already soaking my panties.

His fingers found the dress’s zipper and slowly pulled it down, unhurried, while his mouth traveled over my neck. I felt the cool air of the room on the bare skin of my back and shivered, though it had nothing to do with the cold. When the dress fell to the floor, I didn’t cover myself. I stood before him in black lace, watching him watch me, and discovered that I liked being looked at that way, with the complete attention I had forgotten existed at home. Andrés let out his breath slowly, his eyes fixed on my tits pressed against the bra and the dark stain already spreading across my panties.

“Fuck,” he said. “You’re soaked and I haven’t even touched you.”

“Then touch me already.”

He unclasped my bra with one hand, and my tits fell free, my nipples hard as stones. He crouched and took one into his mouth, all of it, sucking it hungrily, nibbling until I let out a moan I couldn’t hold back. With his other hand he was already squeezing my other breast, twisting my nipple between his fingers. I buried my hands in his hair and pressed his face against me, offering him my tits as if they were something I had wanted to give someone for years.

“You have no idea,” he murmured against my wet nipple, “how much I’ve thought about this.”

“Shut up,” I said, and pushed him toward the bed.

He sat on the edge, and I straddled him, feeling the rock-hard bulge of his cock pressed against his trousers beneath my thigh. I opened his shirt button by button, taking my time, enjoying the small power of making him wait. It was strange and intoxicating: in my marriage, I was the one who waited, the one who adapted herself to the other person’s desire. Here, on top of a man I barely knew, I discovered that I knew how to take, too. I undid his belt, lowered his zipper, and pulled his cock out in one swift motion. It was thick, thicker than Daniel’s, and so hard it throbbed in my hand.

“Look at it,” I whispered. “It’s going to burst.”

“Because of you.”

I closed my fist around it and began to stroke him slowly, looking him in the face, watching his mouth fall open when I squeezed the tip. A thread of fluid welled from the head, and I spread it with my thumb, slippery, while continuing to move my hand up and down. His hands traveled up my thighs, my waist, and stopped exactly where I wanted them to continue. I kissed him so he would understand. His fingers pushed aside the soaked strip of my panties and slipped between the lips of my pussy, finding a wetness that made me flush and drew a hoarse moan from him against my mouth.

“You’re dripping,” he said, incredulous. “You’re fucking dripping.”

“Like that,” I said, guiding his hand with mine. “There, on the clit. Slower. Like that.”

And he obeyed. He moved his finger in small, precise circles without taking his eyes from my face, and when he saw my eyelids droop, he thrust two fingers inside me. I screamed against his shoulder. He crooked them, searched, found the spot Daniel never quite managed to find, and began fucking me with his hand while his thumb kept rubbing my clit. That was another thing I learned that night: how much I liked a man who listened.

***

I pushed him onto his back and took my time. I traced his chest with my mouth, licked one nipple, bit it, then moved down his stomach, leaving a trail of saliva and feeling him hold his breath each time I lingered a second too long. I tugged his trousers down until he was completely naked. His cock rested against his stomach, red, shiny, throbbing. I knelt on the floor between his legs and looked up at him.

“Do you want me to suck it?”

“Please.”

“Ask properly.”

“Suck me. Suck me, Mariela, please.”

I gripped it at the base and ran my tongue from his balls to the tip, very slowly, sucking the taut skin of the head at the end as if it were candy. Andrés let out a long gasp and tangled his fingers in my hair. I took his cock entirely into my mouth, as much as I could, until I felt it hit the back of my throat, and began sucking him without mercy, hungry in earnest, letting my mouth fill with saliva and letting it run down my chin onto his balls. I grabbed them with my other hand, massaged them, squeezed them gently while continuing to move my head up and down.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he repeated. “Mariela, I can’t take this.”

I pulled it from my mouth with a wet sound and shook it with my hand, looking at him, my lips glistening.

“No one says my name the way you do.”

“Put it back in your mouth.”

I did. I sucked him again, more slowly, taking him all the way down, swallowing when I felt him reach the back of my throat. When I took him with my hand and then my lips, Andrés tangled his fingers in my hair and let my name escape as if it were a forbidden word. Mariela. He said it twice, three times, each time rougher. No one said it like that, with that kind of wonder.

But I didn’t want it to end that way, and neither did he. He pulled me upright by my hair, made me climb onto him again, and this time there was no more playing. He tore off my soaked panties, threw them on the floor, and positioned me on my knees over his hips. He held his cock with one hand, guiding it, and opened my pussy lips with the other. I lowered myself slowly, feeling him force his way in, pushing, widening me, filling me in a way that stole my breath. I closed my eyes. I stayed still for a moment, my forehead against his, feeling him pulsing deep inside me, taking in what I was doing, how far I had gone, how impossible it would be to go back.

“You’re inside,” I whispered, as if I needed to hear it. “You’re inside me.”

“All the way,” he panted, grabbing my ass with both hands. “Right to the bottom.”

And then I began to move.

I set the pace, slowly at first, deep, rising almost to the tip and then sinking down all the way again, watching his jaw tense when I squeezed him with my pussy. I took one of his hands and brought it to my breast, forcing him to squeeze it, to twist my nipple. He tried to speed things up, thrusting from below, and I stopped him with one hand on his chest.

“Stay still. I’m in charge now.”

“Mariela, fuck…”

“Stay still, I said.”

I wanted to feel everything, every inch, every second stolen from my other life. I began moving faster, riding him, letting my tits bounce in front of his face. He watched me with his mouth open, hypnotized, and stretched out his tongue to lick one of my nipples whenever it passed close to him. I brought my own hand to my clit and began rubbing it while I fucked him on top, shamelessly letting him watch me pleasure myself with his cock inside me. The city glittered on the other side of the glass, and no one in the world knew where I was or what my body was discovering about itself.

“I’m not going to last long if you keep this up,” he gasped.

“Then don’t last. Fuck me. Fuck me the way you’ve been wanting to.”

I let him take control. With one firm movement he turned me over, laid me on my back, spread my legs wide, and plunged into me again with a single thrust that made me scream. I wrapped my legs around his waist, pulling him in, demanding more. He braced himself on his arms and began fucking me hard, seriously, every thrust a sharp blow that shook my tits and tore a sound from me I didn’t even recognize as my own. The bed creaked. His balls slapped against my ass.

“Like that,” I panted. “Like that, harder, more…”

“Do you like this? Do you like me fucking you like this?”

“Yes, fuck, yes…”

He pulled out abruptly, turned me onto my stomach, and lifted my hips until I was on all fours. I saw his face in the reflection of the window, focused and dark, and mine, mouth open, hair disheveled. He pushed back inside me from behind, gripping my ass with both hands, and began thrusting even deeper. In that position he reached a place inside me I hadn’t known existed. I dug my nails into the sheets, not from pain, but to hold on to something while everything else—my married name, my orderly kitchen, my nine years of promises—became unreal and distant. He gave me a sharp slap on the ass, and I moaned before I could stop myself.

“Again,” I begged.

He did it. And again. My skin burned, my pussy was dripping, and he kept fucking me without pause, grabbing my hair now, pulling my head back so he could see my face while he destroyed me.

“Tell me you like it,” he panted. “Say it.”

“I like it. I like your cock. I like the way you fuck me.”

Pleasure reached me like a wave I had been holding back for too long. It wasn’t gentle or discreet. I arched my whole body, trembling, clenched my pussy around him with all my strength, and heard my own voice break into a long, animal moan as I came against his cock, as I shook beneath him, as the orgasm swept through me in waves that wouldn’t stop. Andrés lasted no more than three more thrusts. He pulled out abruptly, turned me over, and put his cock in my mouth just in time to come in streams, with a muffled groan, across my lips and onto my tongue and tits. I swallowed what I could, licked what remained on my skin, and when I looked up, he was staring at me as if he had never seen another woman.

Afterward we lay still, tangled together, breathing the same damp, heavy air. I felt his heart pounding against my chest, just as wild as mine. I had semen drying in my cleavage, and it didn’t bother me. Quite the opposite.

***

I didn’t fall asleep. I lay looking at the ceiling while he stroked my arm with his fingertips, distracted and satisfied. I expected the guilt. I truly waited for it, like someone waiting for a bill she knows is going to arrive. But it didn’t come, or not in the way I thought it would.

What I felt instead was something more uncomfortable: an enormous, terrifying freedom. For years I had believed I was only one thing, orderly and predictable, Daniel’s wife, the woman who folded shirts and told the truth. And it turned out there was another woman inside me, one who knew how to desire without apologizing, who knew how to give orders, who liked herself in the reflection of a strange man, who came screaming with someone else’s cock inside her and didn’t apologize afterward.

“What are you thinking about?” Andrés asked.

“That tomorrow I’m going back home,” I said, “and I’m going to pretend this never happened.”

“Will you be able to?”

I didn’t answer him. I stood, picked up the black dress from the floor, and dressed slowly in front of the window, my back to him, without panties because mine had been ruined somewhere in the carpet. Not out of modesty. I had no modesty left that night. But because I didn’t want him to see on my face that the answer was no, that I wouldn’t be able to, that something had opened inside me and I didn’t know how to close it again.

I went down in the same mirrored elevator. The woman in the reflection still didn’t look entirely like the one who had gone up, but this time I didn’t look away. I held her gaze. I almost smiled at her. I could still feel Andrés’s cock inside me, my thighs were still sticky, and instead of disgust I felt a kind of small, fierce pride.

When I got home, Daniel was asleep with the lamp on and an open book resting on his chest. I looked at him from the doorway and loved him—I truly loved him—with a tenderness that hurt. That was the most confusing thing of all: that loving him and betraying him could exist, without contradicting each other, in the same body.

I lay down beside him carefully so I wouldn’t wake him. I turned off the light. And in the darkness, my eyes open, I knew that the real infidelity had not been another man’s body. It had been discovering that the woman I thought I was was barely half of who I really was. And that the other half, now that I knew her, had no intention of going back to sleep.