I Found My Wife with the Priest on That Balcony

When I met her at that office, I was already engaged to another woman, and she had a partner. I was an accountant, thirty-four years old, and she came in as an assistant in the billing department at just twenty-three. She looked good in any shirt, any skirt, any neckline, and she knew it perfectly well. She flirted so the driver wouldn’t charge her the fare, so the guy at the kiosk would give her a soda, so the suppliers would give her samples in advance. She was young, funny, and she got what she set out to get.

One afternoon, a coworker and I caught her in the archive with one of the guys from collections. He was squeezing her breasts over her blouse and she had her eyes closed, biting her lip. When they saw us, she came out red-faced and the guy was left talking to himself. We joked about it and let it drop. That guy never managed to get her out of his mind, and she learned to avoid him.

Months later they put her to work with me on the closing reports. We stayed late, went out for hamburgers, then beer, then two beers. One night we kissed in the parking lot. We left the people we were with. We moved to another city for my job. We had two children. I kept working in accounting and she stayed home because opportunities in that town were scarce.

The bed was our best place. Marcela had that rare gift of being able to tell me anything without shame, and I discovered that listening to her past adventures turned me on to the bone. I asked for details. She gave them to me in full. While I whispered in her ear, she did things to herself with her hand she had never done before. She confessed that with me she had learned to masturbate, that that part of her life had been sealed shut for years.

One night she told me the truth about that afternoon in the archive: yes, she had wanted to let herself get fucked against the shelves, the guy had fingered her several times so he could smell her, and when we walked in she even fantasized about staying naked for the three of us. The guy got scared. She left with shame written all over her, but also with a throb between her legs that lasted all week.

I gave her my fantasies in return. I told her that when I was young, one afternoon when my parents’ house was empty, two saleswomen knocked on the door. I stripped naked, lay down on the bed in my room with the window open, pretended to be asleep, and let them look from the street through the reflection in the dresser mirror. They knocked even harder just to see my face when I opened up. I wrapped myself in a towel and answered sleepily. They left without selling a thing. Marcela listened with her fingers sunk in up to the knuckles.

Her desires were more ambitious than mine. That I take her to a strip club and ask the owner to let her dance on the bar for strangers. That we go to a two-room motel, she with one man in one room and I with that man’s wife in the other, doors open. She loved it when I blindfolded her so she could imagine other bodies on top of hers.

One afternoon she went out with my sister to a farm. She went down to the river alone because the others didn’t want to accompany her. In the distance she saw a young man chopping wood. She remembered my story about the saleswomen and stripped completely naked on a big rock, watching him. The boy pretended not to notice, crouched down, pretending to gather branches, but she knew he was spying on her from the corner of his eye. She started masturbating right there, fantasizing that he would cross the river and fuck her like a whore. The boy didn’t dare. She came anyway, got dressed, went back to the farm, and the next day she made love to me while telling me every detail.

One morning a gas technician came for a routine check. Marcela was in a bathrobe pajama, with nothing underneath. We looked at each other. I said goodbye with a kiss and went off to work with my head on fire. That night she told me she had bent over three times in front of the guy, pretending to look for a match, opening her legs “by accident.” The technician acted like he didn’t see anything. I asked her whether she would have slept with him. She said yes, not because of the guy himself, but because of the naughtiness. I asked her if she loved me. She said of course, that the trust between us was so great nothing could separate us.

***

Three years later she found a job. A residence for secondary school students run by two priests from the parish. She came home tired but happy: she had her own income, her own routine, her own desires. The younger of the two priests, Father Damián, was Ecuadorian. He handled the budget, ran the house, and became our friend almost overnight. He showed up for birthdays, brought gifts for the kids, knew our customs as if he had been coming into our house for years.

One noon we invited him to lunch. When he got up for water, I noticed Marcela drop her gaze to the level of his crotch — he was wearing tight pants — and smile to herself, almost imperceptibly. I had seen that smile before, in the archive, by the river, in front of the gas technician. Again, I thought. That gesture again.

From there everything started to fall apart. Less sex. Less conversation. Less patience with the kids. More trips for “training,” more early mornings, more exhaustion when she came back.

One weekend we went on a trip with the boys from the dormitory and the two priests to a country house. Damián went around with his camera and the excuse that he was photographing landscapes. Half the photos were of Marcela: walking, laughing, bending over, fixing her hair. Around midday she drove a long thorn into the second toe of her foot. It bled quite a bit. Father Damián offered to take her to the town hospital, an hour away. They came back four hours later, her foot bandaged and the two of them speaking in low voices like two teenagers with a fresh secret. To everyone else it was a stroke of bad luck. For me, the worst wound of all had just begun.

Then the things appeared. A mountain bike, new, shiny. I never asked where the money had come from; I didn’t want to hear the answer. She went out riding every afternoon after six. A month later, a bigger washing machine replaced the old one. I didn’t ask that either.

I moved into the next room. I begged her to talk to me, to seek help, that so many years couldn’t just be thrown out the window. I told her I knew about the priest, that I was willing to start over wherever she wanted, in another city, in another country. She said I was crazy and turned over in bed.

***

One dawn I heard whispers from her room. The door had no panel, only a curtain. I got up barefoot and pulled it back two inches. Marcela was lying naked on her back, headphones on, her phone in one hand lighting up her breasts. With the other she was stroking herself between the legs, opening and closing them in slow motion. She was telling someone on the phone, “I want you to lick them, I want you to kiss me all over.” Then something lower that I couldn’t make out.

I went into a kind of trance. My heart in my throat, my legs shaking, and an erection like I hadn’t had in years. I thought about shouting, I thought about yanking the curtain open, I thought about a thousand things, but I stayed glued to the edge of the fabric. I heard her finish with a muffled moan against the pillow.

When I thought she had fallen asleep, she took off the headphones and started looking at the phone. From where I stood I could see Father Damián’s naked body in some photo, his erect cock pressed against his belly. They had exchanged everything. Her hand was still between her legs. I felt the blood boiling in me, but I swear I didn’t touch myself. Something in my body came on its own, soaking the whole boxer shorts against the curtain, without a single sound. I dragged myself back to my bed, masturbated two more times until I fell asleep amid tears and a pain at the base of my penis that lasted through the next day.

The next morning I wanted to kill them both. By noon I wanted to see her getting fucked by him somewhere. By the afternoon I cried without understanding who I was.

***

One day she left her email account open on the computer my children used to study. I checked it. There were no compromising messages, but the account was synced with her personal map: five visits in the last few months to a city three hours away, three of them to the same place, the Hotel Astral. She left at dawn under the excuse of “training,” came back at night with a permission slip signed by her boss.

I didn’t confront her. The only thing left for me was to watch.

One afternoon she announced she would be late because of inventory. Behind the dormitory there was an abandoned building and a court; beside the court, a big tree that blocked the view of the second floor. I climbed up among the branches and waited. Father Damián was playing soccer with three boys from the dormitory, the only ones who had stayed over vacation. When Marcela arrived, he stopped the game. The boys stayed on the bleachers talking nonsense. Damián went into the house, got water, and handed the boys money so they could go to the store. Marcela went up to the second floor by the outside stairs. He went up a minute later.

From the tree I could see the rear balcony of the residence. At first only their feet were visible, facing each other, hers slightly raised on top of his. Her leggings dropped suddenly to her ankles and Damián’s foot stepped on them to help her pull them off. Then they moved closer to the edge of the balcony. She put her elbows on the railing and he stood behind her. The movement started slowly and then became voracious. I was holding on to a branch with one hand and my other hand in my fly. It was pain shaped like pleasure, rage shaped like arousal. Marcela turned, opened her mouth with her tongue, lifted one leg so he could drive into her head-on. He gave one final thrust and froze. She laughed softly, almost mockingly. Damián pulled up his shorts and went down to the first floor. Marcela adjusted her leggings patiently and went into the house as if nothing had happened.

I climbed down from the tree with scraped knees, having ejaculated three times into my pants, disappointed, empty, and at the same time with a feeling I wouldn’t know how to name: the dirty pleasure of watching the woman you love giving herself like a bitch in heat to another man.

***

Weeks passed. One night Marcela came over to get me gently, maybe out of pity, maybe out of boredom. I gave in. I touched her like before, kissed her like before, she laughed like before. When she got on all fours, my favorite position and hers, I noticed it: a different smell. It wasn’t ours, it wasn’t semen, it wasn’t anything I recognized. Something in her body had changed inside. I got up and said, “No, not anymore, this is where it ends.”

I left the house that same week. The kids stayed with her; they were already grown, one finishing high school, the other starting university. Later I learned that Father Damián had promised to take her to his country, leave the cassock, start from scratch. He wasn’t able to do it. He left her standing there. Marcela had other partners. I moved to another city and rebuilt my life however I could.

What was not rebuilt is this: from that afternoon in the tree I discovered that seeing her fucked by another man aroused me more than any private scene we had ever had. The cuckold kink got under my skin like a splinter that never quite comes out. My current partner is generous, multi-orgasmic, intense. We make love with real hunger. But there’s something I don’t dare tell her, a fantasy I need and that I was never able to live when I still had time.

Take care of what you have. Tell each other everything, even the dirtiest things. The things that go unspoken are the ones that end up choosing for us.