I installed a hidden camera the day she cheated on me

Natalia and I had been together for almost twenty years. It hadn’t always been so quiet. At first we were incapable of keeping our hands off each other: in the kitchen, in the car, in the bathroom of that tiny apartment where we lived our first year. But time does what time does. The kids arrive, work arrives, the accumulated exhaustion arrives that weighs more than anything else, and the bed slowly turns into a place to sleep and nothing more.

I had gotten used to that. Or that’s what I told myself.

What shook me was the change. About four months earlier, Natalia started going to the gym three times a week. Nothing strange at first. But then she began coming home in new clothes: tight tops she wouldn’t have chosen before, shorts that showed off her hips, a care with her body she used to reserve only for special occasions. She curled her hair before going out to do the shopping. She checked her phone in the bathroom with the door closed. She gave me half answers when I asked her how her day had gone.

Little things. Separately they mean nothing. Together they mean everything.

Suspicion works slowly and in silence. I found it hard to concentrate at work. I watched her during dinner and asked myself questions I didn’t want to answer. When I found out the boiler technician would be coming the following Tuesday, and that I had an all-morning meeting at the office, the idea came on its own. It was a petty idea, I know. No one who respects himself installs a hidden camera in his own living room. But the noise inside my head was unbearable and I couldn’t find another way to shut it up.

On Monday night, when Natalia was already asleep, I placed a small camera on the living room shelf. I hid it behind a ceramic vase that had been in the same spot for years without anyone ever moving it. It pointed directly at the kitchen and the sofa. It could record for eight hours and the battery was full.

I went back to bed. I hardly slept at all. Natalia breathed peacefully beside me, oblivious to everything.

***

On Tuesday I left the house at 8:20. I kissed Natalia on the cheek, reminded her the technician would arrive at ten, and left. I drove to work. I was unable to focus on anything all morning. At noon I called the boiler company under the pretext of confirming the schedule. The girl told me the technician would be heading there between ten and eleven. I hung up and kept staring at the computer without reading a thing.

I knew him from the reviews online. His name was Javier. Twenty-six, according to his profile. Tall, dark-haired, with the kind of build of a man who carries tools and climbs ladders all day. The kind of man Natalia had once mentioned in passing, without attaching any importance to it. I had attached importance to it then, and I hadn’t forgotten it since.

At five in the afternoon I got her message: “This afternoon I’m staying at the gym and then I’m seeing Carmen. Don’t wait for me for dinner.” I closed the computer, gathered my things, and went home.

***

The recording started at 9:43. Natalia was moving around the kitchen making coffee. The first thing I noticed was the clothes. She was wearing a nearly transparent white linen blouse, no bra, with a neckline open enough that any bend would turn it into something more than a suggestion. Her nipples showed through the fabric every time she moved. Below, thin-fabric shorts that ended halfway down her thighs, with no panties underneath, and when she bent down to pick something out of the lower drawer, you could see the slit of her ass for a full second.

That wasn’t her loungewear. That outfit was for getting fucked.

When the doorbell rang, Natalia went to the door without changing, without putting anything over it. She opened it and greeted him with a long smile, the obligatory two kisses but closer than necessary. Javier came in looking at her with a discretion that wasn’t entirely discreet. His eyes went to one neckline and then to the other’s thighs.

She explained the boiler problem while leading him into the kitchen. She leaned over the control panel area to point something out. The blouse fell open in front and her tits hung inside it, white, heavy, with the hard nipples pointing at the floor. He looked away for a second. Then he looked back. And he never looked away again.

I had to pause the recording and breathe for a moment.

Javier lay down on the floor to check the pipes running under the lower cabinet. Natalia bent down to point at something on the back wall, and with that movement she ended up almost squatting over his body, her knees on either side of his hips. She was explaining things with her hand extended. He answered without taking his eyes off her. I saw the bulge in his work pants grow obvious, thicker and thicker, until he could no longer hide it.

At one point, Natalia put her weight on his legs so she wouldn’t lose her balance. And she stayed there. The two of them fell silent at the same time. She began moving slowly, under the excuse of adjusting her position, but she was rubbing her cunt against the bulge through her shorts. Javier put his hands on her hips and didn’t take them away. With his thumbs he pulled the short fabric up until her ass was bare. He slipped a hand between her thighs and she let out a sharp breath. I saw his finger move, saw him pull it out shining wet and bring it to his mouth to suck it.

“You’re soaked,” he said. It came through clearly.

“Shut up,” she answered, laughing under her breath.

***

When they got up, there was no ambiguity left between them. He looked at her for a second. She didn’t drop her eyes. She took his hand and put it back between her legs, over the fabric, so he could feel how wet she was. Javier squeezed there, with his whole palm, and she let out a short moan, the first thing the microphone recorded clearly.

Natalia took him by the wrist and led him to the sofa. He took off her blouse without hurrying, pulling it over her head and dropping it to the floor. He grabbed her tits with both hands, squeezed them, bent down to lick them while she undid his belt. She yanked his pants down and pulled his cock out of his underwear. It was hard, thick, curving upward. Natalia stared at it for a second with her eyebrows raised, as if he had asked her for comparisons no one wants to make.

She knelt between his legs and took it into her mouth in one go, all the way to the back, until her nose touched the hair. She choked and pulled it out drooling, with a thread of saliva hanging from her chin. She took him by the base again and started sucking him hard, closing her lips tightly around the glans, bobbing her head up and down while she caressed his balls with the other hand. Javier gripped her hair with both hands and started fucking her mouth, pushing her head deeper and deeper. She let him do it. She was choking, her eyes watering, and when he let her up she came up to catch her breath, spitting saliva over his cock and going back down on her own.

She had never sucked mine like that. Not even close. The first few years, yes, a little, but never like that, never letting her throat be used, never rolling her eyes back that way.

Natalia pulled a condom out of the drawer in the side table. I didn’t know there were condoms in that drawer. I stared at the image for a moment, as if waiting for the recording to make a mistake, to freeze or cut out. It didn’t. She tore the wrapper open with her teeth and put it on him with her mouth, pushing the latex downward with her lips pressed tight against his skin.

She got on top of him astride, grabbed his cock with her hand, and started taking it in slowly, sitting down millimeter by millimeter, mouth open and breathing cut short. When she had it all the way inside, she stayed still for a second, eyes closed, feeling it all the way to the bottom.

“Fuck,” she said.

She started with slow, deliberate movements, unhurried, searching for the angle. She lifted herself almost all the way off him and then sank down on him completely, squeezing each time she hit bottom. Javier grabbed her breasts with both hands, squeezed them, tilted his head to bite her nipples, to suck them until they were red. She responded by leaning back, bracing her hands on his knees, changing the rhythm of her hips, until she found something and the rhythm settled and began to speed up. You could hear the wet, hard smack of her ass against his thighs, faster and faster. The living room furniture appeared in the background as if it belonged to another life: the coffee table, the floor lamp we bought together at that fair, the kids’ photos on the shelf. Everything exactly in the same place.

“Harder,” she asked him. “Fuck me harder.”

Javier grabbed her by the hips and started pounding up into her, driving into her with dry, sharp thrusts that bounced her tits right up to her face. Natalia gripped the back of the sofa with both hands and started screaming without controlling herself.

I heard her come. I recognized that sound from a long time ago, from far back. And I also recognized that it had been far too long since I’d heard it like that, unrestrained, without the restraint of knowing the kids might hear. Her voice caught in her throat, her whole body shuddered, and she collapsed on top of him trembling, with his cock still inside her.

Afterward she stayed still for a moment, her forehead resting against Javier’s neck. He stroked her back with an open palm, slowly, while still moving his hips from below, sliding in and out of her with slow thrusts, not letting himself go soft. The two of them breathing in each other’s rhythm, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

***

It didn’t end there.

Javier lifted her off the sofa with his cock still inside her and set her down on the living room table, that wooden table where we eat Sunday dinner. He pulled out for a second, laid her back, spread her legs with his hands and bent down to eat her cunt. He dragged his tongue all the way from bottom to top, stopped at the clit and sucked it with his lips closed while he slid two fingers inside and curved them there. Natalia lifted her hips off the table searching for his mouth, grabbing his hair with both hands, pressing his face against her cunt.

“There, there, don’t stop,” she told him.

He ate her out until she came again, soaking his chin, her thighs trembling around his head. Javier got up with his mouth shining, wiped himself with the back of his hand, and looked at her for a second before going back in. He grabbed her legs behind the knees, pulled them against her chest, and started fucking her on the table, all the way in, his cock coming out shiny and going back in. Natalia gripped the edge with her fingers and closed her eyes.

What he said to her in a low voice didn’t reach the microphone well. But her reactions did. I heard him call her dirty, slut, my slut, and she answered yes, that she was his slut, that he should keep fucking her like that. When Javier spat on her chest for the first time, I expected Natalia to object, to pull away, to say something. She didn’t. She threw her head back and asked him to keep going. She asked him to spit in her mouth. She stuck her tongue out and he did, and she swallowed it and licked her lips smiling.

She had never asked me for that. Nor had she ever let me ask her. It had always been a line neither of us crossed.

After several minutes in that position, Natalia turned on her own, got down from the table, and rested her forearms on the back of the sofa, her ass lifted. Javier knelt behind her and ate her from behind, spreading her cheeks with his thumbs, dragging his tongue over her hole and over her cunt without distinguishing between one and the other. She started panting louder and louder, her face pressed tight against the cushion.

Javier started with his fingers in her ass, slowly, with calculated care. One. Then two. He wet them with saliva and with the wetness from her cunt and slipped them back in, pushing with his thumb while he kept eating her pussy with his mouth. She arched her back toward him without protesting.

We had been together twenty years. Twenty years in which I had asked for exactly that only once, at the beginning, when we still dared to ask for things. The answer had been a clear, non-negotiable no.

When Javier settled behind her, I already knew what was going to happen. He grabbed his cock with his hand, set it against her hole and pushed slowly. I watched it open, the glans enter and disappear inside her. Natalia let out a long, deep moan that came from her chest. Javier grabbed her hips and worked himself in all the way, millimeter by millimeter, until his balls were pressed against her cunt. He stayed still for a second. Then he started moving.

And the sound Natalia made was not one of pain. It was the sound of someone who had never been given what she was asking for. She started moving her ass on her own against his hips, pushing back, asking him for faster, harder. Javier slapped her ass sharply and left the mark of his fingers. He slapped her again. She moaned louder each time. She shoved three fingers into her cunt herself while he kept fucking her from behind.

“Don’t stop,” she said. “Don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop.”

She came again like that, with his cock in her ass and her fingers in her cunt, screaming into the sofa cushion with a voice I didn’t know.

***

The condom disappeared at some point I didn’t see. I only saw Javier pull out of her ass, tear it off his cock, and keep going bare. He finished standing up, with Natalia kneeling in front of him on the floor. He grabbed her head with both hands and fucked her mouth again, slower this time, looking down at her while she swallowed and choked. When he was about to come he pulled out, jerked himself two, three times with his hand, and came over her face, over her mouth, over her tits, a long thick stream that hung from her chin and fell onto her chest. Natalia opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue, and he emptied the rest there, and she swallowed it and licked her lips. Then she ran her fingers over her face, gathered what was left, and put it in her mouth, sucking her fingers one by one.

He wiped the corner of his mouth with his thumb and smiled at her with that smile I’ve known since before we got married.

They showered together. The camera didn’t reach the bathroom. It took them more than half an hour. You could hear them laughing. You could hear them starting again.

When Javier came out, Natalia walked him to the door in a bathrobe with her hair still damp. She kissed him on the cheek and said something in a low voice I couldn’t make out. He picked up his tool bag and looked at her one second longer than necessary before heading down the stairs.

***

I closed the laptop.

I sat there in the study staring at the wall, not really knowing what I was feeling. Rage, yes, of course. But not only that. There was something else mixed in there, something I’m not proud to admit but that was real: I had seen my wife in a way I hadn’t seen her in years. Desired. Desiring. Alive in a way time had been slowly extinguishing in both of us without either of us saying it out loud. I had a hard-on under my desk and I didn’t know whether to hate myself for it. I thought about the kids, the twenty years, the boiler I still didn’t know for sure was properly fixed.

I don’t know how long I sat there.

Natalia came home at 7:15. She had her gym bag and smelled of shampoo. She kissed me on the cheek when she came in and went straight to the kitchen.

“Did you eat anything?” she asked from the back.

“A little,” I said.

“I’ll make something quick then.”

We had dinner talking about unimportant things. The kids, the weekend, whether we needed to replace the boiler or if today’s repair was enough. She filled my glass with water without me asking. I passed her the bread. It was a normal dinner.

When we turned off the light, I came to her in a way I hadn’t in a long time. No detours, no indifference, the kind that settles in when the body no longer asks for what it used to ask for. I slid my hand under her nightgown, grabbed a breast and squeezed it hard. Natalia took a second to respond. But she did. She opened her legs under the sheet and guided my other hand to her cunt. She was already wet. I ate her slowly, in silence, my face buried between her thighs until she came, biting her wrist so as not to wake the children. Then I got on top of her and shoved it in at once, and for the first time in years she dug her nails into my back and whispered in my ear to give it to her harder.

I gave it to her. And I came inside without pulling out, pressing my hand over her mouth to muffle her cry.

We stayed wrapped around each other for a while, breathing hard, saying nothing. Without me mentioning the camera or her mentioning the technician.

I don’t know if what I recorded that Tuesday saved us or condemned us. I still don’t know.

The next day I deleted the file.