I Let a Stranger Seduce My Wife

I met Esteban on one of those forums where people write what they’d never dare say out loud. We talked about fantasies, about limits, about everything my marriage to Marisol had stopped having after eight years. One dawn, without thinking too much about it, I gave him my wife’s email address. Just to chat, I told myself. A lie. I knew it even as I typed the address.

Marisol and I had settled into that comfortable, warm routine that long marriages have. We loved each other, I have no doubt of that, but the desire had been fading away without either of us daring to say so out loud. We slept back to back, kissed each other on the forehead, made love on special nights and always in the same way. Sometimes I watched her while she read on the sofa and wondered when we’d stopped looking for each other.

At first they wrote about trivial things. The weather, her job at a bookstore downtown, the movies she liked. I knew because Esteban forwarded me every message, as if inviting me into a game whose rules I still didn’t fully understand.

—It won’t cost you anything —he wrote one night—. Your wife is already replying faster than you think.

He was right. In a matter of days, the emails changed temperature. What began as politeness turned into innuendo, and innuendo turned into something else. Marisol told him things she hadn’t told me in years.

—It’s hard —I replied to Esteban—. To say the least. I know her.

But he kept insisting. With me and, above all, with her. He wanted to see her. He wanted a meeting, whether I was there or it happened behind my back. And I, who should have shut the email and erased every trace, found myself refreshing the inbox every five minutes.

The worst, or the best, was that I was willing. If she agreed, I wasn’t going to stand in the way. More than that: the mere thought of imagining her with someone else left me breathless.

***

For weeks there was a back and forth. Esteban tested the waters, pulled back, then pushed again. Marisol flirted in the emails but always stopped just before saying yes. Until one Thursday afternoon, without me saying a word, she asked me something from the kitchen with a naturalness that froze me.

—Do you know a guy named Esteban?

I felt the floor shift beneath me. It took me a moment to answer.

—Why? —I said, pretending to check my phone.

—No reason —she replied, and I noticed she was smiling without looking at me—. Curiosity.

That night we didn’t say anything else about it, but something in the air had changed. Marisol was hot. I felt it in the way she moved around the house, in how she kissed me before bed, in the hand she let slide over my chest and withdrew just when I started hoping for more. She was playing. With me and with him.

Two days later Esteban confirmed it with a single message: “She said yes. Saturday, at a hotel in the harbor. You’re not coming.”

You’re not coming. I read it four times. And still I didn’t reply no.

***

Saturday was the longest day of my life. Marisol got dressed up the way I hadn’t seen her dress up for me in years. She put on a wide skirt, one of those that billow in the wind, a blouse that hinted at more than it revealed, and a perfume I recognized from our first months together.

—I’m going out with the girls —she said, planting a quick kiss on the corner of my lips—. Don’t wait up.

I nodded. I couldn’t bring myself to say anything. I watched her leave, get into the car, and when the engine disappeared down the street I stood in the living room with my heart pounding in my throat and a mixture of shame and excitement I didn’t know how to name.

The hours that followed were sweet torture. I poured myself a whiskey I never finished. I turned on the TV and saw nothing. I looked at my phone a hundred times, waiting for a message I didn’t know whether I wanted to receive. I imagined things, all at once: that she had changed her mind and come back, that something terrible had happened, that at that very moment another man was touching her the way I had stopped touching her. And the worst part was that that last image, the one that should have shattered me, was the one that left me breathless.

What happened next I learned from Esteban, who told it to me the following day with obscene detail, paragraph by paragraph, like someone narrating a movie he knew the other man would have paid to see.

***

He arrived first. He asked for the biggest room, one with mirrors arranged around the walls, a jacuzzi by the window and a huge bed that took up half the space. Marisol arrived a few minutes later. They greeted each other with two kisses on the cheek, like two acquaintances pretending not to know why they were there, and went up in the elevator without touching, measuring each other with their eyes.

As soon as the door closed, it all came apart. They kissed with an urgency that left no room for conversation, tongues seeking tongues, hands losing their shyness. She pressed her palm over his pants and felt what she was provoking. He slid his hand under that wide skirt and discovered she wasn’t wearing anything underneath. Marisol had left home that way, perfectly aware of what was going to happen.

He touched her without delicacy, his fingers sinking into her at once, and Marisol arched her back against the wall. She moaned in a way that, according to Esteban, sounded like relief, as if she had been waiting exactly for that for months. A pleasure that, he told me, she herself confessed she hadn’t felt in a long time.

She dropped to her knees. She undid his pants in a hurry, pulled them down along with his underwear and took him in her mouth before he could say anything. She ran her tongue over him completely, without shame, taking him to the back of her throat again and again. Esteban wrote to me that he had to brace himself against the dresser to keep from losing his balance.

He couldn’t take much more of that. He pulled her up, turned her around and put her facing the bed, hands on the mattress. He hiked her skirt up to her waist and thrust into her in one stroke. She was so turned on there was no resistance, only a long moan that escaped her uncontrollably. He held her by the hips and drove into her hard, until they both came almost at the same time, her biting down on the back of her hand so she wouldn’t scream.

***

They lay down on the bed, naked at last, catching their breath among the mirrors that multiplied the scene everywhere. Esteban told me they stayed silent for a while, her head on his chest, him stroking her back, as if they were lovers of a lifetime and not two strangers who had met for the first time an hour earlier.

It was Marisol who broke the calm. She started caressing him slowly while kissing his neck, and when she felt him stirring again, she moved down his body and took him in her mouth once more. Esteban wrote that she was incredible at it, that he had rarely felt anything like that. I read every word with blood pounding in my temples.

This time he took the lead. He positioned her on all fours, spread her buttocks and played with his tongue where no one had ever touched her, not even me. Marisol buried her face in the pillow, trembling. He took his time, lubing her patiently, and when he finally entered her from behind, she let out a cry he had to smother with his hand.

He went in and out slowly at first, then with more determination, while Marisol clung to the sheets and repeated that he mustn’t stop. When he finished, they both collapsed onto the bed, sweaty, wordless.

***

After that they showered together. And there, under the water, she took advantage of the moment to kneel one last time, almost like a farewell, until he couldn’t take any more. Nothing was left undone.

They dressed unhurriedly. Marisol fixed her hair in front of one of those mirrors, put on her lipstick and looked at herself for a moment, according to Esteban, with a smile he couldn’t decipher. They said goodbye with a long kiss at the room door and each went their separate way.

That night, when she got home, I pretended to be asleep. She smelled like another man, like hotel, like something that was no longer entirely mine. She got into bed, put an arm over me and fell asleep at once, with a calm that kept me awake until dawn.

The next day I got an email from Esteban. He told me everything, in detail, every gesture, every moan, as if he knew that was exactly what I needed to read. “She gave in completely —he wrote at the end—. And it was wonderful. In bed she’s something else.”

I replied with the only thing I could think of, the only thing I’d been keeping to myself for weeks.

—Next time —I wrote— I want to be in that room. Even if it’s just to watch.

Esteban took barely a minute to answer. “That,” he wrote, “we’ll have to ask her.”

And for the first time in a long while, I didn’t know which of the two of them was holding the reins of my own marriage.