My Boyfriend Denied That He Liked Being Cucked

This is the first time I’ve ever worked up the courage to write something like this, but the story is burning me up inside and I need to get it out. My name is Carolina, I’m twenty-four years old, and I live in Bogotá. I’m not going to pretend to be modest: I know I’m attractive. I have long, dark hair, almost always straight, and brown eyes that, without meaning to, notice too much. White skin that tans fast after just two days in the sun. I’m slim, but with curves where they count, and I love tight clothes. Not out of vanity, but because I enjoy that exact second when a man doesn’t know where to look. This is the story of how I discovered what really turned my boyfriend Andrés on.

I always knew Andrés lied. Not with words —he rehearsed those well enough— but with everything else. We’d been together almost two years and he sold himself as a man of iron principles. “I’d never put up with being cheated on, Carolina. It’s the most humiliating thing there is,” he’d repeat in that voice that went just a little deeper than usual, as if he were speaking to convince himself. But I watched him. I saw how his gaze drifted whenever an unfaithful woman appeared in a movie. I noticed the tiny change in his breathing, the silence that stretched a second too long. His body was an open book he refused to read.

The proof came on a Friday. We were in my bed, in my apartment in Chapinero, and I decided to play a little game.

—Andrés —I whispered in his ear while my hand slid across his chest—. Sometimes I imagine myself alone in a bar, with the music loud and the lights low. And a stranger looks at me from the counter, comes over, offers me a drink…

He tensed. Not much, but I felt his abdominal muscles tighten.

—And what would you say to him? —he asked, in a tone of indifference that sounded far too forced.

—I don’t know. Maybe I’d let him brush my leg under the bar. Let him realize how turned on I am.

His breathing grew deeper. What had until then been resting limply against my thigh began to wake up, throbbing slowly.

—I wouldn’t like it —he said, but his voice came out thin as a thread.

—Really? —I insisted, pressing my lips to his earlobe—. Picture me. He takes me to the back of the place, lifts my skirt, and slips his fingers inside me while you wait at home not knowing where I am. Doesn’t that turn you on at all?

He shook his head. But he was already fully hard, throbbing against my hand with an urgency his mouth refused to admit. I didn’t need anything else. The proof was conclusive. Andrés, my proper boyfriend, the one with the honor speech, was a cuckold in a latent state. The idea turned him on, he loved the humiliation, but he lived locked inside his own cage of denial. And that night, I discovered I had the key.

***

A week later, I crossed the line. Not out of revenge or boredom. I did it out of curiosity. Out of the power I suddenly felt in my hands. I met up with a guy I knew from university, a guy named Lucas. We went to his apartment in Cedritos and there was no dinner or romance involved. He shoved me against the door as soon as he closed it, kissed me with a roughness Andrés had never had, and stripped me in a hurry, as if he’d been thinking about it for weeks.

He took me against the wall first, then on the floor, and finally on his rumpled bed. He grabbed my hair, told me things in my ear I’d never repeat out loud, and I answered with a brazenness I hadn’t known I had in me. I left there with trembling legs and his taste still on my mouth. And with one crystal-clear certainty: my game was only just beginning.

That same night I went back home, where Andrés was waiting for me with his usual tenderness. He greeted me with a kiss on the forehead, asked if I’d eaten, tucked the strand of hair that had fallen across my face back into place. And while he gave me those warm little kisses on the neck, I decided to build the perfect lie. A lie made of truth.

—How was your day, love? —he asked, stroking my hair.

—Good… though I had a really strange dream last night —I answered, with a smile he didn’t manage to interpret—. So real I can still feel it. You should hear it.

He snuggled against me, interested already.

—Tell me.

—I dreamed I was with another man. A stranger. He took me to his place and made me his without asking permission. He threw me on the bed, spread my legs, and didn’t stop until I was coming apart.

As I spoke, I felt him stiffen against my hip. He was touching himself slowly, eyes closed, lost in a “fantasy” he had no idea contained so much of a memory.

—Carolina… that’s so hot —he panted.

—You like that, baby? Imagining me giving myself to another man, moaning for someone who isn’t you? —I asked, knowing the answer all too well.

—Yes… yes, fuck —he admitted, beaten, his voice breaking.

—Well, in the dream he came inside me. And I came home with you anyway, without washing, hoping you wouldn’t notice anything.

Andrés came with a long groan, soaking the sheet, without me barely touching him. I looked down at him with a coldness that gave me shivers of pleasure myself. He’d come to the exact description of my real infidelity, believing he was hearing a made-up story for both of us.

—I love you —he said, exhausted, reaching for my hand.

—I love you too, my little cuckold —I replied, and kissed him on the forehead.

***

He fell asleep with that satisfied-man smile, convinced we had shared a naughty secret. I stayed awake, staring at the ceiling, finally understanding the full extent of what I had in my hands. I could be with whoever I wanted, whenever I wanted, and all he needed was for me to tell him about it afterward, turned into a dream. His denial was my alibi. His arousal, my permission.

What came after was a delicious and dangerous routine. I learned to read him in ways he never learned to read himself. I knew exactly when to raise the stakes and when to ease off, when to leave a loose detail for his imagination to work on its own. Sometimes I gave him a softened version, almost romantic. Other times, I told him things exactly as they had happened, unfiltered, and he clutched the sheet as if the words were burning him.

The second was Mateo, a coworker at the office where I do my internship. He’d been circling me for months with silly excuses, and one rainy afternoon, when everyone had left, I ran into him in the hallway on the fourth floor. There was no long conversation. He took me to the empty conference room, pulled the blind down, and sat me on the long table where budgets were decided in the morning. I let him do it. I let him tear my blouse open and bite my neck, knowing that that same night I’d gift Andrés every detail disguised as invention.

And I did. That night I lay down pressed against his back and spoke to him softly, like someone reciting a secret.

—I dreamed again —I told him—. That a man in a suit lifted me onto a huge table, in an empty office, and made me his without anyone knowing. He covered my mouth so I wouldn’t scream.

—And you let him? —he asked, his breathing already ragged, reaching for my hand to take it where he needed it.

—I let everything happen, Andrés. And I thought about you. I thought about your face if you knew where your girlfriend was that afternoon.

He came before I finished the sentence. Each time it took less and less effort, as if his body had stopped fighting what was obvious. I held him afterward, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and felt that strange mix of tenderness and dominance that had become my drug.

—What if it were true? —he asked me one night, almost out of breath, after one of my stories—. What if you really were with other men?

I went still for a moment. It was the question I’d been waiting weeks for. I looked into his eyes, those eyes that wanted and didn’t want to know, and chose my words with a surgeon’s care.

—And would that change anything between us? —I answered—. Look at you. Look at how you are right now. Tell me if you really want an answer.

He didn’t ask again. He closed his eyes, pulled me to him, and let the question die in the air, right where it suited both of us. Deep down, he already knew. His body had known it from the first minute. All he lacked was the courage not to say it out loud, and that courage I had no intention of giving him.

Today things are still the same, and at the same time everything is different. Andrés treats me like a queen, adores me, shows me off to his friends as if he were the luckiest man in the world. And in a way he is: he has beside him a woman who gives him exactly the one thing that really turns him on, even if he’s incapable of admitting it. As for me, I live in a balance that electrifies me, between what he believes and what I keep silent.

Tomorrow, maybe, I’ll tell him about the neighbor who offered to help me with the moving boxes. Or about the gym trainer who looks at me a little too long. The possibilities are endless and he’s going to keep denying everything, panting, asking for more, while his body gives him away over and over again. What a beautiful game this is when you understand that you’ve already won.