My Boyfriend Doesn’t Know the Woman in the Video Is Me

I was fed up. Bored to the bone. Telling Bruno my fantasies had stopped doing anything for me months ago. I knew the sequence by heart: first the startled look, then the ragged breathing, and at the end that hasty, pathetic finish that lasted about as long as a sigh. I needed more. I needed something that would gnaw at him from the inside without him being able to name the wound.

And one night, staring at the ceiling while he snored, the idea came to me whole, perfect, like a sentence. If he couldn’t know the pain was coming from me, then the pain would never end.

That’s how Selena was born.

Selena is not me. Selena is something else. A body without a name, a mouth without a history, a clean, ancient hatred toward the men who touch her. I went to a costume shop downtown and bought a black canvas balaclava, one of those cheap ones with three openings: one for the mouth, two for the eyes. I tried it on in front of the fitting-room mirror and felt a shiver run down the back of my neck. With that fabric on, I stopped being Renata, the sweet girlfriend, the one who makes coffee with two sugars. Under the canvas, only she remained.

I opened an account on a disposable email server, one of those that can’t be traced. “Selena’sTruth,” I wrote, and the address felt like a promise.

I planned everything with the patience of someone assembling a watch. I chose the locations for how anonymous they were: a bathroom in a roadside bar, the sofa of an apartment rented by the hour, a motel room with mirrors on the ceiling. I found the men on one of those apps where nobody asks for last names. I explained only what was necessary: the mask doesn’t get touched, the face isn’t filmed, and everything I say is part of the game. None of them asked questions. Men like that are satisfied if a woman shows up willing.

The first time I put the canvas on in front of a stranger, I felt something I hadn’t expected. Not shame, not fear. A cold freedom, like jumping into dark water knowing nobody will ever know it was you. Under the balaclava I could say anything. I could be anyone. And while I filmed, all I could see in my head was Bruno’s face staring at the screen, week after week, sinking a little deeper.

***

The first message was brief. In the subject line I wrote: “So you’ll know what a real woman is capable of.” In the body, nothing but a link.

That night I watched him open it on the couch. I was pretending to read in the chair across from him, but I didn’t miss a single gesture. Bruno put on his headphones out of habit, and in an instant his face changed. The skin on his arms prickled. He swallowed like it hurt.

The video began with a shaky hand filming the bathroom of some random place, cracked tiles, a bulb flickering. On the floor, kneeling, a woman. That was all: a body with firm thighs and a black balaclava. Selena.

A man’s hand came into frame and grabbed her by the hair at the nape of her neck. From off-camera, a hoarse voice said something filthy, and she obeyed without hesitation. Between gasps and retches, the voice distorted by the fabric fought its way through, loaded with a poison I knew well because it was mine.

“Like that, just like that! Treat me like what I am! My boyfriend thinks he has a saint at home. He thinks I save myself for him. And here I am, on my knees for a stranger, and I enjoy it more than anything in the world. I wish he could see me. I wish he knew.”

Bruno lowered the phone. He looked at me. There was something new in his eyes, a hairline crack.

“What is this, Renata? Some kind of spam?”

I shrugged without looking up from my book.

“No idea. Garbage. Delete it and that’s that.”

He didn’t delete it. I knew because that night, thinking I was asleep, I heard him play it again at minimum volume, his breathing heavy, his hand under the sheet. It took all I had not to smile into the pillow.

***

The second video arrived a week later.

This time Selena was on a leather sofa, on all fours, the camera fixed on a tripod showing her in profile. Behind her, a bulky guy held her by the hips. She moaned, and between each moan she spit out words like someone throwing stones.

“Harder! My boyfriend would never dare touch me like this. He’s too delicate, poor thing, he thinks I’m fragile. He has no idea I offer myself to anyone who asks. Tell him, tell the camera: am I easy or not?”

The man looked at the lens, laughing, and said that girlfriend was the best gift life had ever given him.

Bruno didn’t get aroused anymore. This time he went pale, the phone in his hand as if it burned. And then he started looking at me differently. With a suspicion he tried to smother before it could take shape. I watched him think, watched suspicion climb his throat and saw him swallow it by force. No, he told himself. It couldn’t be. His Renata, his sweet girlfriend. That was a macabre coincidence, some random internet montage, some random woman with some random balaclava.

I let him wrestle with it. I served him tea, stroked his hair, asked if he’d slept badly. Every gesture of tenderness was another turn of the screw. I wanted doubt to live with us, to sit at the table, to sleep between us.

The days that followed were my favorite part. Bruno started watching me in a new way, as if he were studying me. When I laughed, he searched my laugh for the echo of the other woman. When I stepped out of the shower, his eyes traced my body, comparing it to the one in the video. One afternoon he asked me, in a tone meant to sound casual, where I’d been the Thursday before. I told him in detail, inventing a coffee date with a friend who didn’t exist, and I saw him force himself to believe me.

“You’ve been acting weird lately,” he said one night, fiddling with the edge of the sheet.

“Weird how?” I kissed his shoulder, slow, unhurried.

“I don’t know. More… calm. Too calm.”

I smiled in the dark. The predator’s calm, I thought, but I didn’t say it. I told him it was love, that I felt safe with him like never before, and he clung to that phrase like a life raft. That night he made love to me with a desperation I didn’t know in him, looking for proof in my body that he was still the only one who had me. I closed my eyes and thought of Selena.

***

The third video was the final blow, the one I had planned from the start.

The recording was made from the floor, looking up. Selena was sitting on the face of a man lying on his back, moving slowly, suffocating him. Her words were no longer stray insults: they were a letter, and I knew exactly who it was addressed to.

“That’s it, clean it all off. Clean off what someone else left on me before you. It smells like betrayal, doesn’t it? That’s how I like it. My boyfriend is at home, probably worried about me, sending me goodnight texts. Meanwhile, his princess is sitting on a stranger’s face and getting wetter than she ever got with him. I wish you could see me, Bruno. I wish you knew that when I tell you I love you, I’m thinking about this.”

When his name came out of that masked mouth, Bruno let out a short, animal cry. The phone hit the floor. He sprang to his feet and began pacing from wall to wall, hands in his hair, like a beast in a cage far too small.

“Renata! Renata, come here, come here right now!”

I walked into the room rubbing my eyes, pretending I’d just woken up.

“What’s wrong? What is it, my love? You’re scaring me.”

“This!” He pointed at the phone on the floor with a trembling finger. “This… this woman! She said my name! She said Bruno, she said it clearly!”

I knelt beside him with all the calm in the world. I picked up the phone, rewound it, and played the ending again. I listened with feigned attention, frowned, and then let out a soft, relieved, almost tender laugh.

“Oh, my love. You scared me to death. Listen carefully. She doesn’t say ‘Bruno.’ She says ‘brute,’ lowercase, as an insult. Like when someone yells ‘idiot’ or ‘animal.’ Just a random word, darling. She says it about that guy, not about you. It’s a horrible coincidence, I know, but that’s all it is.”

I looked him in the eyes with all the tenderness I could manufacture.

“Do you really think I could do something like that to you? To you, of all people? I love you, Bruno. You’re my whole life.”

And he broke. He collapsed against my chest and burst into tears like a child. He wanted to believe me. He needed to believe me desperately, because the other possibility was too much to bear. He hugged me so tightly my ribs hurt, clinging to me like the last plank in the middle of a shipwreck.

“Forgive me,” he murmured against my neck. “Forgive me for doubting you. It’s just… it’s just that she looks like you, the body, the voice…”

“Shhh,” I said, stroking his back in slow circles. “Easy. I’m here. I’m always going to be here.”

***

And while I comforted him, while I dried his tears and kissed his forehead, I smiled over his shoulder, where he couldn’t see me.

Bruno didn’t know many things. He didn’t know the tripod was stored at the back of my closet, under the winter sheets. He didn’t know the email account was still open, waiting. He didn’t know the recording had three more minutes I never showed him, an ending where Selena took off the balaclava and looked into the camera long enough for anyone, anyone except him, to recognize her.

Every moan had been for him. Every insult, a poisoned caress. Every “I love you” of mine, a lie so perfect even I no longer knew where the performance ended.

I held him tighter. My boyfriend. My cuckold. My half-finished work of art.

Because the best part, I thought, stroking his hair while he fell asleep through his tears, is that the fourth installment was already recorded. And this time, Selena wasn’t going to be so careful with names.