My Husband Was Sleeping When a Stranger Jumped the Wall

The movie was halfway through when I felt him behind me on the sofa. A cheap Mexican soap opera I hadn’t even chosen, but the screen flickered enough to fill the silence in the room. Mateo rested his hands on my shoulders and started slowly down my neck, with those fingers of his that knew the way by heart but hadn’t bothered to vary the route for months now.

I thought, tonight, yes. That the long Sunday dusk and the rain announced on the horizon had finally managed to spark something in him.

I turned off the floor lamp with the remote. I lay back on the cushion and let him lift my T-shirt. He started with my nipples, with his mouth, and at first it felt good. Tingling, heat, that feeling that something is about to begin. But three minutes passed. Five passed. Ten. Mateo was still there, tongue and lips on the same spot, with the exact cadence of someone carrying out a task learned in school.

I shifted a little to the left. I lifted my pelvis just enough for him to understand. I wanted him to go lower, to touch me with his hand, to take off my pants, to move on to something else. Anything else.

He took the movement as a polite goodbye. He flopped onto his back beside me and let out a long sigh, pleased with himself.

Mission accomplished, that breath seemed to say.

I turned onto my stomach and looked at him. The television’s blue light lit up his profile. His chest rose and fell with insulting regularity. Two minutes later his breathing grew heavier, and before long he was already snoring softly, that snore of his that used to be tender to me and now just made me want to hit him.

Then I remembered what he’d told me the week before. We were arguing about something trivial in the kitchen, a bill, I don’t remember what, and suddenly he had blurted out, “I couldn’t stand finding out you masturbate when I’m next to you. It would be like you telling me I don’t do it for you.” He’d said it in a solemn voice, as if making a statement of principle, and I had kept my answer to myself so we wouldn’t start a fight.

Now he was asleep. And I was awake. And horny. And sick of it.

I slid my hand inside the pajama pants and moved down slowly. I found my clit swollen, ready, offended at having waited for nothing. I started with my thumb, slow circles. The bed creaked just a little. Mateo didn’t move.

I upped the intensity. Two fingers, firmer rhythm. I could feel myself getting wetter, heat climbing up my belly and knotting in my still-sensitive nipples. I wanted him to wake up. I wanted him to notice. I wanted to see his face when he discovered that his sermon about masturbating beside him had been useless.

Mateo turned over. To the other side. Snoring a little louder.

I stayed still for a few seconds, staring at the ceiling, my hand still between my legs. If I kept going I’d end up alone, in silence, without the extra pleasure of anger. If I stopped I’d be left with that unbearable itch all over my body, that sensation that every nerve is screaming at you.

I got up.

***

The hallway parquet was ice-cold. I went barefoot to the kitchen, turned on only the extractor hood light —that low yellow light that makes you feel like you’re in a European film— and opened the fridge. I took out a little bottle of sparkling water, took a long drink, and stayed leaning against the counter, listening.

Outside it smelled like wet earth. The kitchen window faced the inner courtyard, and I could smell it perfectly, that thick, sweet aroma rising from the ground when the heat of the day gives in to the first rain. And then it came down. Suddenly, without transition, that burst that drenches you in two seconds if you’re not under cover.

Something in me loosened. The anger turned into something else, a kind of pleasant daze, and I knew I needed to go out. Not think about it. Not overanalyze it. Go out.

I opened the sliding door that led to the patio. The air hit my face like a warm slap. The vine at the back was shaking in the wind, and the floor tiles gleamed with that sheen of fresh water. I took two steps outside, under the eaves. My T-shirt was sticking to my chest. The pajamas were starting to soak through at the edges.

I closed my eyes.

When I opened them, I saw him jump.

***

He was coming from the other side of the wall, the one that separates the patio from the service alley. He landed on his feet with the elasticity of someone who knows how to use his body. He was completely naked, soaked to the bone, with black hair plastered to his forehead and a ragged breath that wasn’t from exhaustion but from something more urgent.

I didn’t scream. I don’t know why I didn’t scream. Maybe because the rain was making too much noise. Maybe because something in the way he looked at me told me he wasn’t there by mistake.

He came closer slowly. I didn’t move.

He stopped one step away. He smelled of rain, of clean skin, of night. He raised his right hand and brushed my jaw with the back of his fingers, then my neck. His thumb slid down to my lower lip and stayed there, pressing just slightly.

I bit his thumb. Not hard. Enough for him to understand.

—You shouldn’t be here —I said, so softly the wind took it away.

—I know.

That was all he said for a long while. I’m saying it and I still can’t believe it. But that’s how it was.

His free hand took me by the waist and shoved me against the patio wall. The rough masonry bit into my back through the wet pajamas. He kissed me with his mouth open, without preamble, tongue in, as if he’d been building up a run for hours. I tasted the rain on his lips, and beneath it the taste of him, unlike anything else I’d ever known.

Fear slid down my stomach. A delicious fear, the kind that warns you you’re crossing a line and at the same time invites you to jump higher. Blood surged into my tight nipples. Between my legs that painful emptiness opened up, that demand to be filled that I could no longer bear.

I wrapped my arms around his neck. He slid his hands down to my ass, squeezed with the roughness I’d silently asked for all night, and lifted me.

***

I took a step back when he put me down again. I wanted to see him angry. I wanted to force him to admit he wanted me so badly he’d have to take me by force. I wanted the night to make up, in a single brutal scene, for the obedient months my husband had left me with.

He understood right away. He grabbed my forearm, not violently but without negotiation, and shoved me back against the wall. Harder this time. The back of my head bumped softly against the masonry and a lash of pleasure shot down my spine.

—Like this? —he murmured, his lips pressed to my ear.

—Like this.

He tore off the soaked T-shirt in one jerk and threw it onto the tile. His teeth found my throat first, then my collarbone, then my breasts. He bit without hurting, marked without leaving traces. Every pass of his tongue was a promise of something deeper, and I tugged his hair so he’d never stop.

He pulled my pants down. Let them fall around my ankles. I was left naked against the patio wall of my own house, at three thirty in the morning, with rain hammering my back and a stranger who was going to do to me what my husband hadn’t been able to do in six months.

***

He lowered himself to his knees. He kissed my navel, then my hip bone, then the inside of my thigh. I dug my fingers into his shoulders to keep from falling, because my legs were no longer obeying me. When his mouth reached where it needed to reach, one of my hands clutched the metal drainpipe coming down from the roof and the other found the back of his neck.

It wasn’t gentle. I didn’t want it to be gentle. I wanted intensity, pressure, that kind of pleasure that hurts a little at the edges. He understood it, or sensed it, or had read it on my face, and gave me exactly that. When I felt I was about to fall at the first orgasm, he stopped.

He stood up. Looked at me.

—Tell me —he asked.

I was breathing with my mouth open, not enough air. The rain was getting in our eyes. I could barely make out his silhouette against the yellow light spilling from the kitchen window.

—Do it —I whispered—. Get in.

He took me under the thighs and lifted me again. I wrapped my legs around his waist. I felt him settle, felt him find the angle, and then felt him sink in all at once, all the way, until my breath cut off halfway through a moan.

He started moving. Slowly at first, adjusting. Then harder. Then like he was carrying out a sentence. My body matched his thrusts with an ease I hadn’t felt in a long time, and I bit his shoulder so I wouldn’t scream. The wall scratched my back. The sky above kept emptying itself. Each lightning flash lit us for a whole second, frozen like a photograph nobody would ever see.

I dug my nails in. Bit harder. I felt my whole body tightening, the heat rising from my heels, the orgasm coming at me like a wave I could no longer dodge. I grabbed his hair, forced him to look at me, and let him see the exact moment I came apart.

He lasted two more thrusts. Then his face broke into that expression men get when they’ve lost control of everything, and he came inside me with a rough groan the rain swallowed almost whole.

We stayed like that for a while. Him leaning against me, me against the wall, the rain doing its thing. I felt his heart against mine, that gallop slowly settling down.

***

He set me down slowly. My legs weren’t working properly. He held me by the waist until I found my balance again.

—What’s your name? —I asked, just to ask something.

He smiled crookedly. Shook his head.

—Better not.

He was right. Better not.

He stayed one second longer, tracing my face with his eyes as if memorizing something. Then he bent down, picked up the T-shirt from the floor —soaked, useless— and put it back in my arms as if returning a lost object. He walked barefoot and naked to the wall, braced his hands on it, gauged the height, and jumped in a single motion.

When I looked back at the alley, he was gone.

I stayed one more minute under the eaves, letting the rain do whatever it had to do. Then I gathered up my pajamas, opened the sliding door, and went back in silently. The kitchen was exactly as it had been: the little bottle of sparkling water open on the counter, the yellow extractor light, the clock showing quarter to four.

I went upstairs barefoot to the bedroom. Mateo was on his back, snoring with his mouth slightly open. He hadn’t moved. He wasn’t going to move.

I slipped under the sheets careful not to brush against him. I pressed my cheek to the pillow, still carrying the other man’s smell on my skin. I closed my eyes.

Outside, the rain kept falling.