My Infidelity in Medellín Started with a Bet

I arrived in Medellín at just twenty-two, my newborn son in my arms and the promise of a better world my husband had painted for months. Reality hit us in the first week: the rent was unaffordable, the bills devoured the little he brought home, and a choking feeling squeezed my chest every time I opened the empty refrigerator.

It was Marta, a friend from the boarding house where we were living at first, who told me about the job.

—It’s at a rotisserie —she said, lowering her voice—. Night shift, pays well. I’ve been there six months and I never go without anything.

I believed her because I needed to believe her. I told my husband it was a chicken restaurant, that I’d serve lunches and wait tables, that I’d come back at dawn with money in my pocket and a couple of pieces wrapped up for him. He agreed because there was no other option: he worked days in a warehouse and could look after the baby at night.

The first day I realized Marta had only half lied to me. It wasn’t a chicken restaurant. It was a red-light bar in the Manrique neighborhood, with a long counter, private booths with curtains, and a clientele of solitary men who came in with loosened ties and left without their watches. We sold beer, aguardiente, and a percentage of each bill ended up in our weekend envelope.

Camila was the owner. A woman in her forties, ash-blonde dyed hair, rings on every finger, and a smoker’s voice. She sized me up in the first minute and told me I had a lamb’s face, and that that sold.

Andrés was her younger brother. He was probably my age, maybe a year older. He showed up every night after eleven, sat at the end of the bar, and stared at me without even pretending not to. He was skinny, with a crooked smile and long hands that played with his glass while he talked to me.

The first week we only exchanged courtesies. The second, he stole a kiss from me in the hallway leading to the storeroom and I didn’t turn away. By the third, I was already making excuses to pass near him, to have him put a hand on my waist when he said something in my ear. One night he slipped his hand under my skirt in that same hallway, squeezed my pussy over my thong, and felt how wet I was. He smiled, licked his fingers in front of me, and went back to the bar without saying a word. I stood there trembling with my back against the wall, thighs clenched, swallowing the urge to run after him.

***

The bet was born at dawn, after closing.

—There are qualifiers on Saturday —Andrés said while Marta and I counted the tips—. Colombia against Argentina. You have faith?

—A lot —I answered without thinking.

—Let’s bet. If Colombia wins, I give you five hundred thousand pesos. If Argentina wins, you suck me off. Here. In front of your friend.

Marta burst out laughing. I laughed too, with my mouth, but not with my stomach. Andrés looked at me seriously, waiting.

—Deal —I told him.

I was so sure. Ridiculously sure. Colombia was playing at home, it was coming off two straight wins, and I had never lost a soccer bet in my life.

On Saturday night we put the match on the bar’s television before opening. Argentina beat us two to nothing. Marta kept glancing at me every time the other team got near the goal, and I felt cold sweat running down my back.

When the referee blew the final whistle, Andrés turned off the TV without saying anything and sat on his stool at the bar. Marta finished sweeping in silence. I stayed standing in the middle of the room, tray in hand, not knowing what to do with my body.

—A deal is a deal —he finally said.

***

I’m not going to beat around the bush, because there was no beating around the bush. I set the tray on a table, walked over to him, and knelt between his legs on the sticky floor of the bar. Marta pretended to be arranging bottles in a corner, but I could feel her sneaking looks, her breathing short.

Andrés unbuckled his belt unhurriedly, lowered the zipper, and pulled out his cock already half hard. It was thick, thicker than I had imagined on so many nights, with marked veins and a shiny tip. My mouth filled with saliva and I hated myself for it.

—Look at me —he said.

I lifted my face. I grabbed his cock with my right hand, stroked it slowly to get it fully hard, and ran my tongue from his balls to the tip. I tasted him hot. I heard his sigh, and that sigh turned me on more than any touch anyone had ever given me before. I took him into my mouth all at once, as deep as I could, and felt him jam into my throat while tears filled my eyes.

—Like that, baby —he murmured—. Suck me all the way.

I started sucking him with both hands, going up and down, smearing my chin with saliva, dragging my tongue under the head every time I got to the tip. I licked his balls, took them into my mouth one by one while I gave him a slow handjob, and swallowed him back to the root. Andrés held the back of my neck gently, not forcing me, and set the rhythm. That hurt more than if he had shoved me: that he was tender, that he didn’t treat me like just any whore, when I was being one right there in front of my friend.

—I’m about to cum —he warned, his voice rough.

I didn’t move away. He came in my mouth in hot, thick spurts, and I swallowed everything I could because there was nowhere to spit. A stream escaped the corner of my mouth and dripped into my cleavage. When he was done, he helped me stand, wiped my lip with his thumb, and kissed my forehead as if we had just done something sweet.

I ran to the bathroom to rinse out my mouth. I brushed my teeth with soap because there was nothing else. While I looked at myself in the mirror, with red eyes and his semen still warm running down inside my chest, Andrés knocked on the door and came in without waiting for an answer.

—I’ve got the five hundred anyway —he said, taking the bills from his wallet—. Let’s go to a hotel. I’ll give them to you there.

—No.

—I’ll give them to you now if you want. But come with me.

He put the folded bills in my hand, warm. I counted them with my fingers without looking. They were all there.

We left together at five in the morning. We walked three blocks to a short-stay hotel on Seventy, without speaking. I was thinking about my son asleep, my husband snoring with his mouth open, the lie about the rotisserie, the bills bulging in my jeans pocket.

The room smelled like cheap disinfectant. Andrés closed the door and stayed looking at me from the other side of the bed.

—If you want to leave, you leave —he said—. The money’s yours either way.

And that was what finished breaking me. Not being forced was what made me choose him.

I went to him, I kissed him, and I shoved my tongue down his throat with a hunger I didn’t know I’d been hiding. He pulled my top off over my head, undid my bra with one hand, and stared at my tits like he’d never seen tits before. They were still full from breastfeeding, heavy, with dark, big nipples. He grabbed them, squeezed them, licked them one by one slowly, biting my nipples until he made me moan.

—You must have such a delicious pussy —he murmured—. Let me see.

He ripped my jeans off in one tug, sat me on the edge of the wooden headboard, and spread my legs wide open. He knelt on the floor and buried his mouth in my pussy without warning. He licked my parted lips, sucked my clit until my knees shook, slid two fingers inside me and moved them around, looking for the exact spot. I clung to the headboard, arched my back, and came in less than two minutes, biting my hand so I wouldn’t wake the whole hotel.

—That mouth isn’t closing today —he said, still kneeling, his chin wet with me—. Get on all fours.

I turned around and braced myself against the headboard. I felt the tip of his cock rubbing up and down against me, wetting in my pussy, looking for the entrance. He pushed it in slowly the first time, all the way, and drew a long moan out of me. Then he pulled it all the way out and slammed it back in with a dry thrust that made me close my eyes.

What happened after that wasn’t tender or careful. He fucked me with silent fury, as if he’d been holding it in for weeks. He grabbed my hips and drove into me so hard the bed started slamming against the wall. He buried his cock to the balls, pulled it almost all the way out, and shoved back in with a wet sound that filled the room. He squeezed the back of my neck, pressed my face into the pillow, and whispered things in my ear I’d never let my husband say to me.

—You’re a rich little whore, you know that? Look how you’re dripping. Look how you squeeze me. Say it. Say you’re my whore.

—I’m your whore —I answered with my mouth against the sheet—. Put it all in me. Don’t stop.

He turned me over again, put my legs over his shoulders, and fucked me while looking me in the eyes. He sucked my nipples without stopping, bit my neck, ran his thumb over my clit until I was shaking. I came twice more like that, with a broken voice and clenched eyes, soaking the sheet under me.

When he was about to finish, he pressed my hips against his and came inside me without asking, in three long thrusts I felt each one of. I didn’t feel panic. I’d been on the pill since the baby was born. I stayed still beneath him, feeling the last of it leak out and emptying into my lower belly.

He didn’t let me rest. He lay on his back, asked me to climb on top, and I rode him with his cock still hard and slick with both of us. I drove myself down onto him this time, slowly, learning every inch, and started moving on him like I had never moved before. I took his hands, put them on my tits, leaned forward so he could bite them, and rode until I felt myself coming again.

—Now the ass —he told me when I stopped trembling—. Give me that too.

He pulled me off, made me kneel against the headboard, and smeared pussy saliva on my asshole with two fingers. He slid one finger in first, then two, stretching me slowly while I swallowed my moans in my mouth. When he shoved his cock into me, it hurt like I was being split open. I bit the sheet, clenched my fists, and still I begged him not to stop.

—Keep going, keep going, don’t take it out.

He worked it in piece by piece, letting me breathe between thrusts, and after a few minutes the pain blended with something thick and dirty I hadn’t felt before. He put one hand around to the front, pinched my clit, and started taking my ass with short, deep thrusts while whispering how tight I was, how good I squeezed his cock, how much of a whore I was. He made me come again like that, with his cock in my ass and his fingers in my pussy, shaking all over against the headboard. He unloaded inside me a second time, and this time I felt it hot in a place where I had never felt anything before.

When I left that room, with shaky legs and soaked underwear, I knew something had broken and I wasn’t going to be able to fix it.

***

I got home with my thong full of semen leaking down the insides of my thighs and my mind numb. I got into the shower before greeting my husband. I washed the clothes by hand at the utility sink, scrubbing with detergent, while he made breakfast for me, humming a song.

—You took your time —he said when I came out.

—The boss paid up in the end. Five hundred. I kept it safe.

He believed me. I brought a sancocho from the bar at midday the next day to keep up the lie about the chicken restaurant, and he ate it gratefully.

From that night on, there was no turning back. Andrés and I saw each other every dawn when the bar closed. Sometimes at the hotel, sometimes at his studio apartment, once in the back room with Marta guarding the door. That time I fucked him standing against a crate of beer bottles, with my skirt bunched at my waist and my thong shoved to the side, biting my fist so the last customers wouldn’t hear us. He filled my pussy with hot cum in less than ten minutes and I went out to serve tables with wet legs and the smell of him stuck in my hair.

I stopped taking the pills because I convinced myself I loved him, that a child of his would bind us together forever, that he would pull me out of the borrowed life I was carrying. I asked him to finish inside me every time, in my pussy, in my mouth, in my ass, and he pleased me without asking. I learned to suck him like I had never sucked anyone before, to swallow without gagging, to ask him to shove it into any hole at any hour. I became a bitch in heat for him, and he knew it and took advantage of it.

Two months later I took a pregnancy test at a pharmacy. Two lines. I cried with happiness in the bar bathroom and told Andrés that same night. He hugged me, told me we’d go to the coffee region, to Pereira, where he had a cousin with a place. That I should sell what I could, take the child, and he’d take care of the rest.

I started planning the escape. I talked to Marta, hid clothes in the bar, and kept the weekend bills in an envelope inside the baby’s suitcase. Every night when I got home I deleted the photos and videos from my phone, sure that was enough.

I didn’t know my husband had given me a new phone two weeks earlier with backup set up in the cloud. Everything I deleted uploaded automatically to his email. He’d been reading me for months.

***

One dawn I got home from the bar and the house was too quiet. My husband was waiting for me seated on the edge of the bed, dressed, with the phone in his hand.

—Take off your clothes —he said.

I did it because I couldn’t find my voice to argue. He checked me over completely, with red but dry eyes, and when he opened my legs and saw the trail of semen Andrés had left in my pussy just two hours earlier —thick, sticky, still leaking inside me— his phone fell to the floor.

—I know everything —he said—. I’ve known for months.

He showed me the videos. The photos. The messages I thought I’d deleted. I saw my own face with Andrés’s cock in my mouth, my ass lifted in the Seventy hotel, my voice moaning for him to put it all in. He told me I was pregnant with Andrés’s baby, and then I was the one who ran out of words, because I hadn’t even had the chance to say it out loud to myself.

—I’m leaving —he said, getting up—. I never imagined you were capable of this.

I, with rage and guilt mixed together, blurted out the worst thing I could think of.

—Even better. I never loved you. I married you because my parents forced me.

I saw his face change. Mouth slack, eyes still. He didn’t answer me. He started packing clothes into a bag while I went into the shower, shouting from inside that when I came out I didn’t want to ever see his face again.

When I came out, the house was silent. He wasn’t there. Nor was the bag. Nor my son. Nor the crib of the baby who still couldn’t walk.

I went barefoot out into the street at six in the morning, screaming the boy’s name. A neighbor took me back to the house because she was afraid something might happen to me. I called my mother crying that my children had been stolen.

***

My mother locked me in her room two hours later and beat the truth out of me with a belt. I told her everything: Andrés, the pregnancy, the plan to run off to Pereira. When I finished, she called my father and my older brother, and the three of them gave me a beating I still remember whenever I bend down.

After that they took me to the office of a doctor who was a friend of the family. They didn’t ask me anything. They made me sign a paper and took Andrés’s baby out of my body that very afternoon. I bled for three weeks. I cried nonstop for one.

Andrés was summoned using my phone, pretending it was me. My brother waited for him in a park with two friends and they almost killed him. The police arrived before they finished. Andrés went south to hide for real, no longer because of me.

Meanwhile, my parents contacted my husband. He agreed to take me back on one condition: that we would move far away. He bought three tickets to Quibdó and from there five hours by boat along the Atrato River, to a lost village in Chocó, with a house made of boards and a heat that wouldn’t let you sleep.

There I spent the worst year of my life. My husband drank aguardiente every night and whenever he remembered what happened he hit me without raising his voice, with methodical rage that left bruises on my ribs and thighs where no one could see them. My children grew up watching me keep quiet.

When my brother came to visit us, my husband threatened me the night before that if I opened my mouth he’d smash my head into the river. I smiled all day like an idiot, made arepas for my brother, lied to his face. When he left, I cried for three straight hours in the yard.

I understood that crying was useless. I started giving my husband everything he wanted, cooking what he liked, welcoming him with my legs open when he came home drunk. I sucked his cock kneeling in the kitchen while he drank his aguardiente, I let him fuck me in the ass in the hammock in the yard, I swallowed whatever he wanted just to keep him happy. I whispered in his ear that he was the only one, that no one had ever fucked me like he did, that what happened in Medellín had been a late-teenage madness. I became his model wife and his home whore with a single goal: to go back.

I asked my mother to convince him, to swear on me that I wasn’t going to fail again. My brother helped too, reluctantly. They offered him a roof in the family house while he got something started in the city.

My husband sold the little board house, the chickens, and the boat, and the four of us went back to Medellín on a two-day bus ride along the Pacific road. We arrived on a Sunday afternoon, dusty and silent.

That same night, while he slept in my parents’ guest room, I went out to the yard to smoke my first cigarette in years. I thought about Andrés. I thought about the baby they took out of me. I thought that I wasn’t going to forgive anyone, not even myself, and that that was enough to keep going.