My Wife Came Back Marked and Ordered Me to Kneel

Lorena came into the apartment dragging her feet, her hair mussed, her lips swollen, and a dark stain climbing up her skirt to her hip. The torn fabric clung to her thigh, sweaty and dirty, marked by fingers that had groped her without pause. She did not even close the door all the way: she left it ajar, as if inviting the hallway air to come in with her.

Damián was still where she had left him hours earlier, standing in front of the window, swallowing hard without daring to turn around. He had been waiting for her since midnight. He knew where she had been and with whom, because she herself had sent him three messages that night to remind him.

“Aren’t you going to ask anything, you idiot?” Lorena said slowly as she took off her heels and let them drop onto the wooden floor.

Each shoe struck with a dry thud. Damián closed his eyes for a moment.

She sat on the edge of the dining table with feigned care, as if sitting down were a punishment. But her eyes shone with something that was not exhaustion.

“They left me wrecked,” she laughed, and lifted her skirt to her waist so he would have to look. “See this? Red, swollen, split open. They used me however they wanted, without asking permission. They pulled my hair, bit me, spat on me. And you’re here, waiting for me with the little light on.”

A thick white strand slid slowly down the inside of her thigh. Damián watched it fall onto the parquet and had no idea where to look.

“One of them grabbed my arm and said to the others, ‘This one’s wet, she’s asking for it.’ They pushed me against a wall, bent me in half, made me scream. And I came, Damián. Three times. They put me on all fours and tore me apart until I begged them to stop, but none of them wanted anyone to stop.”

Damián remained silent. His mouth tasted of metal. Every word she spoke was a stone falling on top of him, and he could not move out of the way.

“Want to know the worst part?” Lorena lowered her skirt with a theatrical gesture and brushed the dust from her knees. “This afternoon, while you were breaking your back at the office, Bruno came over. Your friend Bruno, the one who always stays for one last drink when you invite him. The one who stares at my ass when you think nobody notices.”

She brought a hand to her chest and stroked her hard nipple through her stained shirt.

“He rang the bell with a stupid excuse, a box of wine you’d ordered from him. I opened the door in a robe. He didn’t even say hello. He grabbed me by the waist, turned me around, and shoved me against the refrigerator. He pulled my underwear down with one hand and stuck it in me right there, standing up, with the breakfast dishes still unwashed.”

Damián closed his eyes for a second. When he opened them again, she was staring straight at him from the table.

“He whispered in my ear, ‘Does your husband do this to you? Does that pathetic loser fuck you like this?’ And I told him no, that you didn’t, that you never had. I told him harder, not to stop. He came inside me, squeezed my hips until he left bruises, and walked out without saying goodbye. As if I were trash. Trash he could use and return to its owner.”

She sucked the tip of her finger slowly, looking him in the eye.

“Then I went out for a walk. A car went by, a guy rolled down the window and said, ‘Get in.’ I didn’t even ask his name. I got in. He pulled my underwear down in the seat, spread my legs, and fucked me right there, on an empty street, with the windows fogged up and the seat belt digging into my back. He came inside me, then opened me with his fingers and licked me until he left me clean. He called me ‘good girl,’ called me a ‘whore,’ told me to come back whenever I wanted.”

She’s lying, Damián thought. She has to be lying. But something in the way her voice broke at the end of every sentence told him she was not.

“And in the end there was Sebastián. That big guy from the gym who makes you nervous whenever you run into him in the elevator. You were right to be nervous. He took me to a room behind the bar, threw me onto a sticky table, and shoved it up my ass without warning. It burned, it stung, and the others laughed: ‘Take it, baby, take it.’ And I took it. I took everything.”

Lorena opened her legs again, slowly, letting another white drop fall onto the floor.

“I’m broken, Damián. I walk crooked. And you’re here, staring, without knowing what to say.”

She came up to him and brushed his chin with two firm fingers. She smelled of stale perfume, alcohol, and other bodies.

“You’re my husband. That doesn’t give you the right to anything. Not to ask questions, not to have an opinion, not to cry. You’re the one who waits. The one who cleans. The cuckold.”

Damián lowered his head. He did not look at her. He had not looked at her for months.

***

She got down from the table without hurrying and stood in front of him, barefoot, her stained skirt and smeared mascara. She spread her legs shamelessly and put everything she had brought home on display.

“What are you looking at?” she spat. “Want to taste what real men left me? Or are you going to stay rooted there like a piece of furniture?”

Damián did not answer. Lorena grabbed his head with one firm hand and pushed him downward. It was not a violent shove; it was enough.

“Kneel. On the floor. Like the dog you are.”

He let himself fall. His knees cracked against the parquet. Lorena climbed onto the table again, settled herself with her legs spread wide, and aimed her hips at him.

“Clean me. Get everything they left inside me out with your tongue. I don’t want a single drop left. Not one.”

Damián buried his face there without thinking. His tongue began to move over her with an urgency he did not recognize in himself. She felt hot, swollen, full of a foreign taste that burned in his mouth. He went down to her dirty, open asshole and licked there too, eyes closed, thinking of nothing but obeying.

“That’s what I like,” she purred, stroking her breasts through her torn shirt. “Eat up all that other men’s cum. Look how it’s dripping down your chin. Do you like the taste of the others, darling? Do you like being humiliated like this?”

She forced his head harder against her sex.

“Don’t stop. Bruno left me full in the back and I’m still leaking. Clean it all. Harder. Deeper.”

Damián moaned against her flesh. It had been a long time since he had felt her so close, and he was ashamed that such closeness was only possible like this, with his mouth full of other men’s semen. But he did not stop. His tongue moved on its own, sticky, quick, defeated.

“You’re a floor rag,” she said, almost tenderly. “Look at you. Swallowing other men’s cum, licking off what they left me. And you love it. Look how hard you are down there.”

Lorena arched her back and gasped. A wave ran through her from the nape of her neck to her sacrum.

“You’re making me come, you son of a bitch. With your filthy tongue, like a slave. And you’re making me come anyway.”

With a sudden movement, she pressed his head against her sex and came all over his face. She rubbed the wetness across his nose, lips, and forehead. Damián swallowed without thinking.

“Take it. Swallow the mixture. Mine and theirs. That’s what you like, isn’t it? Tell me yes.”

He nodded with his face buried between her thighs. He had no voice.

Lorena pushed him away with her foot. Not violently—with contempt.

“That’s enough. Go back to your corner, dog. You’ve served your purpose.”

Damián crawled until he could rest his back against the wall. His face gleamed. His breathing came in broken gasps. His chest rose and fell at a rhythm he could not control.

Lorena straightened her skirt, lit a cigarette, and looked at him from the corner of her eye, with the crooked smile of someone who had won long ago.

“Good cuckold. That’s how I want you.”

***

The cigarette smoke rose slowly toward the ceiling. Damián remained on the floor, against the wall. Lorena watched him with a disgust that seemed like care, rehearsed for weeks in front of the bathroom mirror.

“You know what, darling?” she said, taking a long drag. “While you were breaking your back in that mediocre office, I was fucking another man in this very bed. Here. In the bed where you climb on top of me with that sad thing between your legs. A real man. He tore me apart. He came inside me so many times I spent the whole day leaking.”

Damián’s eyes were fixed on the parquet. Every word fell on him like a stone.

“And yes. He got me pregnant, you cuckold,” she spat. “I’ve been carrying another man’s child inside me for three months. And here you are, licking up what’s left over.”

She climbed onto him suddenly. She mounted him on the floor angrily, as if punishing him with her body. She moved fast, hard, laughing through clenched teeth, a mixture of pleasure and rage.

“Want to know what it was like?”

And Damián saw it. Against his will, he saw it. He imagined her naked on their sheets, riding a faceless man, moaning with her mouth open, his hands digging into her buttocks. He saw her come and start again. He saw their bed shaking with the violence of a stranger’s body. A bed for two, stained by three.

“And it wasn’t just him, either.”

Damián barely raised his eyes. She leaned over and spat on his cheek.

“In the bathroom of a nightclub last Saturday. When you thought I was with my cousin. I don’t even remember the guy’s name. He saw me go in wearing that short pair of shorts you gave me for my birthday and followed me without saying a word. He grabbed me by the hair, shoved me against the sink, and drove it into me without asking permission.”

She looked at him mockingly, filthy pleasure in her voice.

“He didn’t even pull my underwear down. He moved my shorts aside and put it in me like that, without protection, without asking anything. He fucked me fast, dirty, hard, as if I were something he could leave in the sink when he was done. And he came inside me. Every last drop.”

She leaned down until her mouth was pressed to his ear.

“And I came too. Without guilt. Soaking wet. I left the bathroom with my underwear dripping with someone else’s cum and sat at the table outside with you. You asked me for another beer and told me I looked more beautiful than ever. What an idiot.”

Damián closed his eyes.

“I walked out of the club with my asshole sweaty and my shorts bunched up between my cheeks. I passed right beside you at the bar and laughed. You smiled back at me. That good-husband smile that makes me want to spit in your face every time I see it.”

Lorena got off him, wiped her hand on her T-shirt, and walked to the window. She typed something into her phone unhurriedly, as if she had all the time in the world.

“Oh, right,” she said without looking up from the screen. “Tomorrow we have an appointment with the obstetrician at ten. You’re coming with me. You’re going to hear the heartbeat of the child that isn’t yours. And you’re going to smile like an exemplary father. Like the good cuckold you are.”

Damián did not answer. He had nothing with which to answer.

She walked naked into the bathroom, her back straight, the marks still red around her waist and on her thighs, the lit cigarette between her fingers. The door closed without violence, as if nothing mattered anymore.

Damián remained on the floor, against the wall, his face wet and the taste of three other men in his mouth. Tomorrow he would smile in the doctor’s office. He would squeeze Lorena’s hand when the heartbeat sounded. He would smile because he no longer knew how to do anything else, and because somewhere in the filthy depths of himself, he had begun to understand that he did not want to learn.