My Wife Cheated on Me and a Stranger Saved Me

When I walked into the apartment that night, two hours earlier than usual, I heard them before I saw them. The marital bed creaked like it had never creaked with me on top of it. Carolina moaned things I had never heard her say. "Harder, you son of a bitch, tear my pussy apart," "Yes, yes, give me all of it," "Fuck me the way he never knew how." And Mauricio—the same Mauricio who had broken my jaw with a punch at an office party years ago—answered her in the hoarse voice of a satisfied animal, between thrusts that made the headboard pound against the wall.

I stood frozen in the hallway, keys still in my hand, watching them through the half-open door. She was on top of him, back arched, hair falling across her face, tits bouncing with every downward movement, thighs spread as wide as they could go, her pussy impaled to the root on Mauricio’s thick cock. He had his hands clamped on her ass, pulling her cheeks apart, guiding her up and down over his cock, wet with juices and gleaming all the way to the balls. When she turned her head and saw me, she didn’t get off. She didn’t cover herself. She just went still for a second, mouth open, then kept moving slowly over Mauricio’s hips, sinking all of him inside, drawing him out to the glans, swallowing him again without taking her eyes off mine.

“Go,” she said without stopping, while Mauricio bit one of her nipples and she let out a moan that came from deep in her belly. “Go sleep on the couch, Diego.”

He lifted his face from my wife’s breast, looked at me with a smile, and smacked her ass hard enough to make her whole backside shake. Carolina cried out with pleasure. She started riding him faster, almost looking me in the eyes, splashing as juices ran down the insides of her thighs. Mauricio grabbed her hips and began pounding into her from below with brutal force, driving himself all the way in and making her howl. “I’m coming, Daddy, I’m coming on your cock,” Carolina moaned, and I stayed there, keys digging into my palm until I drew blood, watching my wife come astride the man who had left me impotent years earlier.

I went down the hall like a beaten dog. I stuffed four shirts and my laptop into a bag, grabbed my documents, and left. I could still hear her screaming on the stairs. At eleven o’clock sharp, I stopped a taxi and told the driver to go without knowing where I wanted to go.

“Hotel Cervantes,” I said after a while. “Do you know it?”

“Yes, sir.”

The man didn’t speak to me the entire way. I used the time to block her number and write to Human Resources asking for my resignation. I had spent ten years at that company. Ten years putting up with Mauricio being my direct boss, my silent torturer, the man who had made me impotent with a blow that hadn’t landed on my face—it had landed on my head—and ever since that night in the hospital, I had never gotten hard again. Carolina knew. Carolina knew everything.

***

I spent four days locked in that room. I cried like I couldn’t remember ever crying before. On Saturday I went to my mother’s house. She opened the door, looked me in the eyes, and started crying with me before I had even opened my mouth.

“My son, you’re suffering so much.”

I told her everything. What Mauricio had done at the party, the hospital, the years of silence, what had happened in the apartment. My mother called Carolina and called her things I hadn’t known she knew. Then she called Carolina’s parents. By Monday, her entire family had shut my wife out.

Tincho, a childhood friend who had lived in Houston for ten years, found me a place to stay. His wife’s cousin, Ramiro, was leaving for Copenhagen for six months and needed someone to look after his house on the outskirts of Valencia. I accepted without thinking. Five days later I was settled in a huge, empty house, with a garden I couldn’t bear to look at and a swimming pool I had no intention of using.

Three weeks later I had lost twenty-two pounds and was drinking a bottle of whiskey every night. One Sunday I woke up at eight in the evening, went out into the street still drunk, and ended up on top of the railing of the bridge crossing the river north of town. I don’t remember deciding to climb up. I remember the dark water rushing below. I remember thinking that this was the end.

A hand grabbed my arm just before I jumped.

“Diego-san! Diego-san! What are you doing, for God’s sake?”

I recognized that voice instantly. There was only one person in the world who called me that. Mrs. Yumi Tanaka, a sixty-year-old Japanese woman who had worked in cleaning at my office, lived on a farm three miles from the bridge. We had spent entire afternoons talking about Japan, about her escape from the yakuza with her father, about the rituals her father knew and which she claimed could heal anything.

“Get down from there, Diego-san. Come with me.”

***

The farm covered four hectares, with an immaculate Japanese garden, animals everywhere, and, in the living room, a thin old man sitting in an armchair, as skinny as a wire. She introduced me to her father, Daisuke. They spoke to each other in Japanese. The old man made me kneel, placed one cold hand on my forehead and the other on my chest, and a train ran me down from the inside. I woke on the floor without knowing how much time had passed.

“My father says your Qi is broken. If you want to live, you must stay here, work the land, and train with us. There is no other way.”

I agreed. What else could I do? At five the next morning I was pounding on that door again. I started by feeding pigs, planting, cleaning pens, plowing, and carrying eighty-eight-pound sacks on my shoulders. Before work, an hour of movements with Daisuke left me sprawled in the mud. After work, another hour of meditation. After two months I had regained my weight, but it was all muscle. After three months I could run six miles without getting winded. The only thing I didn’t recover was the other thing. That remained dead between my legs. My cock hung soft and useless, like a piece of wet rope. Not when I washed with cold water at dawn, not when I deliberately thought about naked bodies, not when I grabbed it and jerked it angrily until my skin became irritated. Nothing. Dead.

***

Hana arrived in the fourth month. She was Yumi’s daughter, and had traveled from Japan after spending half her life trapped in something neither of them wanted to tell me about. She wasn’t even five feet tall. She weighed less than a sack of cement. She had strange tattoos on her forehead, cheekbones, and neck, and a gaze that cut through the air like a knife. She never smiled. She always wore clothing buttoned up to the neck: long sleeves, turtlenecks, dark leggings.

The first time she saw me, she looked me up and down with such disgust that I took a step backward. She spoke to her grandfather in a razor-sharp tone. The old man raised his voice once, and she lowered her head.

“Come here, Hetare,” she told me afterward, and I later learned that it meant something like coward, pathetic loser, worm. “From today on, I train you. My grandfather supervises.”

She walked ahead of me toward the apple tree. I looked at her ass beneath the leggings because I hadn’t looked at a woman’s ass in five years and, for a second, I felt something move inside me. A tiny, almost imperceptible tingle at the tip of my dead cock. Hana’s ass was small and pert, every crease outlined by the tight fabric, and it parted as she walked, revealing the perfect cleft between her cheeks. When we reached the tree, she drove her index and middle fingers into an apple and pierced it as if it were butter.

“If you keep looking at me like that, disgusting Hetare, your eyes will end up like this apple.”

***

Hana broke me. She corrected me with blows. She shouted at me in two languages. She laughed when I fell. She smashed my ribs with elbows that felt like hammer blows. I accepted everything because she was right, because I was a Hetare, because I still dreamed at night of Carolina beneath Mauricio, of my wife’s pussy stretched around another man’s cock, of the look of pleasure I had never seen on her face with me.

One afternoon, at the town square, I saw her pass along the sidewalk across the street. Carolina. Six months pregnant. I ran in the opposite direction, bought three bottles of whiskey, and drank them sitting on the kitchen floor at Ramiro’s house. Hana found me there. She grabbed me by the hair, shoved me under the shower fully dressed, dragged me to the farm, and left me naked in the stable for twelve hours. When she came back, she put a yoke collar around my neck and hitched me to the plow.

“You’re worse than shit. If you don’t respect yourself, neither will I.”

I pulled the plow barefoot, bleeding from my shoulders and feet, feeling the scrape of the earth as a deserved punishment. When I collapsed, she washed me with the hose, left me on the hay, and walked away. Yumi came in and spread a cream over me that burned. As she massaged my back, she spoke without looking at me.

“That woman from the square recognized you. She’s sorry. She says she went crazy the night you found her, and that the pregnancy wasn’t planned.”

“I don’t care. That child isn’t mine. That man took everything from me, right down to my wife’s womb.”

“Empty that cup, Diego-san. My father and my daughter are going to help you. And as for the other thing… my father says there’s nothing wrong with you. It’s all in your head. Stand up.”

***

The following dawn I told Hana enough with the yoke collar. I wanted to train. That month I moved on to kung fu, Dim Mak, and techniques I had never believed existed outside movies. Hana broke my face every afternoon, and the next day I got up so she could break it again.

Once, during an exercise, I struck her in the stomach with a yell that left her lying on the floor, breathless, for several seconds. When she got up, pulling off her turtleneck because she had fallen onto an anthill, I saw her body for the first time. Black bra. Small, high breasts pressed tightly against the lace. And beneath the bra, along her sides and back and arms, a gigantic tattoo: a snake wrapped around her entire body from her shoulders down to where it disappeared beneath her leggings. Old, white, fine scars crossed the drawings. The skin of someone who had been cut many times.

She covered herself hastily and came at my throat, eyes blazing with fury. Her grandfather stopped her with a single word. Afterward, looking at me, he forbade me to ask about it again.

***

That same night Daisuke asked his granddaughter to do something no human body should have been able to do. Hana entered my room with her face set hard, wearing a robe and nothing on her feet. Without saying a word, she pulled off my blanket, spread my legs, and sat at the edge of the bed between my thighs. She put one hand on my forehead and the other between my legs. The heat coming from her fingers was like red-hot metal. She squeezed my testicles until I thought I was going to scream. Then she took my soft cock in her free hand and started rubbing it without tenderness, as if polishing a piece of furniture. Up, down, up, down, with her callused palm and her thumb pressing against the glans every time she moved upward. I felt nothing.

She muttered in Japanese, faster and faster. She spit into her hand and continued, faster, harder. My cock didn’t react. She bent down, exhaled angrily, and put my sex in her mouth. She sucked me all the way in, taking me down her throat with a technique that wasn’t about pleasure but obligation, command, ancient medicine. Her tongue circled my glans, her lips formed a seal around the shaft, saliva ran over my balls and dripped onto the sheets. With her left hand she massaged my testicles; with her right she squeezed the base. I stared at the ceiling, feeling that Japanese mouth around my dead cock, and thought only: still dead.

She lifted her head for a second, lips swollen and a string of drool hanging from her chin, and glared at me.

“Think I’m Carolina.”

I closed my eyes. I saw Carolina riding Mauricio. I saw my wife’s pussy sliding all the way down over another cock. I saw the look of pleasure, her open mouth, her sweaty hair. And I felt Hana sucking me as if she wanted to tear my soul out through my cock.

The heat became unbearable, a whip-crack that rose from my feet, and for the first time in five years I grew hard as a stone inside Hana’s mouth. She noticed instantly, growled with satisfaction, and sped up. She sucked me to the root, nose buried in my hair, swallowing saliva around the throbbing shaft. With one hand she squeezed my balls; with the other she stroked my perineum. I began to pant, arching my back, feeling things I had assumed were dead forever. An electric tingling gathered at the base of my spine, rising and falling, hammering at my temples.

I opened my eyes to look at her. And I saw the face of someone whose heart you have just broken. Hana’s slanted eyes were full of restrained tears, her mouth still wrapped around my hard cock, which had been awakened by another woman, her forehead resting against my hip. She released me, sprang to her feet, wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist, shouted something in Japanese, and stormed out, slamming the door.

I was left alone, naked, cock pointing at the ceiling, throbbing and hard for the first time in five years because of the ghost of the woman who had destroyed me. I didn’t understand then why Hana had reacted that way. From that night on, I woke every morning with a hard-on, so hard it hurt, so hard that sometimes the frenulum bled from rubbing against the sheets. But I didn’t use it. I didn’t touch myself. It was only an erection. Only proof that my body had returned.

***

An entire year passed. My body was different. My mind was different. Hana still treated me like a dog, but a dog that already knew how to bite. One afternoon, returning from town by train, six drunken men attacked us in an empty lot. I knocked two of them to the ground with blows I hadn’t even known I could throw. Hana demolished the other four without breaking a sweat. When we continued on with Yumi’s arm in mine, Hana said to me without looking at me:

“At last, Hetare. You’re improving.”

Coming from her, it was almost a kiss.

***

My mother called me one night on the verge of hysteria. Carolina was at her house with the baby. Mauricio had come after her, beating her, and followed her there. I shot out of the farm. Hana followed me, but I lost her on the way.

When I arrived, Mauricio was kicking my ex-wife on the living-room floor. My mother stood frozen against a wall, the baby in her arms. When he saw me, the other man let go of Carolina and came at me. I emptied my mind. I made that circular movement that had never come out right before, and this time it worked. Mauricio flew into the wall. He lay unconscious, bleeding from the back of his head.

I lifted Carolina from the floor. I laid her on the couch. I wiped the blood from her face with a towel my mother handed me. When I looked up, Hana was standing in the doorway, watching us. I hadn’t realized she had arrived. I saw pride on her face. Then sadness. Then something I took a while to recognize because I had never seen it there before: tenderness.

She crossed the living room, grabbed me by the arms, kissed me on the mouth, and left after saying only one word.

“Goodbye.”

Carolina, swollen and bleeding, grabbed my hand.

“Who… who is she?”

“The daughter of the woman I live with.”

“Diego, please, let’s talk. I love you. What we had…”

“What we had lasted thirteen years. And you broke it at eleven o’clock on an ordinary night. I’m healed now. Here”—I pointed to my head—“here”—my chest—“and here”—my package. “Be happy with the little girl. I’m leaving.”

***

I returned to the farm two hours later, still stained with blood. Yumi was waiting at the door, her face distraught.

“Hana went to the airport, Diego-san. She’s returning to Japan. The yakuza released her three years ago, but offered her a position if she came back. Now she has accepted.”

“Why?”

“Because she always knew you loved your wife. Today she saw you confirm it when you ran off to save her.”

“I didn’t run off to save her. I ran to get a weight off my shoulders.”

“Go tell her that.”

I reached the airport without knowing how. I saw her leaning against a window, backpack at her feet, hair covering half her face. I shouted from the opposite end of the terminal.

“Damn you, Hana. You’re not going anywhere.”

“What did you call me, Hetare?”

“By your name. Hana. The name your mother gave you, not the one that pack of sons of bitches gave you.”

The fight that followed is something I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Two bodies colliding in an empty hangar beside the runway. I took more blows than she did, but in the end, when I had no air left, I let out a shout from my abdomen that left her dizzy, sent energy through both my hands, and, when she fell onto her back, threw myself on top of her and pinned her arms against the concrete.

“You’re beautiful, Hana. Don’t go. I need you.”

“Liar. You ran for her.”

“I ran to finish with her. And then to run back for you. I love you. I hate you, too. But I love you.”

I began crying on top of her. Hana looked at me without blinking.

“What about my tattoos? My scars? Would you go out in public with me like this?”

“I don’t care about the package. I care about you, you miserable, sour-tempered bitch.”

She released my hands. She returned my kiss with a fury that was love. And for the first time since I had known her, a tear fell.

“I love you, Diego. Damn you. I love you.”

***

We arrived at the farm holding hands, both of us covered in blood, our clothes in tatters. Yumi saw us from the porch with a mixture of horror and joy that only a Japanese mother could combine. Hana elbowed her in the ribs when I said, laughing, that it had taken me a long time to convince her.

“For being a loudmouth.”

That night I woke in the guest-room bed, clean, my body covered in Yumi’s cream, with Hana sleeping beside me in a top and short leggings. When I moved, she opened her eyes, looked at me, smiled for the second time in my life, and slid her hand beneath my pants. She grabbed my cock, which was already waking, and squeezed it hard with that tough, callused hand I had learned to fear and desire at the same time.

“Now we’re going to continue what was left unfinished the other time. But if you imagine I’m her, I swear I’ll rip it clean off.”

“If you’re the one who brings her up, I’m the one who’ll punish you.”

She laughed in my face and squeezed harder, fingers wrapped around the base, thumb rubbing my frenulum. My cock was already rock-hard, throbbing and wet with pre-cum, before I finished the sentence. I kissed her as if I were going to die. I pushed my tongue down her throat, bit her lips, grabbed the back of her neck. She kissed me as if she had been waiting all her life, hungry, moaning softly, biting my chin. She stripped off my pants with an agility that hurt. She ripped off my boxers in one pull. She stared at my erect cock, throbbing against my belly and gleaming in the dimness, and ran her tongue over her teeth like a cat.

“You’re huge, Hetare. And all mine.”

She lowered her head slowly, looking into my eyes, and took all of me into her mouth without hesitation, without urgency, without the coldness of that time in the stable room. This time there was hunger. She sucked from the base to the tip, dragging her tight lips along me, circling the glans with her tongue, spitting on me and swallowing me again to the throat. Saliva ran down the hand she used to squeeze my balls, dripped over my perineum, soaked the sheets. Every time she took me all the way in, her throat made a wet gurgling sound that arched my back. Her slanted eyes filled with tears from the strain, but she didn’t stop. Up, down, sucking only the glans and circling it quickly with the tip of her tongue, then taking my entire cock and holding my gaze as she swallowed around the shaft.

“My balls are going to burst, Hana,” I panted.

She pulled me out with one hard tug, the wet sound echoing through the room, and smiled at me with shining lips.

“Not yet, Hetare. Tonight you’re going to come wherever I want.”

She pulled off her top and I saw the snake again. Small, high breasts, brown nipples standing out like pebbles. The tattoo’s head reached her pubic bone, and the animal’s forked tongue disappeared between the shaved lips of her sex. I tore off her short leggings and laid her on her back. I traced that snake with my tongue from her navel to where it ended, licking every scale, biting her skin, leaving marks. When I reached her pubic bone, I spread her legs with both hands and saw her pink pussy, gleaming and wet down to her thighs, small lips peeking from the perfect shave. I buried my mouth there.

I ate her pussy as if my life depended on it. I ran my tongue all the way from her perineum to her clitoris, again and again, drinking in the sharp, salty taste of her juices. I pushed my tongue inside her, moved it in circles, pulled it out, and sucked her swollen clitoris, gently tugging it with my lips. Hana arched her back like a bow, grabbed my hair with both hands, and pressed my face against her sex until I couldn’t breathe. “There, there, there—don’t stop,” she moaned in Spanish and Japanese at the same time, twisting beneath me. I pushed in two fingers and searched for that inner spot, that rough sponge I had read so much about and never found. I found it. Hana screamed so loudly she woke the dogs in the garden. Her thighs began to shake, closing around my head, and I felt a warm gush bathe my face and neck.

“Oh God, oh God, what did you do to me?” she panted, trembling from head to toe.

I climbed on top of her, face soaked with her juices, and took my hard cock in my hand.

“I’m going to put all of it inside you, Hana. Every inch.”

“Break me, Hetare. Tear my pussy apart.”

I penetrated her in a single thrust, sinking to the balls into her tight, burning, soaking-wet flesh. She cried out and clung to my shoulders, digging her nails in until she drew blood. Hana’s pussy squeezed my cock like a fist, pulsing around the shaft and sucking me inward with every contraction. I began to move slowly, drawing out to the glans and sinking back in to the bottom, savoring every inch. She looked into my eyes with her mouth open, moaning softly, her fierce face softened by pleasure.

“Faster, Diego. Harder. Break me.”

I grabbed her wrists and pinned them against the mattress over her head. I began fucking her hard, pounding all the way in and making her bounce on the mattress. Her small breasts jumped with every thrust, her whole body shook, the tattoos of the snake shifting as though the animal were alive. The sloshing of her wet pussy around my cock filled the room. I bit one of her nipples. I sucked it while I kept thrusting. She began to scream, to say things in Japanese, to arch her neck.

“I’m coming, I’m coming, Diego, I’m coming again.”

I felt her pussy contract around my cock, her thighs squeezing my hips, her nails digging in. Hana came beneath me screaming my name, shaking all over and biting my shoulder so she wouldn’t wake her mother.

I turned her over. I lifted her ass. I spread her cheeks with both hands and saw her open, flushed, dripping pussy, and above it, her other hole, small and pink. I sank into her from behind again, gripping her hips, and began pounding her like an animal. Hana’s pert ass bounced against my pubic bone with every thrust, making the dry slap of skin against skin. I grabbed her black hair and wound it around my fist. She let herself be guided, arching her back, offering me her entire ass, moaning with her face against the pillow.

“That’s it, Hetare, that’s it—fuck me as if you hated me.”

I ran my thumb through the saliva and pushed it into her other hole. Hana shrieked and came for the third time, soaking the entire sheet with a gush. That squeeze around my cock finished me. I felt my orgasm rise from my balls, travel through my entire shaft, and emptied everything I had accumulated for five years inside her pussy. Spurt after spurt, trembling and moaning over her tattooed back, until it leaked from her lips and ran down her thighs.

She confessed to me later that she had never reached orgasm in her entire life. That morning she came three times. She told me in a whisper, head resting on my chest, still trembling, fingers playing with the hair on my belly. We fucked again before dawn. And afterward, when the sun was already coming through the window, again. I had five years accumulated inside me, and she had an entire lifetime.

***

Mauricio disappeared. No one ever heard from him again. Carolina went back to her parents, who eventually softened when they met the baby. Daisuke died the following winter, asleep in his armchair, wearing the same wise expression he always had. A few months later Mei Luna was born, beautiful like her mother, whiny and stubborn like her father—in other words, like me.

Sometimes, when I’m washing the dishes and watch Hana playing with the little girl in the garden, I remember that night on the bridge. And I think that the worst day of my life was, without my knowing it, the first day of the rest of it.