My Wife Left Me and a Stranger Knocked on My Door That Night

It was my forty-third birthday that Saturday, and the house smelled of dead flowers. Camila had taken two suitcases three weeks earlier and left only a short note on the counter: “I don’t hate you. Don’t wait for me.” That was all. My daughter Mariana called every two hours to make sure I wasn’t drinking too much, and my sister-in-law had sent me a bottle of aguardiente that sat cooling, unwitnessed, in the freezer.

I was still wearing the same shirt from noon when the doorbell rang. I thought it was the delivery guy with the pizza I hadn’t even ordered. I opened the door and found a tall man, about fifty, with very short gray hair and eyes the color of dirty water. He was holding a bottle of Russian vodka in one hand and an unlit cigarette in the other.

“Good evening,” he said. “My name is Sebastián Quintero. I’m a friend of Camila’s. I imagine she told you about me.”

She hadn’t told me about him. She hadn’t told me about anyone. I let him in anyway, because after three weeks of silence, any noise was a mercy.

We sat on the terrace, facing the black plain and the distant lights of the avenue. He smoked a bitter cigarillo and I drank aguardiente straight from the glass. It took us twenty minutes to talk about anything other than the weather.

“I came because she isn’t going to explain herself,” he said at last. “And you deserve to know, even if you don’t like it.”

“Know what, exactly?”

“Why she left. Why she isn’t coming back. Who I am in all this.”

He crushed the cigarette in a planter and looked at me without blinking. I poured myself another drink so I’d have something to do with my hands.

“Start with yourself,” I told him. “Tell me how you met Camila.”

Sebastián smiled crookedly, and for the first time that night I had the feeling I was speaking to someone who had already rehearsed the conversation in the car, in front of the rearview mirror, before getting out.

“To understand her, you have to understand me first. Do you have patience?”

I had all the patience in the world and no way out.

***

He told me he had grown up in a neighborhood in Cali, on a street of English-style houses lined up like soldiers. That when he was very young he fell in love for the first time with a skinny girl who lived across the street, the daughter of the woman who helped with the cleaning, and never confessed because he was too shy. That his father, sick of that silent flirtation, sent him to a seminary in Cartagena so the foolishness would pass.

“At the seminary I fell in love again,” he said, in a calm voice. “But this time with an older classmate. Tomás. Twenty years old, dark-skinned, gray eyes, basketball player. I wanted him from the first month and hated myself for it.”

He paused to pour himself vodka. I said nothing. I had nothing to say.

“One Saturday afternoon I went to his room so he could explain a passage from the Gospel to me. It took us five minutes to end up naked on the little cot. Five. We didn’t even lock the door. I pulled down his pants with trembling hands and saw his cock for the first time, thicker than I had ever imagined, the veins swollen and the tip already wet. He grabbed the back of my neck without saying a word and pushed me down. I opened my mouth and he shoved it all the way in with one thrust. I arched, tears came to my eyes, saliva dripped onto my pants, and he held my head there against his pubis until I learned to breathe through my nose. ‘That’s it, priest, that’s it,’ he whispered, laughing. I sucked his cock for an hour, until he left my throat raw and came three times, the last one all over my face. Then he turned me over against the cot, spit between my ass cheeks, and slid his fingers in one by one until he opened me up. When he finally drove his cock in from behind, I felt myself split in two, and even then I lifted my ass so he could go deeper. I screamed into the pillow while he fucked me with raw nerve, yanking my hair, telling me I was his, that no priest was going to pray over what he was doing to me. He came inside me. I stayed still, feeling the semen run down my thighs, and thought, with crystal clarity, that I had found God in the worst possible way.”

“And nobody found out?”

“Nobody. I think half the seminary was doing the same thing and nobody wanted to be the first to point fingers. We were together for almost a year. Every afternoon, after vespers, I’d go into his cell or he’d come into mine and we’d devour each other alive until the bell rang. I learned to suck cock the way you learn a new language. I learned to take it in the ass without asking permission. I learned what I know about pleasure today with him, on a horsehair mattress, with a crucifix watching us from the wall. When I left, I left without saying goodbye. I went to study aviation and never heard from him again. That still haunts me.”

I took another drink. I thought of Camila and how little I knew about her life before me.

“And how does my wife fit into this story?”

Sebastián lifted his gaze to the darkened sky.

“I warned you it was long. Can you handle another drink?”

***

I handled three more. He told me that after the seminary he flew helicopters all over Colombia, that he paid boys in cheap motels and never felt anything afterward, that he met a woman named Lorena at a valuables transport company and married her believing marriage would fix his head.

“I cheated on her with men for twelve years,” he said, without drama, as if reciting a bill. “At every stop. In every hotel. Russian pilots who fucked me standing up against the sink and left without saying their names, sailors who paid me to fuck them, cab drivers who looked at me too long in the rearview mirror and ended up with my cock in their mouth in the parked car. When Lorena found out, she knelt in front of me and asked me not to leave her, even if I kept cheating on her with ‘those others.’ I thought I would feel sorry for her. I felt disgusted. By myself, not by her. I told her everything that same night and she asked for a divorce before dawn.”

“And since then?”

“Since then I haven’t lied to anyone again. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I came.”

He lit another cigarette and watched me through the smoke. I understood what was coming before he said it.

“I met Camila three years ago on a charter flight to Aruba,” he said. “She was going to a modeling conference. I asked her what she wanted to drink and she said, ‘Whatever you’re drinking.’ That was the whole conversation on the way there. On the way back she sat behind the copilot, in the jump seat, and didn’t move for four hours.”

“Did you sleep with her?”

“Not that night. Not the next one either. Camila takes her time. She knows that better than I do. I won her over the way you win someone over, I suppose: without trying, with patience, by showing her others. Only in my case, the others were boys. And that, instead of scaring her off, drove her wild.”

My mouth went dry. Camila had always suspected my female friends, the runway models, the receptionists at the studio. It never crossed her mind that the rival would be a man who preferred men.

“She became obsessed with me precisely because of that,” Sebastián went on, as if reading my thoughts. “Because she couldn’t compete with what I did to boys. Because it was a border she had never crossed. She wanted to be there. She wanted to see it. And in the end she asked me to let her watch.”

***

He told me that part slowly, in detail, without asking permission.

“The first time was in an apartment I have in Cartagena. I brought a guy from the dock, twenty-three years old, young, quiet, with cheap tattoos all over his back and a smile that didn’t match his face. Camila was on the couch facing the bed, wearing a black dress, barefoot, with a gin and tonic in her hand. I didn’t introduce them. He understood she was watching and that was the condition. Some men get uncomfortable. This one didn’t.

He paused. Took a drag. Let it out into the night.

“I stripped him while he sat on the edge of the mattress. I pulled his pants down with my teeth, slowly, looking at her the whole time. The boy was hard before I even touched his skin, and when I pulled his cock out of his underwear it hung heavy, thick, dark, with the foreskin pulled tight. I took it into my mouth all the way to the back of my throat and started sucking while looking at Camila over his navel. She didn’t say a word for an hour. She just crossed and uncrossed her legs and bit the inside of her cheek. I saw her skirt ride up over the black dress, saw her slide two fingers over her underwear, saw her start rubbing her pussy without taking her eyes off us, mouth open, breathing through her mouth as if she couldn’t get enough air.

“Go on.”

“The boy got me on all fours over the mattress. He spit on my ass, opened me with his thumbs, and shoved his cock in with one thrust. I screamed. Camila moaned at the same time as me, as if it were happening to her. He fucked me hard for twenty minutes, his hands on my hips, moving me like I weighed less than a sack. My face was turned toward the couch, watching my wife slide her fingers under her panties, eyes wide now, not hiding it anymore, moaning loud every time he drove me all the way down. At one point she tore open the dress, pulled her tits out over her bra, and pinched her nipples with both hands, biting her lip until it bled. When the boy came inside me, he came so deep I felt the contractions. She came at the same time, riding her own hand, mouth clamped shut so she wouldn’t scream too loudly. She got up from the couch, set the empty glass on the table, and went to the guest room. She didn’t speak to me until breakfast.”

“And at breakfast?”

“She told me she wanted to do it again. But with her in the middle.”

I swallowed. My stomach hurt. My throat hurt. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted him to shut up or keep going. Sebastián still wasn’t looking at me. He was speaking to the plain, not to me.

“We did it six times in two years. Always different. Always a new boy, chosen by her in some bar in the old city. The second time was different. Camila stripped as soon as the boy came in, lay down on her back in the middle of the bed, and told us, without looking at either of us: ‘Both of you, at once, now.’ The boy climbed on top of her and drove his cock into her cunt in one single thrust. She arched off the mattress, grabbed my thighs, and opened her mouth. I was on my knees beside her face. I pushed my cock all the way in. She swallowed it like she’d been waiting months for it. We coordinated without talking: he fucked her below, I put mine in and out of her mouth, and she moaned with a full throat, choking in the best possible way. He came inside her and I came across her chin, and she kept asking for more with her eyes. After that she asked for her ass. I put on spit, I put on oil, I opened her with two fingers while the boy sucked her tits. When I finally drove my cock into her from behind, she screamed so loud the neighbors banged on the wall. We didn’t stop. I fucked her ass until I came inside, and she came three times riding the other boy’s cock. She learned things with us no book was ever going to teach her. She learned not to be afraid. She learned to ask out loud for what she used to only think. She learned to have two cocks at the same time and know which was which with her eyes closed. That’s what she took when she left this house. She didn’t take money. She took what she learned.”

“And why are you telling me this?”

“Because she isn’t coming back. And because she asked me to tell you. It’s the last thing she’s going to do for you.”

***

The phone vibrated in my shirt pocket. It was Mariana. “You still okay, Dad?” I answered yes, that I had company, that we’d talk tomorrow. I sent her a kissing emoji. When I looked up, Sebastián was standing, watching the night from the railing, the glass dangling from his hand as if it weighed more than it should.

“I didn’t expect you to hate me less for telling you,” he said, without turning around. “I only expected you to understand it wasn’t cowardice on her part. Camila was leaving with me or without me. I just opened the door and held the handrail while she went down.”

I stood too. I walked over to where he was. I was angry, I had aguardiente in my blood, I had eighteen years of marriage walking along my back. I don’t know what I wanted to do when I got close. Hit him. Push him over the railing. Cry against his shoulder.

I did none of the three. I stopped a foot away from him, looked into his dirty-water eyes, and asked the only question that mattered to me.

“Did she enjoy me? When she was with me, in this house, in my bed. Did she enjoy it?”

Sebastián held my gaze for a long time. He didn’t lie to me.

“Until the day she met me, yes. After that, no. After that you were the place where she slept when she came back tired from my bed. When you licked her pussy she thought about the cock of whatever boy was next. When you came inside her she squeezed her eyes shut to remember how I came in her mouth. Forgive the bluntness. You asked for it.”

I nodded. There was no point fighting against such clean truth. I poured myself another drink, poured him one too, and the two of us stayed against the railing, smoking in silence, until the plain started to brighten and the neighbor’s dogs began barking as if they knew something we didn’t.

Before he left, Sebastián gave me his number written on the back of a napkin. He didn’t say what for. I didn’t ask either. I put it in the nightstand drawer, beside the wedding ring Camila had left on top of the book she was reading the afternoon she decided to go.

That night I didn’t turn off the light. I lay there staring at the ceiling, thinking about the dock boy, about my wife’s black dress, about the things she had asked for out loud from another man. I pulled my underwear down without moving the sheet and grabbed my cock, which had been hard for two hours without me wanting to admit it. I started slowly. I imagined Camila spread open on that bed in Cartagena, her mouth full of one man while another split her ass. I imagined the dock boy, tattooed, looking at me while he drove it into my wife, not lowering his eyes. I imagined Sebastián, eyes the color of dirty water, kneeling between the legs of a stranger, sucking with that old mouth shaped by fifteen years of flights and hotels. I came quickly. I ended up shooting against my own stomach, with a dry heave, biting my fist so I wouldn’t wake anyone who wasn’t in the house. I discovered, with my hand sticky and my breathing broken, that rage and desire smell the same. And that the phone number was still in the drawer, twelve inches from my hand.

To be continued.