My Wife’s Friend Who Arrived When She Left

The doorbell rang after twenty past two, and at first I thought it was her. That Lucía had come to her senses, that the driver had brought her back, that she was going to walk in with her half-closed suitcase and this whole charade would turn out to be what it should have been: a badly told nightmare.

Through the curtain, I saw a man of about fifty, tall, wearing a pilot’s jacket and carrying a bottle wrapped in gold paper under his arm.

—Andrés Restrepo? —he asked when I opened the door—. I’m here on behalf of your son. He asked me to give you this before I caught my flight.

Mateo had left for Madrid that very afternoon, before dinner. It was plausible. Above all, it was an excuse anyone with the slightest courtesy would accept at that hour.

—Come in.

His name was Esteban. He flew for the same airline as my wife. He had landed at eleven and detoured from the hotel to do my son a favor. I was only half listening. I still had in my ears the false applause that had accompanied Lucía’s exit from the restaurant, after she stood up, struck her glass with a knife, and announced, in front of my mother, the partners, and the employees, that our marriage was ending that night and that she was not going to be the one who came home.

—Shall I pour you a drink? —I asked, just to do something with my hands.

—If you’ll join me.

We filled two short glasses with the vodka he had brought. I took the tobacco tin from the mantel and asked whether he minded my smoking.

—Go ahead. I will too, if you invite me outside.

I took him to the terrace. Lucía didn’t allow smoking indoors: it was one of her many rules, and until that very afternoon they had been laws. I switched on the aluminum heater she had chosen to match the planters and sank into the rocking chair in the center.

—Nice terrace —Esteban said, lighting a long, blond cigarette—. It has a feminine touch you can notice.

—It’s all her work. I supplied the money.

—I assumed as much. Your wife has good taste.

—You seem to know her well.

—We cross paths on runways and in airport cafés. You end up knowing more about pilots from other crews than about your neighbors.

—And where did you meet her?

—In Munich. She was inspecting the fairing on the belly of her plane, and I was passing through on my way to the hangar. I greeted her out of politeness, and she asked whether, by any chance, I was a good mechanic, because the aircraft wouldn’t go into reverse. I laughed. Lucía didn’t.

I raised my head slightly. He had just called her by her first name, without the “María” she required from strangers and colleagues. In the cockpit, on the runways, on the manifests, she was always María Lucía Vélez. Lucía alone was reserved for family and three close friends.

—Lucía —I repeated, weighing the word.

—What?

—Nothing. Go on.

—Well, that’s it, man. Cafés, app messages, those airport conversations that grow without you noticing. You two have been together many years, right?

—Long enough for them to seem insufficient, since I don’t understand why until now.

—That’s how it is, man, that’s how it is. Sometimes neither people nor moments are what they seem. But the world turns, and we go tumbling along on top of it.

I drew a long drag and blew the smoke toward the cloud-covered sky. Down below, the city had that bilious hue of early mornings when you no longer expect anything good.

—Do you know what bothers me most? —I asked—. It’s not that she left. It’s that she planned it. She chose my birthday. She spoke to Verónica, my assistant, to find out my schedule. She spoke to Adriana, her divorced friend, so she could support her from the balcony. She waited until they sang “Happy Birthday” to stab me in the back. That isn’t courage. That’s calculated cowardice.

—Or the opposite —Esteban replied, with a calm I didn’t like—. Maybe it was the only way she found to leave without backing out. Cowardly people don’t stand up in front of a hundred people and say anything.

—You defend her too much for someone who met her on a runway in Munich.

He smiled without opening his mouth. He poured himself another vodka, slowly, with the unhurried patience of someone who knows silence is on his side.

—I defend her because I’ve been left too, Andrés. And because, from a distance, you learn that the woman who leaves has almost always been leaving inside for years. The thing is, you didn’t want to look.

—Don’t give me textbook lines.

—It’s not from a textbook. It’s what I see when you talk about her. Your eyes are full of resentment and your voice is full of river. You’re still in love with your wife. And that’s what will kill you this week, not the divorce.

I squeezed the glass. I squeezed it so hard I felt the glass pressing against the bone in my palm.

—Last Sunday we fucked until dawn —I said, not knowing why I was telling him, but needing this stranger to know that Lucía had been mine in bed before she belonged to anyone else—. We cleaned the house. She cooked sancocho. She asked me to buy shrimp for the ceviche she was going to make when our daughter arrived with her friends. And that same night, after dinner, she went upstairs smelling of soap and sat on top of me with her nightgown open. I grabbed her tits with both hands, squeezed them until her nipples grew hard, and she felt for my cock over my trousers and pulled it out without saying a word. She got on her knees on the rug, took the whole thing into her mouth until it touched her throat, and sucked me slowly, looking me in the eyes, with that tongue of hers circling the head like it was a piece of candy. I grabbed her mane and set the pace. I fucked her mouth until drool ran down her chin, and when I was about to come, I pulled her up by the hair and threw her facedown on the bed.

Esteban said nothing. He stared at me, his glass halfway raised.

—I spread her ass cheeks with both hands and saw her swollen, soaked pussy, throbbing. I mounted her from behind and shoved my cock in with one thrust, all the way to the hilt. She let out one of those long, hoarse moans of hers and arched her ass against my pelvis so I could bury it in her completely. I fucked her like that for a while, gripping her hair, my other hand clenched around her hip, listening to her moan “harder, Daddy, harder” into the pillow. I spanked her until her ass turned red. I rolled her onto her back, opened her legs, buried my face in her pussy, and licked it slowly with my whole tongue until she grabbed my ears and came in my mouth, with those tremors that begin in her thighs and rise into her belly. She came twice in a row while I kept licking her clit without stopping. Then I climbed on top, pinned her wrists against the headboard, and put it inside her again, looking into her eyes, driving so deep that the headboard pounded against the wall. I filled her pussy with semen, and she fell asleep on top of me, my cock still inside her, breathing slowly, like a little girl. And I thought… —my voice cracked a little, but I steadied it—. I thought I was lucky.

—And you were —Esteban said, and for the first time that night I noticed he had poured himself another vodka without his former patience—. That night, at least. Her leaving afterward doesn’t erase the rest.

—That isn’t enough for me.

—It doesn’t have to be enough. But it’s the only thing you’ll have left.

I stood up, fed up, and approached the aluminum railing. I gripped it with both hands. The cold metal cleared my head.

—You know what, Esteban? Call her. You call her and put her on the phone. That’s all I’m asking.

—No, man, no. That decision is hers, and she’s already made it. I’m not going to force her to talk to you in the middle of the night.

—In the middle of the night? If you’re a colleague who crosses paths with her on runways and in cafés, why are you so certain what she wants? Why do you defend her as if you knew her from bed?

My pipe had gone out without my noticing. I lit it again, my hand steadier than I expected, and turned toward him. He was sitting with his legs crossed, his glass halfway raised, watching me with extraordinarily blue irises that the heater’s light turned to ice.

—Andrés —he said slowly—, it depends on which truth you’re looking for tonight. But if you’re so determined to find it, perhaps you should think first about who might be hiding it from you, and why.

The cellphone in the inside pocket of his jacket rang. He lowered his gaze to the screen, twisted his mouth, made a short clicking sound, and returned the phone to its place without answering.

—Was it her?

—It was anyone. It doesn’t matter.

I took a long drag and decided, to gain some ground, to tell him something. I decided to tell him how I had met her, to see whether, between the two loose ends, he might let his own slip.

—I was in my second semester of international business. Some friends from the neighborhood dragged me to a quinceañera. That same afternoon I had said goodbye at the airport to an exchange student from California, Hannah, a freckled redhead who had been staying at Daniela’s house, my girlfriend at the time, while Daniela was doing the same on the other side. Daniela had entrusted Hannah to me. I went further than I should have: I fucked her three times during the last week, on Daniela’s living-room sofa while Daniela was in class. I ate her pussy in the shower, she sucked me on her knees in the garage, and I fucked her ass in my brother’s room. And by one in the morning I was already telling my friends about the horns I’d put on Daniela with the American girl, exaggerating how she screamed, how she begged me to fuck her harder, how her mascara ran when she came in my mouth.

Esteban nodded, amused for the first time during the conversation.

—I was in the middle of that when a girl I didn’t know stopped behind me, looked me up and down, and said, without anyone asking her to: “Look who we have here. The swaggering prince with his court of flatterers. What a smooth-faced pretty boy. You think you’re the last Coke in the desert. But when I tell my friend all this, you’ll see.”

—Was her friend Daniela?

—My girlfriend, yes. And the girl was Daniela’s best friend in the world, newly arrived in the neighborhood. I had never seen her in my life. She turned around to leave, just as she had arrived, and at that moment I knew that woman was going to cost me dearly. Because the little bandit took up residence in my head fully clothed, and that same night, when I got to my room, I jerked off thinking about her, imagining what it would be like to have her naked, legs spread, sucking my cock with that insolent mouth.

Esteban let out a short, genuine laugh.

—And you let her leave?

—I shouted after her. I caught up with her. I touched her shoulder. She turned around with that mane of hers and said, “Excuse me? It’s very late for you to be asking questions.” And I, instead of backing off, took her hand and held it until she stopped pulling away. I told her, nose to nose: “It’s never too late to meet a little cinnamon bun like you.”

—And her?

—She called me a swindler, a womanizer, a libertine, a pale-faced pretty boy, and a couple of other things I no longer remember. She explained that she preferred a donkey to carry her rather than a horse to drag her. And in the end, because I told her I only wanted to know her name, she said: “María Lucía Vélez Mina. Satisfied?” Three weeks later that same mouth had my cock inside it in the back seat of my Renault, her skirt pulled up and her panties hanging from the rearview mirror. And two months later I was fucking her every Saturday at the motel on the outskirts while Daniela thought I was studying.

—The Curly One.

I raised my head very slowly.

—What did you say?

Esteban choked on the smoke. He coughed. He took a long drink.

—I once heard her say that was what they called her as a girl, in the neighborhood. Because of her curls.

—As a girl, yes. After that, no. After that, she only allowed three people in the world to call her that, Esteban. And I know all three. None of them wears a pilot’s jacket.

The cellphone rang again inside his jacket. This time he didn’t twist his mouth. He stood up very slowly, set the glass on the side table, and took two steps toward the railing with his hands in his pockets, like someone searching for an elegant way not to answer.

I kept my eyes on him. My pipe was lit, liquor was in my blood, and, for the first time in six hours, I had a very clear idea of what I was going to do at dawn.

—Answer it —I told him—. This time I’m interested in what your friend has to say.

And Esteban, without looking at me, finally took out the phone.