She Had a Lover in Florence and Her Husband Never Knew

Elena had never slept as badly in her life as she did that first night in the hotel in Florence. She had been married to Andrés for fifteen years, fifteen years of fidelity, of anniversaries kept, of quiet dinners and vacations organized down to the last minute. And yet it was three in the morning and she couldn’t close her eyes without seeing the smile of that Italian man from the museum.

They had arrived in Rome three days earlier. Andrés ran the plan with the same meticulousness with which she restored a painting: every hour calculated, every monument marked on the map, every restaurant booked. That was what she had liked most about him at first. That certainty. That promise that with him, nothing would go wrong.

In the mornings they toured the Colosseum, the Trevi Fountain, the Vatican. Elena stopped in front of every fresco, every piece of marble, with her breath catching in her throat. She had spent twelve years working as a restorer in a small workshop in Barcelona with her two business partners, Carla and Marta, and twenty years before that devouring art books until she fell asleep on top of them. Seeing the Creation of Adam in person was like a blow to the chest.

Andrés watched her affectionately and yawned. By midafternoon he was exhausted. At nine at night he fell asleep with the television on.

On the fourth day they took the train to Florence.

“Tomorrow we rest,” Andrés said as they waited in line to board.

“Tomorrow I’m going to the Uffizi,” she replied.

“Tomorrow we both rest.”

“You rest. I’m going.”

They didn’t argue. They had been together too many years to argue over that. Andrés laughed and put an arm around her shoulders. Elena thought, as the train crossed Tuscany, that her husband was the kindest man in the world, and that was probably why it was so hard for her to feel anything at all.

***

They arrived at the hotel in the middle of the afternoon. Andrés lay down on the bed without taking off his clothes. She went out for a walk.

Florence smelled different from Rome. More enclosed, denser, as if the city breathed slowly. She crossed the Ponte Vecchio and let herself be carried through the streets until she reached, without meaning to, the side entrance to the Uffizi. It was closed, but off to one side a small door had a sign taped to it: “Laboratorio di restauro”.

Professional instinct won out. She knocked.

A tall man in his forties opened the door, wearing a white T-shirt stained with pigment and honey-colored eyes. Lorenzo. He introduced himself that way, no surname, smiling as if he had known her all his life.

“Restorer?” he said in Spanish, with an accent that sent a tingle somewhere Elena hadn’t remembered having.

“From Barcelona,” she replied.

“Come in. It’s closed to the public, but come in.”

She followed him.

The workshop was enormous, with high ceilings, two long tables covered in white cloths, and tools she recognized as if they were from her own house. It smelled of varnish, old wood, and something warmer she couldn’t identify. Lorenzo showed her a fifteenth-century wood panel he was consolidating. They talked for an hour about pigments, microclimates, the hellish humidity of Florentine winter. She forgot about Andrés.

By the time she went back out into the street it was night.

“Tomorrow I’m doing a private visit for a colleague from the Prado,” he had told her when they said goodbye. “At seven. If you want to come, I’ll open the door for you.”

“I don’t know if I’ll be able to,” she lied.

“I’ll be here,” Lorenzo said, and held her gaze a second longer than necessary.

***

Three in the morning. Andrés was snoring softly beside her, one arm over his stomach. Elena stared at the ceiling. She thought about the curve of Lorenzo’s neck when he bent over the panel, about how he had brushed the back of her hand without meaning to when he handed her a brush. About how she hadn’t felt a discharge of electricity like that in fifteen years. About how it had been years since she’d slipped her hand between her legs thinking about anyone who wasn’t a ghost, and yet there she was, with her nightgown hiked to her waist, two fingers rubbing her cunt slowly beneath the sheet while Andrés slept less than a handspan away. She came biting the pillow in silence, her hips lifted off the mattress, and when she lowered her fingers they were soaked. She wiped them on the edge of the sheet with a shame she hadn’t felt since she was fifteen.

She got up at six. Showered in silence. Put on the simplest dress she had packed, black, knee-length. She didn’t wear underwear underneath, and preferred not to ask herself why. She didn’t put on makeup because she didn’t want to ask herself why she was putting on makeup.

She left Andrés a note on the bedside table: “Went out for breakfast. Back late morning.” She kissed him on the forehead. He didn’t even move.

She walked across Florence. The streets were almost empty at that hour, with a fine mist clinging to her hair. When she got to the Uffizi, Lorenzo was already waiting for her with the side door slightly open.

“I knew you’d come,” he said.

“I didn’t know,” she answered.

He laughed and let her in.

***

The workshop was silent. Morning light came in at an angle through the skylights and fell over the tables like something out of a Vermeer painting. Lorenzo showed her a box with pieces of a dismantled altarpiece. He handed her a magnifying glass. Their fingers brushed again, and this time neither of them pulled away.

“Does your husband know you’re here?” he asked quietly.

“He thinks I’m having breakfast.”

“And where are you, really?”

Elena took a while to answer. She looked at the wood of the altarpiece, the fine cracks in the gold leaf, the badly restored face of a fourteenth-century Virgin.

“I don’t know,” she said.

Lorenzo set the magnifying glass down on the table. He brushed a strand of hair from her face with a slowness she found unbearable. He took her chin between his fingertips. When he kissed her, she thought for an instant of Andrés asleep in the hotel and then stopped thinking altogether.

Lorenzo kissed as if he had all the time in the world. Unhurried, without urgency, with an almost professional concentration, the same one with which she worked on the most delicate pieces. He slid his tongue into her mouth slowly, pushing, teasing hers, and Elena let out a low, rough moan she didn’t recognize as her own. He unbuttoned her shirt one button at a time and ran his hands over her chest. His skin was warm, faintly salty with morning sweat. She licked one nipple and felt Lorenzo shiver. He grabbed her ass over the dress, squeezing it with both hands, and when he discovered she wasn’t wearing anything underneath he let out a low laugh against her ear.

“No panties,” he murmured in Italian. “Puttana. You came here knowing what you wanted.”

“Shut up,” she told him, and bit his lower lip.

He lifted her by the waist and set her on the long table at the back, away from the skylights, where the light barely reached.

“Not here,” she murmured, looking around on instinct.

“Here,” he said, and locked the inner door.

He slowly hiked up her dress, looking at her face. Elena closed her eyes. It had been months, maybe years, since she had felt so seen. Andrés loved her, but he loved her the way one loves a familiar room. Lorenzo looked at her as if he were seeing her for the first time. As if he were the one entering a museum. He spread her knees with both hands and stood there for a few seconds, looking at her cunt open on the table’s wood.

“Dio mio,” he said, and she blushed like a little girl.

She lifted her hips without thinking. She felt Lorenzo’s mouth first on her neck, then lower, stopping in the hollow of her collarbone, pulling her dress off her shoulders to bare her breasts. He sucked each nipple in turn, tugging at them with his lips, biting carefully until they turned hard and purple. Elena gripped the edge of the table with both hands. She wanted to tell him to stop. She didn’t say a word.

Lorenzo moved downward, kissing her belly, her navel, the inner part of her thighs. He ran his tongue very slowly along her groin, licking the fold where the skin was thinnest, and she writhed on top of the table as if it hurt. He knelt between her legs. He spread her thighs without asking permission and she found herself offering them to him, lifting her hips to meet his mouth. When his tongue touched her for the first time, she made a sound she hadn’t made in years, something rough and low, almost a whimper. She buried her fingers in his hair. She thought, absurdly, of the note she had left Andrés. “Went out for breakfast.” And she bit the hand that wasn’t holding him so she wouldn’t scream.

Lorenzo was in no hurry. He licked her with the same care with which he examined an altarpiece: corner by corner, pausing where he noticed a different tremor, going back when she slipped away from him. He opened her pussy lips with two fingers and flattened his tongue from bottom to clit, once, twice, three times, until Elena began begging him in a whisper to stay there. When he trapped her clit between his lips and began sucking it slowly, she arched her entire back against the table. He slid one finger inside her, then two, without stopping, searching for a point deep inside that made her open her mouth in a silent cry. She was drenched. She could hear herself making noises against his mouth, and that obscenity, that wet sound in a restoration workshop at seven in the morning, excited her more than the tongue itself.

“I’m going to come,” she whispered in Spanish. “Lorenzo, I’m going to...”

She dug her heels into his shoulders. Yanked hard on his hair. She came against his mouth a few minutes later, without warning, with a long spasm that shook her legs against his ears, moaning softly, smothered, one hand still clamped over her lips. Lorenzo didn’t pull away. He kept licking her slowly while she trembled, drinking in everything that escaped her, until Elena had to push his head away because she couldn’t take it anymore.

***

When he straightened up his mouth was shining and his chin was wet. Elena was trembling. She unbuckled his belt without meeting his eyes, with clumsy fingers, feeling for the first time in years exactly on the wrong side of her own life. Lorenzo helped her. He yanked down his trousers and briefs, and she let out a small involuntary sound at the sight of his cock, hard, thick, curving upward, with a clear drop beading at the tip. She bent down without thinking. She took as much of him into her mouth as she could, gripping the base with her hand, and heard him give a low groan above her. She licked his whole head, sucking slowly, playing with her tongue beneath the crown, and he grabbed her hair with both hands and began forcing her head to the rhythm he wanted.

“That’s it,” he said in Italian. “Brava. Like mama.”

Elena sucked him until she gagged and kept sucking. She licked his balls, ran her tongue over the entire shaft, took him all the way back into her mouth. It had been years, entire years, since she’d sucked a cock, and she was surprised by how much she liked it, how wet she got again just from having it in her mouth. Lorenzo pulled her off when he was on the verge of coming.

“Not yet,” he panted. “Not yet.”

He gently pushed her back until she was lying on the table, her dress wrinkled at the waist and her hair scattered among the restoration tools. He grabbed both her legs beneath the knees and spread them wide open.

“Look at me,” he asked.

Elena opened her eyes.

Lorenzo pressed the head of his cock against the entrance to her cunt and rubbed it slowly up and down, wetting himself in her, sliding it over her clit. Elena writhed.

“Put it in,” she said, not recognizing her own voice. “Put it in now, please.”

“Say it again.”

“Fuck me.”

Lorenzo entered her in one long thrust, all the way to the hilt, and Elena let out a cry that burst from her mouth before she could stop it. He covered her mouth with his hand. He stayed still inside her for a second, letting her feel the width, the length, the way he rubbed a place Andrés hadn’t reached in so long she had forgotten it existed. She felt his pulse against hers, the weight of his body, the brush of his open shirt against her breasts. She dug her fingers into his shoulders. She couldn’t stop looking at him.

He moved slowly at first, going all the way in and out each time, very slowly, forcing her to feel every centimeter. Then he began to speed up. He grabbed her hips with both hands and rammed into her, pounding against her, making the whole table and the tools on top of it tremble. Elena heard the wet, obscene noise of sex going in and out, and the noise of skin against skin, and her own broken moans escaping between his fingers.

“Turn around,” Lorenzo ordered.

He pulled out of her. Elena obeyed without thinking, turned around on the table and ended up standing, bent at the waist, her breasts crushed against the wood and her ass lifted toward him. Lorenzo hiked her dress up to her back. He ran his hands over her buttocks, squeezing them, spreading them. He spat on her cunt and drove back in hard.

“Oh God,” she moaned into the table.

He fucked her like that, standing, holding her hips, pounding into her with all the force of his body. Elena felt his cock driving deeper and deeper in that position, the table creaking beneath her, saliva dripping onto the old wood. Lorenzo ran one hand over her back and grabbed a fistful of hair, pulling her head back. With the other he found her clit and started rubbing it in time with the thrusts.

“Come again,” he whispered in her ear. “Come with me inside you.”

Elena came screaming into the crook of her own arm, biting down on her forearm until it left a mark, her cunt squeezing Lorenzo’s cock in spasms that emptied her completely. She was crying and hadn’t even realized it. She came a second time in less than a quarter of an hour, biting her lip so she wouldn’t cry harder. Lorenzo held on for a few more thrusts, faster and more out of control each time, and then finished soon after, burying himself all the way inside her, silent, his forehead resting on her shoulder and his fingers dug into her hips. Elena felt the hot gush inside her, long, through clenched moans. They stayed like that, joined together, for a long while.

They remained silent much longer. Only the old wall clock could be heard, ticking off the seconds, and the two of them breathing, slowly coming down. When he pulled out, she felt the semen slide down the insides of her thighs and she wasn’t ashamed.

“It’s eight thirty,” he said at last.

Elena sat up as if waking from a dream. She climbed off the table, cleaned herself as best she could with a white restoration cloth he handed her without a word, straightened her dress, found her bag. Lorenzo watched her without moving, still naked from the waist down, his cock shiny and half-soft.

“Will I see you again?” he asked.

“No,” she answered. “Tomorrow we’re going to Venice.”

“Carnival.”

“Carnival.”

He smiled.

“If you change your mind,” he said, “you know where I am.”

Elena didn’t answer. She went to the inner door and waited for him to get up and open it. Before leaving, she turned around. Lorenzo was still barefoot in the middle of the workshop, shirt open, hair mussed. She held his gaze for a moment.

“Thank you,” she said.

It was the strangest word she had spoken in years.

***

She walked back to the hotel, her thighs sticky and her cunt burning with every step. The streets were already full of tourists with cameras around their necks. Florence smelled of coffee and wet stone. Elena sat in a small pastry shop and ordered a cappuccino and a cornetto. She ate slowly. She thought about Andrés. She thought about the fifteen years. She thought about the phrase “it won’t happen again” and was surprised to discover she wasn’t sure she meant it. She closed her thighs under the table for a moment and felt Lorenzo’s semen still inside her, and a shiver ran up her back.

When she walked into the room, her husband was coming out of the shower wrapped in a towel.

“I thought you weren’t coming back,” he said, smiling. “How was breakfast?”

“Quiet,” Elena answered, forcing herself to smile too. “Florence is beautiful in the morning.”

Andrés came over and kissed her. He noticed nothing. He smelled of his usual shampoo, his soap, the routine of fifteen years. Elena kissed him back without thinking and felt, with a little shiver, that Lorenzo’s mouth was still burning inside her, and that she was filled with another man while her husband ran his tongue over her lips without realizing it.

“Come on, get yourself pretty,” he said. “I’m taking you to the Uffizi today.”

She turned around so he wouldn’t see her face and opened the suitcase as if looking for something specific.

“Yes,” she said, with the steadiest voice she could manage. “To the Uffizi.”

She thought she would spend the whole morning pretending not to know that workshop. She imagined Lorenzo crossing the inner courtyard in a work coat, not looking at her, as if he had never put his tongue between her legs, as if he had never bent her over a table and fucked her until she cried. The idea gave her a new kind of vertigo, different from guilt. Something closer to excitement than fear.

And before leaving the hotel, without Andrés seeing, she looked at herself for a second in the elevator mirror. The woman staring back had cheeks still flushed and lips a little swollen. Elena thought that, at some point that morning, she had stopped being exactly the person she had been the day before.

And for the first time in a very long time, she didn’t care.