The Lingerie Photo That Made Me Betray Her

Time heals, they say, and in my case it was true, though it took its time. By the time I was twenty-nine, I was already carrying the weight of two relationships that had left me with barely visible but deep scars: Mónica, who ended up in the arms of a mutual friend, and Sandra, whose parallel affair with our direct boss I found out about in the worst possible way. The images kept coming back at night, like a vice I hadn’t quite managed to let go of, but less often now. I had learned to live with them.

It was in that state of forced calm that Valeria appeared at the company. She was twenty-four, fair-skinned, with black hair streaked with copper that changed with her mood and dark-framed glasses that gave her an air of seriousness belied by her easy laugh. She worked in digital marketing; I worked in procurement. Our worlds weren’t supposed to cross much, but the company was medium-sized and the corridors short.

She had come in as an intern, proved she could do more, and stayed on: first covering leaves, then with a contract nobody questioned because she was the most organized person in the department. The mandatory communication between procurement and her team started with brief messages, concrete questions, and the occasional joke at the expense of the computer system we both used.

I gradually learned she had been coming out of a complicated relationship with someone in IT, that they had broken up because of an ex who had been harassing her for a long time. It wasn’t pity I felt, but something closer to familiarity: I knew too what it was to carry around the ghost of someone who wouldn’t leave you in peace.

That was how we started running into each other outside of work. We lived in the same neighborhood, a few blocks apart, and without planning it we ended up sharing part of the walk home. She talked and I listened: her postgraduate debt, the family demanding more than she could give, the ex who kept reappearing now and then with messages that ranged from apology to threat. I told her little about myself, just enough. I’d learned that sometimes the most useful thing you can be for someone is silence at the right moment.

Somewhere during that period I met Patricia. She worked in communications, was twenty-seven, had dark hair, an honest laugh, and no intention of complicating her life. Neither did I. We started seeing each other without putting a name to it and it worked well for a while: dinners, the occasional trip to the movies, nights that stretched out without drama. With the new commitments, my time with Valeria was reduced to messages, the plans we made and canceled, the promise of a night out that never actually happened.

Until the company’s year-end party arrived.

A few days before the event, I went out for drinks with Valeria. She was tense, more than usual. Her ex had started showing up again with more insistence, and I knew he meant to show up at the party. We had a few beers and talked late into the night. When we said goodbye outside her building, the silence lasted a beat too long, and we kissed, just barely, before I pulled away.

—This isn’t the moment —I told her.

She nodded without protesting. Each of us went our own way.

***

The night of the party I arrived with Patricia. She was wearing a fitted burgundy dress and had her hair up; she looked great and I told her so. Valeria arrived alone, in a dark green dress that fell long on her and her curls loose, with an expression trying to hide her nerves and not quite succeeding. We crossed paths at the entrance and greeted each other with the brevity of people who have tacit agreements.

The night went on. I danced with Patricia, drank more than I should have, and laughed at jokes I wouldn’t remember the next day. After midnight, I got the first message from Valeria. I ignored it. Then a second, a third. On the fourth, Patricia went to the bathroom and I took the chance to read it: her ex had come into the event and had been following her from table to table. She was hiding in a corner, she needed to get out.

I found her without much trouble. I told her I’d take her to the door and from there I’d call her a taxi. We went out through the side entrance and waited on the sidewalk until a car pulled up, she got in, and left. It all took ten minutes.

When I went back into the hall, Patricia was standing by the bar with a drink in her hand and an expression that didn’t need translating. Someone had told her. I explained what had happened; she listened without interrupting, and in the end said she understood, but she didn’t like being office gossip. She asked me to leave with her.

I drove her home. Halfway there, the silence between us slowly dissolved, and when we reached the gate we kissed with the urgent mix of unresolved fighting and alcohol. I yanked her dress up. She was wearing black lace, a tiny thong I moved aside with two fingers to slide my hand between her legs. She was already wet, a sticky heat that smeared my fingers as soon as I touched her. I rubbed her clit in circles while she unbuttoned my pants clumsily and pulled out my hard cock, gripping it with her cold hand, nerves making her clench too tight.

—Put it in, come on —she told me in my ear, her voice husky, not in the mood for preliminaries.

I tore off her thong. She climbed on top of me in the back seat, legs spread against the seatback, and sat down on my cock in one stroke. She let out a short moan, part pleasure, part protest at the roughness. I grabbed her tits over the dress, then pulled the neckline down and freed her dark, hard nipples, and I sucked them while she started to move. She rode me with the barely digested anger of the fight, driving herself down hard, squeezing me inside with a pressure that wanted to hurt and feel good at the same time. The car rocked; the windows fogged up. I grabbed her ass with both hands and helped her go faster up and down, until I felt her trembling all over and biting her lip so she wouldn’t scream. I came inside her just as she finished, my face pressed to her neck, and she stayed still on top of me for a few seconds before getting off and straightening her dress without looking at me. We both knew that fuck was a disguised goodbye, not a reconciliation.

I was back on the road when the phone started vibrating. Valeria. I let it ring. She called again. I answered.

Her ex had been waiting for her at the building entrance. She had managed to get in, but he was still downstairs, and her brother, with whom she lived, wasn’t home. Her voice was low, controlled, but the effort showed.

I detoured toward her neighborhood without thinking much about it. I parked half a block away and let her know. When I got out of the car, he was on the sidewalk: twenty-five years old, puffed-up attitude, arms crossed. I looked at my hands for a second and walked toward the door.

Valeria opened it before I got there. He asked who I was. I told him I was her boyfriend. He didn’t believe it right away, but he didn’t have concrete arguments to dispute it either. I waited, steady, until he decided it wasn’t worth the energy and walked away. I stayed a little longer, until Valeria’s brother said he was on his way home. Then I left.

***

At the office, the gossip did what gossip always does. Patricia told me straight out: she didn’t want misunderstandings, didn’t want triangles, didn’t want people talking. I told her I understood. Things between us cooled with the same slowness with which relationships that never had much fire die.

I kept accompanying Valeria some nights, but without making it obvious: I’d let her leave first and join her a few blocks from the company, out of sight of any coworker. She was still nervous, though less so. Her brother knew about it, and her ex had cut back on his appearances.

One Saturday afternoon we ended up at the mall without really planning to. We wandered through stores without any real purpose, tried ice cream in the food court, argued about which movie was worth seeing. In a clothing store she went to try things on and sent me photos from the fitting room to ask my opinion. When we got to the lingerie section, I stayed outside.

—Aren’t you coming in? —she asked from inside.

—No, wait here.

She came out with a bag and we kept walking. Once we were on the sidewalk, she told me to check my phone.

The photo was of her in the fitting room, facing the camera, wearing a green set that cinched her waist and made the contrast with her skin even clearer. I closed the message without saying anything.

—You didn’t like it? —she asked.

—It’s not that.

—Then?

—You don’t do that with just anyone, Valeria.

—I only do it with you.

She held my face before I could answer and kissed me. This time I didn’t pull away. The kiss lasted long enough for both of us to understand there was no going back.

***

She invited me up to her apartment. I shouldn’t have accepted; I was still with Patricia, if only in name. But I did. In the elevator we said nothing, though I looked at her reflection in the mirror and saw her nipples pressing against the dress, hardened by the air conditioning or by what was coming. Inside, with the apartment silent and the hallway light off, she came closer.

She took off my jacket, then my shirt, and started tracing my neck with her mouth. There was a concentration in her movements that threw me off: she bit lightly, sucked, left little marks along the line of my collarbone. She squeezed my cock over my pants, felt how hard it was, and laughed softly against my ear.

—Wait a second —she said, and disappeared toward the bedroom.

She came out wearing the set she had bought. The green fit her exactly like in the photo, maybe better: the bra lifted her tits and left a deep channel, the panties were a minimal strip that outlined her mound, and the openwork stockings up to her thighs finished everything off with a band of white skin between the elastic and the fabric.

She climbed on top of me and kissed me with an intensity I hadn’t expected. She was more decisive than her appearance suggested. She bit my lower lip, shoved her whole tongue into my mouth, rubbed herself against my bulge until I felt her wet heat seep through the fabric of my pants. She went down slowly, ran her tongue over my chest, over my navel, over the line of hair on my stomach, biting just above the waistband of my boxers. She pulled them down with her teeth and my cock sprang out, hard, against her cheek.

She looked up at me from below with those dark, glasses-less eyes, and smiled before sticking her tongue out and licking me from base to tip, slowly, leaving a shiny trail of saliva. Then she took me all the way into her mouth, deep, until I felt myself hitting the back of her throat and heard her swallow a choke without pulling away. She stayed like that for a few seconds, her nose pressed to my pubis, the vibration of her muffled moan climbing up my cock. When she withdrew, her eyes were teary and a strand of saliva hung from her lip, and she took me back in immediately, bobbing with a rhythm that admitted no argument. She sucked my balls in between, went back up to the tip and played with her tongue around the head, looking me in the eye with a smile that was almost a challenge, then went back down. I grabbed her hair with both hands and set a harder pace; she accepted it, opened wider, and let me fuck her mouth for a few minutes, saliva running down her chin and the tits still trapped in the green bra bouncing with every thrust.

I didn’t stay still for long. I lifted her by the shoulders, turned her, and bent her over on her knees in front of me at the edge of the couch. I ripped her panties away in one pull, no gentleness. She had a perky white ass, with the elastic mark still on her skin, and her cunt was already open and glossy, dripping down the inner side of her thigh. I took her hair in one hand and with the other grabbed my cock and rubbed the tip against her lower lips, up and down, without putting it in. She pushed her hips back, searching, but I withdrew just enough that she couldn’t reach it.

—Put it in me —she asked, her voice breaking—. Put it in me now, please.

—Like that’s how you want it?

—Like that.

—Ask better.

—Fuck me, please, fuck me.

I shoved it in with one motion, all the way, to the hilt. She let out a sound that wasn’t a moan but something deeper, more visceral, a guttural whimper that vibrated all through her back. I grabbed her hips and started fucking her hard, slapping skin against skin, watching her ass shake with every thrust and her cunt swallow my cock more easily each time. I spanked her, then again, and left my handprint on her. She clenched around me each time I hit her, a spasm of mixed pain and pleasure. I took her by the hair, pulled back, and made her arch, fucking her with her back curved and her tits swinging loose now out of the unfastened bra.

I laid her down on the bed on her back and went down. I spread her legs wide, put her thighs over my shoulders, and buried my face against her swollen cunt. I used my tongue patiently, without rushing, running it slowly over the swollen lips, sucking the entrance, going up to the clit and trapping it between my lips while I slid two fingers inside and curled them, looking for that spot inside. She twisted under me, grabbed my head, and pressed my mouth hard against her pussy, soaking my whole face. When I found the right angle I felt her begin to tremble; I drove my tongue into her clit and sped up my fingers, and she came with her whole body, her thighs closing around my head, her hands clutching the sheets and a long guttural scream she didn’t bother to muffle.

I didn’t give her time to recover. I kept licking her, softer now that she was hypersensitive, and searched for another angle with my fingers. She tried to close her legs but I forced them open with my elbows. In less than a minute she came again, shorter but sharper, with a jolt that made her belly shake and splatter thick fluid onto my chin.

—Stop —she said, unconvincingly, eyes closed and in the voice of someone who doesn’t want you to stop.

I didn’t stop. I slid in a third finger and kept working her clit with my tongue, now lightning-fast, nonstop. The third time was different. I felt something change in her body, a tension that didn’t give the usual way, a rigidity climbing up from her feet and along her legs. I pulled my mouth away, put on the condom with hands trembling with urgency, and entered her slowly, very slowly, centimeter by centimeter, all the way in. She stayed still for a moment, eyes wide, mouth parted, and then let it all go at once: a warm gush that soaked my cock, my balls, her thighs, the sheet beneath. A long moan, almost a sob, slipped from her throat. She had never experienced it before and it showed on her face: genuine surprise, a body that didn’t fully understand what had just happened to it.

—What… what was that? —she whispered, with a nervous laugh and wet eyes.

—You —I told her, and I shoved it back in.

We kept going for quite a while longer. I turned her face down with a pillow under her hips and fucked her from behind, pressing her neck into the mattress, watching her white ass take all of me. Then I turned her over, put her legs over my shoulder, one ankle on each side of my face, and drove in so deep I saw her make a grimace. I rode her until she came again, this time with a control she learned in the moment: she planted her hands on my chest, found her own angle, and moved in circles, sucking me inside with a cunt that had already been trained. When I felt her coming again I let go too, inside the condom, pushing up with the last thrusts while she collapsed on top of me, sweaty, trembling.

We stayed still in the dark, listening to our breathing return to normal. The sheet was soaked beneath her, and her hair was stuck to her forehead, a red flush rising from her neck to her cheeks.

—I didn’t know I could do that —she said at last.

—Now you know.

***

I ended things with Patricia the following week. It wasn’t a long conversation. She had already seen it coming and took it with the same pragmatism with which she had approached everything we had. With Valeria, things moved forward without anyone declaring them: one day we were spending time together, the next we no longer needed to explain why.

Her ex stopped showing up altogether when he understood there was someone who wasn’t going to back down. The office gossip died down on its own over time, as it always does. We stayed at the same company a couple more years, until she found something better and I changed departments. By then we were already living together.

We got married two years after that night, with a small ceremony, close family, and the friends who truly mattered. What we built had as its foundation something neither of us had had before: the habit of telling each other things. That openness we gave difficult conversations ended up becoming the core of everything, including our sex life. But that story I’ll tell another time.