The Look That Betrayed Them in the Middle of the Affair

I knew something was wrong as soon as I felt his warm hand sliding up the inside of my thigh.

Despite how pleasurable the moment was, as soon as my nerves eased enough for me to think, I couldn’t help feeling strange. Those caresses were timid, exploratory. The exact opposite of what I expected, because Marcos had been eager long before the candle wax burned down and left us in darkness. I knew what was going to happen, and the anticipation had kept me on edge enough for me to already feel moisture seeping through the fabric of my panties, soaking them until I could feel them sticking to the lips of my cunt.

The thunder outside intermittently drowned out the other couple’s first moans. Even so, my friend Daniela’s guttural moans were beginning to syncopate with the storm. I could hear her perfectly: the way she breathed in fits, the half-swallowed “oh, yes, like that” that slipped out, the wet smack revealing a mouth sucking something that wasn’t a mouth.

Hearing them was turning me on. So were the caresses.

I was horny. Horny and drunk. My nipples were so hard they rubbed against my bra and made me squeeze my thighs, seeking friction between my legs.

It was the last night of our Easter getaway. The next day we had to go back to rowing through the sea of our workaday routine. Marcos and Tomás, his colleague from the office, had booked a country house to make the most of the long weekend. It was the first time the four of us had gone away together like that. Tomás, Daniela’s partner, was the new addition: they hadn’t been together very long. Daniela and I had been friends since university; she had divorced two years earlier, and that guy had appeared thanks to a dinner Marcos and I organized. Four months later, this trip was the first serious experiment in the four of us living together outside the city.

What was about to happen in that little stone-and-timber sitting room hadn’t been planned, but neither was it entirely improvised.

It was a fantasy.

I’ve been married to Marcos for seven years. He’s an engineer. I’m a doctor. We don’t have children, and we don’t plan to have any. We’re a normal couple—whatever that word means—and, apart from one enormous fight in the middle of our relationship that nearly broke everything apart, things were going well. Pretty well, I’d say. As well as anyone can ask life to be. We fucked two or three times a week, enthusiastically, and he still knew where to touch me to make me come without too much effort.

Or so I thought.

Anyway. I don’t want to get bogged down in those details, because every couple is different. But all roads lead to Rome, and every household has its dirty laundry.

That night had gotten a little out of hand. A lavish farewell dinner; a bottle of wine per person; stupid games to remember our university days: truth, strip, or mezcal-riding. And, what the hell, a couple of joints from the stash Daniela always kept for special occasions.

I don’t drink much and I smoke even less. Almost nothing. But you only live once.

Outside, it was pouring. The fire in the fireplace was dying down, and nobody wanted to go out to the shed for more wood. Fate, as if it had invited itself to our little gathering, showed up in the form of a blackout. A single candle forgotten in a dusty pantry drawer, highlighting the irony of the situation: four adults with the latest-generation smartphones using their flashlights to look for something as ancient as a stub of wax.

With barely a finger of mezcal left in the bottle, we got tired of the little questions and came up with the last one Daniela had been lucky enough to ask me: your greatest erotic fantasy.

My daring, riding a canoe and slamming into the waves on the alcoholic river in my veins, blurted it out amid laughter: doing it beside another couple. Hearing us fuck, I think those were my exact words, slurred by my drunken tongue. Hearing another woman moan while I was being fucked. Hearing another man grunt when he came at the same time my husband filled my cunt. I felt embarrassment rising up my neck and into my ears. María’s synesthesia made me feel the color red.

More laughter.

Marcos’s gaze, half alcohol, half lust, roaming over me from head to toe. It wasn’t new: we’d talked about it in bed a few times, while he fucked me from behind and whispered in my ear that he imagined another guy watching me while he fucked me, or me sucking another man’s cock in front of him. People talk about things that are never going to happen, and they always made me come harder.

Laughter from some and whistles from others. Like teenage kids.

Daniela, always mischievous, went all in with a hand of cards we had discarded a couple of hours earlier to play strip poker.

—When the candle goes out, we do it —she said.

—You don’t have the balls —answered someone who looked a lot like my husband.

—You’re idiots —I laughed, but I got nervous. Too nervous. What if…?

We were sitting on two sofas, each couple on their own, with a raw-wood table between us. On the tabletop, the remains of the revelry surrounded the candleholder, and since Daniela’s words the candle seemed to be burning down faster. The embers in the fireplace barely lit anything beyond their own recess. Our faces blurred into the darkness as the flame trembled on the wick.

There was a dense tension, like fog. It wasn’t unpleasant. It wasn’t pleasant either. It was… the exact opposite. Silence had taken hold of us, and I could hear the four of us breathing, each exhalation thickening the atmosphere. Wetter and stickier by the second. My cunt throbbed on its own with every breath the other three took, as if they were touching it from a distance.

Another clap of thunder startled us, reminding us that everything was real, even though alcohol and joints had coated us in an unreal, dreamlike patina.

That was when I looked at Tomás and surprised myself by being surprised. He wasn’t comfortable. It showed, even though he tried to hide it within the complicity of the setting.

I didn’t know him very well. Not as well as the others, at least. From the beginning, he had seemed like a sensible guy. He was younger than us, but he didn’t seem out of place. He had that rare sort of class that lent a person gravitas, as though he were wearing a tailored suit. Unlike my husband’s usual colleagues—meat for the aesthetic of whatever television series happened to be popular—Tomás was what people now called “old money.” He wasn’t handsome like Marcos. He wasn’t ugly either. He was… elegant. Marcos, on the other hand, could star in a Dolce advertisement. Dressed or undressed. A body hardened at the gym without going overboard. Gray hair at the temples that made him look like he knew what he was doing. His hands… oh, his hands! Strong, big, hard as the structures he liked getting filthy in. A dockworker’s build squeezed into an Armani suit. A thick cock, neither too long nor too short, with that upward curve that touched the exact spot every time I climbed on top of him.

Nobody said anything. We only breathed, heavily. Why wasn’t anyone saying anything? Was it going to happen?

I argued with myself. Nobody had confirmed anything, but we all seemed to agree that it should happen.

I looked at the candle: the wick was now a puddle of transparent wax in the hollow of the holder. The flame was barely a crescent the width of a fingernail. Its bluish color cast almost no light beyond the halo it outlined.

Marcos stood up beside me. I nearly lost my balance when his weight left the cushions. He filled the glasses with the rest of the mezcal and handed one to each of us.

—What happens in the mountains… —he said, raising his glass in a final toast.

Then I knew it was going to happen.

And part of me was longing for it. Tomorrow would be another day, and it wouldn’t be as if I hadn’t shared embarrassing situations with Daniela before. Tomás was another matter. But the darkness we were being drawn into with no way back gave me courage I hadn’t even known I possessed. For a second I imagined his mouth on my nipples, his fingers opening me, his cock entering me slowly while from the other sofa came the sound of Marcos fucking Daniela on all fours. A silent moan escaped me.

That and the fiery shot of mezcal.

Then the candle finally burned out. The last thing I saw was a thread of smoke climbing toward the beams of the sloping ceiling.

The silence that followed was sepulchral. It seemed I wasn’t the only one who had stopped breathing.

Two seconds passed, a thousand, until I once again felt Marcos’s presence beside me, filling a void that was already hurting.

The solid darkness made my head spin as though I had lost my point of reference. I didn’t even know whether my eyes were open or squeezed shut.

Daniela’s first moans, timid at first, reached my ears. “Oh… like that, slower…,” I heard her murmur. Then a deep gasp, and the unmistakable sound of a tongue working between wet lips. Someone was eating a cunt less than two yards from me, and that slow, filthy sloshing made me clamp my thighs together. Consciously or not so much, I curled a little farther into my husband’s body, seeking explicit contact.

But he was still. He knew the game; he’d played it with me more than once. But when it came to being stubborn, I was unbeatable.

Another indeterminate stretch of time passed, and my friend’s moans turned into pure panting. She was no longer holding back. “Yes, suck me there, fuck, eat me whole,” she panted, followed by a short, high-pitched shriek when something—a tongue, two fingers, who knew—touched her in exactly the right place. The sounds of clothing and springs made it obvious what the darkness was trying to conceal. I heard a belt buckle, the rasp of a zipper, a male grunt, and then that wet, rhythmic sound that only a mouth sucking a hard cock all the way down could make.

That was when I felt the hand slipping beneath the hem of my skirt.

The contact was electric. So electric that I waited for the thunder, which arrived moments later, rumbling between the mountains surrounding the house.

I felt the warmth of his skin against the heat radiating from mine. The contrast in temperature was what made me start thinking about something else. I still didn’t know what. I had the feeling I was facing something I didn’t understand—what it represented or what to do with it—but with the urgent need to decide immediately.

My senses were stiffened and hypersensitive at the same time. The anguish of someone who wants to wake up but can’t.

The hand moved toward my crotch, which was soaking itself independently of my will. I could feel my panties transformed into sticky fabric, drenched in wetness, the smell of my cunt forcing its way into the heavy air of the room. But it wasn’t like usual. The image of a drunken tarantula came to my mind, feeling its way along out of sync with its hairy legs.

When the drunken spider reached my underwear, it made a strange movement—a clumsy pinch, a finger that slipped without finding my clitoris, a thumb pressing in the wrong place—and my throat closed suddenly.

With fear.

The feeling was so strong that I wanted to scream, although no sound came from my mouth.

Paranoia, my mind diagnosed. Calm down, it prescribed next. But it was already too late for me.

A force that seemed to come from someone else came to my aid. I moved away as far as I could, banging my kidneys against the sofa’s armrest.

Another clap of thunder shook the house, breaking the glass that seemed to trap me. I heard hurried noises beside me. From the other sofa came, now clear, the unmistakable sloshing of a cock moving in and out of a wet cunt, a “like that, harder, put it all in me” whispered in Daniela’s hoarse voice, and Marcos’s low grunt as he thrust into her on his knees.

I had no idea what the fuck was happening. My body was defending itself, and I felt thick tears rolling down my cheeks.

What a ridiculous scene, my mind whispered again.

I silenced it as best I could, regaining control enough to say something to my frightened husband. But before I could make a coherent sound, as if summoned by the last clap of thunder, the electricity came back and illuminated the room.

The image I tried to digest, once my eyes adjusted to the painful light, froze in my memory like a snapshot.

On the other side of the sofa, Tomás. White as rolling paper. The face of a deer caught in the high beams of a car in the middle of the road. His fly open, his limp cock sticking awkwardly out above his underwear, his right hand still extended toward the empty space where I had been sitting a second earlier.

Across the table, Daniela was hurriedly pulling up her pants, lifting her pelvis as if she were in a yoga class against the clock. I saw her shaved cunt, gleaming with saliva and something else, before the black fabric covered her vulva. Marcos wasn’t as quick: his hand moved somewhat more slowly as he withdrew it from where he had had it seconds before—three fingers sliding in and out of my friend’s cunt, shining up to the knuckles. It looked like a slowed-down image of someone who has been burned and instinctively pulls away. His cock, hard and dripping at the tip, was also visible for an instant before he fumbled with the zipper.

There was a tenth of a second that shone in color in the Polaroid developing inside my head. The rest of the photograph was black and white. But that detail was rendered in vivid color.

It was a look.

Brief. Almost nonexistent. Even so, my brain had burned it into memory.

An exchange between Daniela and Marcos that held enormous significance for me. Despite knowing it was important, I wasn’t yet in any state to analyze it carefully.

That would come later.

For now, what mattered was my fury: molten lead spilling over my entire body, like that medieval punishment reserved for the greatest traitors.

Tomás catapulted off the sofa, moving away from it as if it were burning him, frantically stuffing his cock back into his clothes. He backed into the stone wall until his body struck it.

I saw myself from outside. My face was twisted in anger and disbelief.

—Lucía… calm down. It’s nothing but a joke.

I didn’t recognize my friend’s voice. The high pitch with which she spoke the first words betrayed her nerves.

—Honey…

I cut off whatever the hell my husband was about to say with an icy look before fixing my gaze on Daniela again.

—A joke?

I heard my scream, but I didn’t feel as though I had uttered it.

I saw Marcos stand up, the obscene erection still outlined in his jeans—a dark stain in the fabric right at the tip, where pre-cum had seeped through—and move toward me with his arms outstretched.

I used the same arctic stare to stop him. Don’t even try, my eyes said.

I felt like I was boiling inside, though I was very cold on the outside.

Tomás, on the other side of the room, seemed as frozen as I was. He tried to look toward the other sofa. In his feverish eyes was a plea I didn’t quite understand.

—Lucía, please —Marcos spoke again—. Let me explain. It’s not what you think.

I shifted my gaze from one to the other until I fixed it on him. I felt like I was the prey in an ambush, increasingly cornered.

—What I think? —I shouted—. What the fuck do you want me to think? I just saw you with your fingers buried to the wrist in my friend’s cunt, with your cock ready to stick it in her. What the fuck do you want me to think?

Disbelief assailed me in the middle of a whirlwind of terrible sensations.

—It’s a joke! Lucía, for God’s sake —Daniela repeated—. Don’t blow this out of proportion. Let’s sit down and clear things up…

—Daniela, if you say that one more time, I’ll rip your head off. You fucking bitch.

I could swear I heard the sound of her jaws hitting the floor. Despite the force of my words, they came out of my mouth with sinister calm. I don’t think I had ever heard myself speak that way. In my head, my most analytical side had taken control. The part that dealt with the most urgent cases at work.

I know her. She’s meticulous, demanding, and decisive, for better or worse. When she appears, there’s no stopping her. Not even I can.

My first impulse was to grab Marcos’s car keys and get the hell out of there. A remnant of my other self: the impulsive one. I soon discarded it. The last thing that would make sense in that chaotic mess was to start driving. My mind recreated the scene of a deranged woman driving that aspirational behemoth along goat tracks in total darkness, with toxic levels in her blood high enough to blow any traffic checkpoint.

Instead of that stupidity, I left the sitting room, where everything already felt so alien, and headed upstairs, where the bedrooms were.

All three faces followed my slow movements, shifting their gazes toward me and between the two of them. Yes, between them, because Tomás remained frozen in his corner. He seemed as out of place as I was.

Once inside our… my bedroom, I slammed the door and bolted it.

I leaned against the wood, confused in the darkness. Then my mind began replaying the night. Meticulously, it broke down every frame of what had happened. I stopped at a couple of them. I ran them over and over, searching for something I still couldn’t understand.

From outside came the murmur of voices growing louder. Only two. The two I knew best.

I began following a thought that appeared in my mind with the fear of not knowing whether I wanted to proceed along it. I knew it wouldn’t lead anywhere good. I caught myself looking for excuses not to.

They couldn’t be that stupid. That was my basic assumption. The alternative was that they were. And that made me even angrier.

A joke? A fucking joke that had gone as far as… where? When was it supposed to stop?

No, it wasn’t a joke. That couldn’t have been improvised. Daniela had already been moaning with pleasure before I even felt the contact of… Daniela already had my husband’s cock buried deep inside her before Tomás’s hand trembled over my thigh.

Oh, God. Tomás had groped me. Was that a joke too? Was my fucking husband fucking my friend with his mouth, her cunt, wherever the hell he wanted, a joke as well?

I brought out the snapshot burned into my mind again. Daniela pulling up her pants, her black panties rolled between the folds of her cargo trousers, her cunt still open and shining with saliva. Marcos’s hand withdrawing with the force of someone who has caught a finger in a mousetrap, the three fingers soaked to the knuckles, wet with my best friend’s juices. Both of them wearing startled expressions, undoing an earlier one that I hadn’t been able to retain but could imagine perfectly. I knew him well enough, at least: I knew the face he made when he was about to come, his jaw clenched, the vein in his neck taut. He had worn that face barely a minute earlier, but not because of me.

That pissed me off. Fuck. It pissed me off enormously.

What had they been thinking? When had they thought they could get away with that? And if it had happened, if I hadn’t noticed anything strange, if the lights hadn’t come back… if… what then?

A joke?

My husband finishing by fucking my friend, coming inside her, while I did it with hers, swallowing a stranger’s cock for the first time in seven years… The next day, what? A joke? Ha ha ha, and we’d all laugh about it together?

The absurdity of it made me doubt everything. It can’t be was the phrase repeated most often in my head, colliding along the way with it’s a joke.

Soft knocks on the door interrupted my curses.

—Honey —my husband said through the wood—, open up and let’s talk. Please.

—Sweetheart —my friend’s voice joined in—, don’t make a drama out of this. It was… I mean, the joints… the alcohol… You’re confused.

Confused? I thought. Yes, I was confused. I couldn’t understand anything that had just happened. Because of the drugs, the alcohol? No. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was something else.

And then it hit me.

I realized what the problem was.

The problem was the look they had exchanged, almost imperceptibly. That detail in color, like the little girl’s red coat in Schindler’s List.

I turned and opened the door. Marcos almost fell into the room; I suppose he’d had his ear pressed against the wood.

Daniela stopped halfway to catching him, never taking her eyes off me, astonished.

—Since when? —I asked bluntly.

My question reverberated like a sawed-off shotgun blast.