The Twelve Trials Began on My Birthday

There are decisions made about you without your knowledge. Mine was made on a Friday in September, in a palace on the Grand Canal, two weeks before my birthday. I, of course, wasn’t there. That night I was sleeping in my husband’s arms in our apartment in Valencia, oblivious to everything.

It would be months before I learned that the Brotherhood of the Black Lily existed. That twelve men gathered every equinox beneath white masks, in a windowless hall lit only by candelabras. That night, the youngest and most nervous of the twelve had handed the others a dossier bearing my name, my age, my height, and a photograph of me laughing in a workshop in Florence I didn’t even remember having visited. That the leader had asked him whether I would agree to submit to the twelve trials. That he had answered yes, his voice dragging, because the Renaissance was my weakness.

But I learned all that later. On the night of my birthday, I knew only two things: that I was turning twenty-eight and that my husband Andrés had been behaving strangely for weeks.

Ill-timed smiles, looks that lingered longer than necessary, calls he cut off the moment I entered the room. I put it down to the gift. Andrés was terrible at keeping secrets and always got nervous when he was preparing something big.

My family arrived at noon. First my brother Tomás, then my parents with my aunt and uncle Roberto and Mercedes, their two teenage daughters, and Grandma, a ninety-two-year-old woman who barely recognized anyone anymore but still handed out kisses to whoever came near her. Andrés had prepared the living room with white flowers and a table covered with tapas: battered prawns, parsley clams, fried little fish, olives for the girls. I had put on a floaty dress the same color as the flowers.

“You look beautiful,” my mother told me, kissing my forehead. “Twenty-eight years old. Incredible.”

The presents came out before we had even sat down to eat. My aunt and uncle gave me a Russian rings necklace, three interlocking hoops, with my name and Andrés’s engraved in silver. I put it on at once and felt its cool weight against my collarbone.

“And this,” my father said, holding out a white envelope, “is from your mother and me.”

I opened it slowly. Inside were two plane tickets and a printed itinerary. Rome, Florence, Venice. The trembling began in my fingers and rose to my shoulders.

“Dad…” My voice cracked. “This is too much.”

“You deserve it, sweetheart. You’ve been talking about Italy for years.”

I had studied the Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage and had carried a nearly religious obsession with the Italian Renaissance ever since university. Botticelli, Raphael, Leonardo, Michelangelo. Their names made me close my eyes as if they were being recited into my ear.

“I’ll give you my present later,” Andrés murmured, leaning toward me. “It’s not suitable for minors.”

I felt his breath on my neck, and my mouth went dry.

***

The afternoon stretched on amid wine, laughter, and Grandma falling asleep with her head lolling to one side in the armchair. My cousins retreated to their phones after the second course. The conversation turned to the small restoration business I had started with two classmates from university. Three women, a tiny workshop in the old quarter, our first serious commissions beginning to come in.

“Lucía, the new star of Valencian restoration,” my uncle Roberto joked, raising his glass.

“I wish. For now I just restore eighteenth-century panels and return paintings to the inland parishes.”

When Grandma woke with a start and my uncle announced that it was getting late, I looked at the clock and discovered it was eight. The afternoon had evaporated between my hands. Long goodbyes, Grandma’s noisy kisses, my mother promising to call the next day so I could tell her about every museum on the itinerary.

Andrés and I collapsed onto the sofa as soon as the door closed. I rested against his chest and closed my eyes.

“Happy birthday, my love,” he whispered.

“And my present?”

He laughed against my hair.

“Oh, right. The present. Come with me.”

***

The bedroom was dark except for the bedside lamp, which Andrés had left on with a new, warmer bulb. On the bed sat a box wrapped in burgundy paper with a gold ribbon. It was light.

“Open it alone,” he said. “Let me know when I can come in.”

He kissed my forehead and closed the door behind him.

I untied the ribbon slowly. Inside I found, first, a smaller box made of rigid cardboard. I opened it and stopped breathing: a black lingerie set, fine lace, with details embroidered in burgundy thread. Bra, panties, garter belt, and thigh-high stockings. It wasn’t the kind of present Andrés usually gave me. Over our five years of marriage and the seven years we had dated before that, what we had had had gradually lost its intensity until it became a comfortable, predictable routine. This was something else. This was a declaration.

Under the set, wrapped in tissue paper, was a Venetian mask. White, made of papier-mâché, with gold filigree around the eyes and a black feather slanting over the right temple. I lifted it with both hands and turned it beneath the light. It was beautiful, and at the same time it gave me an inexplicable shiver, as though it were looking at me.

It took me a while to change. The stockings were fussy and the garter belt was a geometry I had never practiced. When I finally looked at myself in the wardrobe mirror, I didn’t recognize myself. My short, tousled hair, the pallor of my breasts, the black lace breaking up my silhouette. I put on the mask, and then yes: the woman in the mirror was a stranger. A stranger with her tits pushed upward by the bra, her nipples already hardening and showing through the lace, and a strip of skin between her panties and garter belt that was begging for teeth.

“Andrés,” I called. “You can come in now.”

The door opened and I heard his breath catch.

“My God,” he said, and added nothing else for several seconds.

I held out my hand. He approached barefoot, in a white shirt and without a belt, and wrapped his arms around my waist.

“There’s something I haven’t told you,” he murmured, kissing my neck just where the bra’s clasp ended. “The trip to Italy. It has a date now.”

“When?”

“Carnival. We end in Venice, right in the middle of Carnival.”

I pulled away to look him in the eyes.

“Are you serious?”

“Completely.”

I felt my heart pounding against the lace. Venice during Carnival. The gondolas, the plazas, the masks drifting through the narrow streets like specters dressed in silk. I kissed him on the mouth with a violence I hadn’t expected to feel, thrusting my tongue deep inside and biting his lower lip until he let out a growl.

***

Andrés pushed me toward the bed without stopping kissing me. His hands traveled over my back and slid down the curve of my waist until they found the elastic of my panties. He tugged it with two fingers.

“Careful,” I protested. “They’re new.”

“I’ll buy you more.”

And he ripped them apart with one pull. The lace gave way with a sharp snap, and I was left open beneath him, my pussy already wet, the torn panties hanging from one hip. Andrés stared at it for one long second, his eyes glassy, as if he hadn’t seen me like that in years. And it was true: he hadn’t seen me like that in years.

I was caught between laughter and surprise. It had been years since Andrés had grabbed me like that, with a hunger that seemed to have forgotten its manners. He pinned my wrists against the mattress and moved down my chest, biting through the lace of my bra. I felt his teeth on my right nipple, first through the fabric, then pushing it aside with his chin to suck it directly. He nursed it slowly, with his flat tongue, until my back arched off the mattress. He moved to the left and treated it worse: bite, tug with his lips, a slow lick around the areola. I closed my eyes and let the weight of his body sink me into the bed, my wrists still restrained and my legs opening of their own accord.

“You’re soaked,” he murmured against my navel. “I can see it from here.”

“Get down here already.”

“What do you want me to do to you?”

“Eat my pussy, Andrés. Now.”

He smiled without lifting his head and kept kissing me inch by inch. He licked my hip bone, then the inside of my thigh over the stocking, pushed aside the remnants of my torn panties, and stopped a finger’s breadth from my pussy, blowing hot air without touching me. I pulled his hair hard enough to hurt him.

When he freed my wrists to slide downward, I felt his tongue between my thighs and a deep moan escaped me that didn’t sound like my own. I grabbed his head with both hands and closed my legs around him. He licked slowly at first, from bottom to top, sucking my lips one by one as if he were eating opened fruit. Then he sought out my clitoris and stayed there, circling it with the tip of his tongue, soft at first, then faster, more insistent. He pushed two fingers inside me at once and began moving them, crooked upward, searching for that spot he knew and hadn’t truly visited in months.

“Oh, fuck,” I panted. “Like that, don’t stop, like that.”

He sucked harder. His fingers went in and out with a wet noise that embarrassed me and turned me on even more. I felt everything building in my belly, that pressure before the explosion, and had to let go of his hair so I wouldn’t dig my nails into his skull. I pushed his face against me with both hands spread over the back of his neck.

“I can’t take it anymore,” he suddenly said, sitting up, his chin glistening down to his neck.

“You take it, you bastard,” I protested. “I was almost there.”

But he was already undressing. He pulled his shirt over his head and shoved down his pants and boxers in one motion. His cock sprang free from the elastic, hard, swollen, pointing upward. He positioned himself over me. The Venetian mask had slipped to one side. I pushed it up with my hand. Andrés laughed.

“Leave it on.”

He gripped his cock in his right hand and ran it over my pussy lips, up and down, wetting the tip with what his mouth had left behind. He rubbed it against my clitoris twice. I spread my legs wider.

“Put it in me already.”

He entered me slowly, inch by inch. Much too slowly. I needed something else.

“Harder,” I asked.

He sped up a little, but it wasn’t enough. I dug my heels into his thighs and scratched his back from top to bottom.

“Harder, Andrés. Fuck me harder, please.”

He tried to increase the pace, bracing himself on his elbows, and for ten or twelve thrusts I thought he might last. He pounded into me with the dry slap of skin against skin, and I felt the tip reaching deep inside me. But I felt him slipping away. I knew that short breathing. I knew the stiffness in his shoulders that appeared five seconds before he came. I knew the way he clenched his teeth when he could no longer hold it back. I shoved him away firmly before it was too late, feeling his cock slide out of me with a wet sound.

“Move.”

He lay on his back, confused, his chest rising and falling and his cock pointing at the ceiling, completely glossy with my fluids. I straddled him, gripped it at the base, and guided it toward me. I dropped my full weight onto it until I impaled myself all the way down. We both panted at once. I felt it throbbing inside me, touching places that had been asking to be touched for some time. I braced myself on his shoulders and began moving at my own pace, lifting my hips and dropping back down, searching for the exact angle, the one where the tip rubbed precisely where it needed to. I felt the mask slide sideways across my cheek again and didn’t bother fixing it. Andrés looked up at me with his mouth open, his hands clutching my hips, while I rode him with my tits bouncing out of the bra, my nipples hard as stones.

“Suck them,” I ordered, leaning forward.

He lifted his head and took one nipple into his mouth. He nursed it hard while I kept moving. The double sensation, his cock inside me and his mouth on my breast, pushed me up another level.

“Lucía,” Andrés panted, releasing my nipple. “I’m going to…”

“Hold on. Hold on a little longer.”

“I can’t, fuck, it’s just that you’re…”

“Hold on, hold on, hold on,” I repeated like a prayer, feeling myself getting close too, knowing I was almost there, that three more thrusts would do it. I sped up. I rode him with my whole hips, rising until only the tip remained inside him and then dropping myself all the way to the bottom. The mattress creaked. I moaned louder and louder, unable to stop.

He came first. I felt him shudder beneath me, his hips arched, his fingers digging into my hips, and felt hot spurts exploding inside me, one after another, while he let out a muffled moan with his eyes closed. I kept moving for several more seconds, hoping to catch up, rubbing myself against his pubic bone, but his hardness faded quickly and I felt his cock, still inside, beginning to soften and slide out of me, a thick thread of semen hanging between our bodies. I lowered myself onto the mattress and lay beside him. The semen began to run down my inner thigh.

“I’m sorry, my love,” he murmured, covering his eyes with his arm. “I couldn’t hold on.”

“It’s okay.”

But it wasn’t.

I took off the mask and left it on the bedside table beside the tickets. Andrés fell asleep within five minutes, breathing with the deep calm only satisfied men allow themselves. I stayed awake. My clitoris throbbed, swollen and unrelieved, my nipples brushed against the lace of my bra and ached from being so hard, and in my head there was no longer a bedroom, or Andrés, or Valencia. There was Venice. Empty streets at dawn. One mask crossing paths with another on a bridge. A stranger’s male hand gripping the back of my neck.

I slid my hand inside my torn panties and found myself soaked with a mixture of my fluids and his. I pushed two fingers into my pussy, pulled them out gleaming, and brought them up to my clitoris. I began rubbing myself in quick circles, squeezing my thighs around my own wrist, biting my lips so I wouldn’t wake him. With my other hand I grabbed one tit inside my bra and pinched the nipple. I imagined the mask in the mirror. I imagined fingers that were neither mine nor Andrés’s thrusting inside me. The orgasm came quickly, brief, shaking my hips against my hand, enough to let me sleep. I licked my fingers before letting my arm fall onto the mattress.

***

I woke the next day with the sun shining full in my face. Andrés was snoring on his back, completely naked, the sheet tangled around his ankles and his sleeping cock against his thigh. I got up quietly and locked myself in the bathroom. In front of the mirror, I discovered the dried trace of my husband’s semen still stuck to my skin, running from the inside of my thigh down to my knee, and another stain in my groin, white against the lace of the garter belt. I stepped into the shower and let the hot water pour over my back for a long while. I washed between my legs with my hand, feeling some of him still coming out of me mixed with the water.

When I came out, wrapped in a bathrobe, Andrés was already on the sofa with coffee in his hands.

“Want one?”

“Yes, please.”

He got up and went to the coffee maker, then called the question to me over the noise of the grinder:

“So, are you happy with Venice as the final stop? I’ve always wanted to see the masks.”

“I’m happy with it.”

“They say Carnival is a little transgressive,” he added, poking his head around the kitchen doorway with a smile that was both innocent and mischievous.

“As it should be,” I replied.

And for some reason, while he disappeared behind the grinder again, I looked at the mask still sitting on the bedroom table, its black feather still slanting like a finger pointing toward someone who had not yet appeared in my life.

I thought that trip was going to be unforgettable.

I was right, although neither of the two reasons I would later remember it for had anything to do with art.