The Woman in the Red Dress Was My Wife

Martín poured himself a whiskey in the study while he waited for Valeria. They had been together for ten years and married for seven, and he still felt a knot in his stomach every time he heard her moving around the house. They shared their profession, office, and professional surname: the Vega and Associates firm, founded by his father Eduardo, was the livelihood of them both.

The problem was that the firm was sinking. After his mother died, Eduardo fell into a deep depression and let the accounts pile up with debt. When Martín reviewed the balance sheets, he realized that in less than a year everything his father had built would be lost. He needed a big contract, and fast.

The opportunity came through Federico, an old university classmate. He secured him a meeting with Hernán Ruiz, head of Human Resources for the Vargas Group, one of the most aggressive construction companies in the country. After two months of presentations, Hernán smiled at him with the cold cordiality of negotiators.

“I like your proposal, Martín. But there are other interested parties here. You’re going to have to show me that you’re worth more than a well-written document.”

“I’m willing to offer a stake in the firm.”

“That’s good. But first I’d like dinner. Something comfortable, fun. Three people.”

Martín understood. In that circle, negotiations were sealed with escorts and alcohol, and the Vegas were not so naive as to believe they could change the rules. What he never imagined was how far Valeria would be willing to go to save her father-in-law’s legacy.

***

“Just one more dinner, my love,” she told him that night, hugging him from behind while he washed two glasses. “And he signs. Then we can breathe.”

“The problem is the location. No private restaurant, no hotel with an available suite. And this man, Sergio Vargas, doesn’t show up twice.”

“Your parents’ house has been empty since your dad moved into the apartment.”

“Are you crazy? Receive them where I grew up?”

“I’ll make sure not a single photo, paper, or book bearing the surname remains. It’ll look like a rental property.”

Martín stared at her for a long while. He knew she was right. Valeria was always right when she made that face.

“And the girls?”

“I’ll hire them. Four. Daniela’s already confirmed for you,” she said, holding his jaw between two fingers. “And don’t even think about touching anything but her hand. If I find out you do, I’ll cut your dick off while you’re sleeping.”

He laughed for the first time in weeks. Then he hugged her gratefully. He did not yet know that Valeria had been thinking about something else for days.

***

On Saturday, it rained as if the sky were in a hurry to finish off the world. Martín arrived at his parents’ mansion an hour before the guests. Valeria had followed through to the letter: not a single photo or recognizable painting. The living room looked as if it had been lifted from a decorating magazine, and the Japanese menu was laid out on the main table.

At nine twenty, the SUV came through the gate. Three men got out, sheltering beneath umbrellas. Federico, thin as a reed; Hernán, with the impeccable bearing of a man in his fifties; and Sergio Vargas in the middle, broad-shouldered, wearing a dark blue suit and a thick gold ring, with the look of someone accustomed to never hearing no.

“Good place you picked, Martín,” Sergio said as he handed him his wet overcoat. “If you don’t mind my calling you by your first name.”

“Of course not.”

Dinner began gently. Sake, light conversation, carefully calculated anecdotes. But as soon as Sergio went to the bathroom, Hernán lowered his voice.

“Mansilla’s firm is circling the same contract. If you want to close tonight, you’re going to have to offer more than sushi.”

“The girls are on their way.”

“Good. That’s part of the financial report too, Martín. If a firm can’t properly afford entertainment, what guarantee do we have that it can handle our account?”

Martín nodded. He excused himself to get coffee and hurried to the kitchen. He called Valeria.

“We have a problem, love,” she answered. “One of the girls backed out. I’m looking for a replacement, but with this rain, on a Saturday night, it’ll be a miracle.”

“Sergio’s very demanding. If one is missing, he’ll take offense.”

“I’ll handle it. You keep stalling.”

When he returned to the living room, he prepared a Manhattan for Sergio and mojitos for the others. In a conspiratorial whisper, Federico suggested they stay the night on the second floor to avoid going back out into the storm. Sergio liked the idea. They went upstairs to choose rooms, and through a cruel twist of fate, the businessman picked the exact room where Martín and Valeria had spent their first night together, when she was not yet a lawyer and he had not yet inherited a problem.

***

At a quarter to eleven, headlights swept across the garden. Federico went out with an umbrella. Sergio settled into the main armchair with the smile of a man about to receive a gift. Martín was preparing a tray with four champagne glasses when the door opened.

Daniela entered first, brunette, voluptuous, wearing a tight black dress that outlined her large tits and round ass. Then Soledad, slender, in a violet jumpsuit that traced her nipples beneath the fabric. Then Mariana, a tall blonde with a Nordic air, silver heels, and bare legs exposed up to the groin. And the fourth.

The fourth woman entered in a red dress that looked sculpted onto her body. Her hair was pinned up, her lips painted a shade he had never seen on her, her eyes deliberately avoiding his.

The tray slipped from his hands. The glasses shattered against the floor.

“Oh my God, let me help!” “Lucía” said, crouching beside him as if she were a helpful stranger.

Amid glass and apologies, they managed to escape to the kitchen. Martín closed the door. The bass of the music barely allowed him to hear his own voice.

“What the fuck are you doing, Valeria?”

“I had no choice, Martín. The girl replacing the one who canceled was an hour away. The contract was falling through. I thought Sergio would choose Daniela, as we agreed. That I’d stay with you, pretending, until he got tired.”

“Do you know which room he chose?”

She nodded, pale.

“Everything will be fine,” Valeria insisted, taking his face in both hands. “Trust me. It’s one night.”

***

When they returned to the living room, they were already dancing. Soledad was laughing against Hernán’s neck, one of his hands tucked beneath the jumpsuit and squeezing one of her tits without even trying to hide it, rolling her nipple between his fingers. Mariana moved her hips in front of Federico, and the thin man had already lowered the dress straps; the blonde let him paw her hard tits to the rhythm of the music, laughing open-mouthed whenever he pinched a nipple. Sergio Vargas, meanwhile, did not take his eyes off the red dress.

“Shall we switch?” he suggested, getting to his feet.

Daniela accepted with a professional smile and approached Martín, who let her take his hand more out of inertia than anything else. Sergio wrapped an arm around Valeria’s waist with a familiarity that churned Martín’s stomach, then lowered his hand to squeeze her ass over the red dress, his fingers sinking into the flesh.

“You’re very pretty, Lucía,” the businessman whispered in her ear, loudly enough for Martín to hear. “Prettier than the others. And I imagine you have a pussy as pretty as your face.”

“Thank you very much,” she replied, keeping her distance, “but it looks like you were already with Daniela.”

“I did my homework this week, sweetheart. I know Mr. Vega’s firm is in the red. I know this dinner is being paid for with Monday’s signature. And I know your name isn’t Lucía.”

Valeria felt the floor shift beneath her. Sergio smiled at her with all his teeth.

“Don’t worry. No one will find out. But tonight you’re staying with me, legs spread and mouth shut. That’s my condition for signing.”

***

Daniela dragged him into the kitchen when she saw Sergio take Valeria’s face and kiss her in the middle of the dance floor, thrusting his tongue deep into her mouth while pawing her tits over the red dress. He clenched his fists so hard that his own fingernail cut into his palm.

“You can’t do anything,” Daniela told him quietly. “If you go upstairs and hit him, you lose everything. She chose this. Don’t ruin her sacrifice.”

“She’s my wife.”

“She’s a woman paying an enormous price so that tomorrow you’ll have a firm. Let her finish it her way.”

Valeria came in a minute later. Her breathing was ragged, her lipstick smeared, and the neckline of her dress had been pulled down to the beginning of one breast, a red handprint from someone else visible on her skin. She seized Martín’s hands and squeezed them as if she wanted to leave a tattooed imprint.

“I love you. Don’t forget it. Whatever happens up there will be an act. Tomorrow we’ll be us again. Tell me you’re with me.”

Martín stared at her for a long time. Tears burned his eyes, but did not fall.

“If you’re willing, I support you.”

She kissed him on the mouth as if it were the last time and climbed the stairs, with Sergio following two steps behind, his open hand resting on the red-dressed ass, pushing her toward the room.

***

Daniela took him to the back bedroom, the one overlooking the patio, farthest from the room where his wife was already closing the door. She put a pair of headphones on him and a bottle of whiskey in his hand.

“Drink this. And turn up the volume.”

But the headphones were not enough. The house was old, the walls thin, and the bed in the adjoining room was the same one he had broken in at twenty-two with Valeria. He knew every one of its creaks. At one twenty in the morning, those creaks began marking a rhythm that had never been meant for him.

On the other side of the wall, Sergio had already ripped Valeria’s red dress off and thrown it onto the floor. He had her standing against the dresser in a black bra and thong, burying his mouth in her neck while squeezing her tits with both hands, pulling them over the cups to pinch her nipples until they hardened.

“I knew you’d have great tits,” he told her, bending down to suck an entire nipple into his mouth and bite it with his teeth. “I knew your husband didn’t fuck you the way you deserve.”

Valeria closed her eyes. She had promised herself she would not respond, but when he slipped his hand inside her thong and parted the lips of her pussy with two fingers, she was already wet. Her body betrayed her before her mind did. Sergio brushed his thumb over her clitoris and smiled when he felt her tremble.

“Well, well, the little lawyer. Her pussy gets wet for a stranger.”

He shoved her to her knees on the floor. He unbuckled his belt, lowered his trousers, and pulled his hard cock out in front of her face. It was thick, veined, larger than Martín’s. Valeria’s jaw trembled when he pressed it against her lips.

“Open your mouth. All the way. To the back.”

She opened. Sergio grabbed the back of her head with both hands and rammed his cock down her throat in one thrust. Valeria made a muffled sound, her eyes filling with tears, but he did not let go. He drove it against her face three, four times, until saliva ran down her chin and stained her tits.

“That’s it, slut. Suck it properly. Suck it like your life depends on it.”

Valeria began sucking him on her own, both hands at the base, pulling him out and taking him back in with a rhythm that shame made perfect. She licked the head, wrapped her tongue around it, sucked his balls one at a time; everything she had learned in ten years with Martín, she was giving to another man.

Sergio hauled her up by the hair and threw her onto the bed on her back. He tore off her thong and spread her legs with his knees. He buried his face between her thighs and licked her entire pussy, from bottom to top, with a flat tongue, until he drove it against her clitoris. Valeria arched her back and released her first moan. Deep. Open. Real.

“Goddamn,” she said through her teeth, grabbing his head and pushing it against her sex. “There. There.”

He pushed two fingers inside her and kept licking. He curled them inside her, searching for the spot, and when he found it Valeria came with a long spasm, biting the back of her hand so she would not scream the wrong name. The bed creaked with every convulsion of her hips.

“I’m not finished with you yet,” Sergio told her, climbing on top. He gripped his cock and rubbed it over the lips of her soaking pussy without entering her. “Ask me for it.”

Valeria clenched her teeth. On the other side of the wall, she knew Martín might be listening. But Sergio had already pressed the head of his cock to her entrance and was pushing in slowly, torturing her.

“Ask me for it, Valeria. By your name.”

“Fuck me,” she whispered. “Fuck me already.”

Sergio drove his entire cock into her in one thrust. Valeria opened her mouth in a silent scream, her eyes rolling back. He began fucking her hard, the bed banging against the wall with every thrust, the springs screeching out the obscene rhythm Martín knew by heart because he himself had set it a thousand nights in that same bed.

“That’s how you like it, isn’t it? Hard. Deep inside. Tell me you like it.”

“I like it,” she moaned. “I like it, you son of a bitch, I like it.”

He turned her onto her stomach, lifted her by the hips, and drove into her from behind, on all fours, gripping her pinned-up hair as if it were a rein. He buried his cock to the balls without giving her a moment’s rest, while slapping her ass, the smacks echoing throughout the room.

“Look at my cock going in and out of your pussy, slut. Look at me.”

Valeria turned her head and glanced back, hypnotized, at the thick cock sinking between her buttocks. She came again, moaning long and low, and he kept fucking her without stopping, skin striking skin, the smell of sex filling the entire room.

When he could not hold out any longer, Sergio pulled his cock out, turned her onto her back, and came over her. Thick jets of cum fell across her tits, her neck, her open mouth, and her hair. Valeria lay there panting, foreign come running down her skin and a tear sliding toward her temple.

“Good girl,” Sergio said, dropping down beside her, his open hand resting on one sticky breast. “Rest for a while. We still have the night ahead of us.”

The first moan from his wife pierced the wall like a splinter. It was not fake. That was the worst part: it was not fake. It was the same deep, open sound she made when she lost control. He had heard it for ten years. He knew it as well as he knew his own name.

Martín slowly removed the headphones, set them on the nightstand, and stared at a fixed point on the wall. He did not cry. He did not shout. He simply breathed. Daniela, sitting on the edge of the bed, took his hand and told him quietly:

“That man next door can buy anything he wants. But your wife is paying a price he’ll never understand. Remember that tomorrow.”

***

The contract was signed at nine thirty in the morning, on the dining-room table where they had eaten sushi. Sergio Vargas scrawled his name in thick handwriting, left the pen beside the folder, and poured himself coffee as if nothing had happened. Federico clapped Martín on the back. Hernán smiled at him with the same cold cordiality as always.

Valeria came downstairs when the cars were already leaving. She was wearing one of his old shirts, from when they were students, and her hair was still damp from the shower. She sat across from Martín in the kitchen and pushed the empty cup toward him without saying a word.

He poured her coffee. She took a sip. Then, without looking at him, she set the cup on the table and told him the only thing he needed to hear.

“I did it for us. And never again, Martín. Never again.”

He took her hand. Outside, the sun had come out. The storm was gone. But they both knew that something, somewhere inside them, would never be whole again. And that, all the same, it had been worth it. For the legacy, for the name, and because after that night there was nothing worse left that could happen to them.