The Woman Who Cheated on Me with My Brother Is Back

For ten years I told myself I had forgotten her. I repeated it so many times I almost came to believe it: on planes, in meetings, in beds with women whose names I don’t remember. I built a company from nothing, made more money than I knew how to spend, and learned to look at people as if they were pieces on a board. All so I wouldn’t have to think about Helena.

And then Esteban died.

Esteban Mora was the closest thing I had to a father after mine disappeared and my mother fell ill. He got me off the street, paid for my education, taught me how to negotiate without my voice shaking. He was also Helena’s father, which made me, for a while, the luckiest man in the world. Until I wasn’t.

The lawyer summoned me for the reading of the will. I didn’t want to go. The mere idea of going back to that house, of breathing the same air as her, turned my stomach. But I owed the old man that much, so I put on the most expensive suit I owned and drove to the estate by the lake where I had been happy at twenty-three.

She was in the living room when I walked in.

Ten years hadn’t taken anything from her. On the contrary. The girl I had fallen in love with had become a woman of slow gestures and tired eyes, more beautiful than she had any right to be. She was wearing a black mourning dress that clung to her hips, and when she looked up and recognized me, I saw her breath catch.

—Adrián —she said, as if my name weighed on her mouth.

—Mrs. Mora —I replied.

The blow landed exactly where it was meant to. She wasn’t “Mrs. Mora”; she was my brother’s wife. Helena had married Mateo barely a year after leaving me, in a ceremony to which I was, of course, not invited.

Mateo wasn’t there that afternoon. Better for him. I still remember the last time I saw him, the night I walked unannounced into the apartment he shared with Helena and found them in bed. My brother. My fiancée. The sheets I had paid for. I didn’t shout. I didn’t break anything. I simply closed the door and disappeared from their lives for a decade. Sometimes the worst punishment is silence.

The will was long and boring until the final clause. Esteban, the clever old bastard, had left control of his company tied to one condition: that I return to the executive suite, side by side with the family that had destroyed me. It was his way of forcing us all to sit at the same table. From beyond the grave he was still moving the pieces.

—I need to think about it —was the only thing I said before leaving.

***

She showed up at my house three nights later.

I live in a glass house on a hill, far from everything, precisely so no one bothers me. When the doorbell rang at eleven at night, I knew it was her before I looked at the camera. I knew it in my body, in that part of me that never learned how to forget her.

I opened the door. She had her hair down and a coat over something I couldn’t make out. Her eyes were red.

—I know it’s late —she began—. But if I waited until morning, I wouldn’t dare.

I let her in without saying a word. I made her stand in the study while I poured myself a whisky and offered her nothing. Small cruelties. I’d been fantasizing for ten years about having her like that, uncomfortable, focused on me.

—I came to ask you to accept the will —she said—. The company means everything to my mother, to Mateo, to…

—To Mateo —I repeated. —Of course. It’s always about what Mateo needs.

—I didn’t come to talk about him.

—No? —I took a step closer—. Because as far as I know, you’re still sleeping in his bed. The same one where I found out what your word was worth.

She lowered her gaze. She expected me to make her cry, to defend herself, to say any of the things I had spent years rehearsing to answer. Instead, she took off her coat and let it fall over the back of a chair.

Underneath, she was wearing almost nothing. A dark lace set I knew well, because it was the same kind of thing she used to wear when we were young and she still belonged to me.

—I didn’t come to ask your forgiveness —she said, and her voice only trembled a little—. I know you wouldn’t give it. I came because for ten years I haven’t stopped thinking about you, and because this may be the last time you let me come close. Punish me however you want. But don’t ask me to leave.

***

I should have thrown her out. The sensible, dignified thing would have been to open the door and watch her walk back down the hill. Instead I set my glass on the table, crossed the distance between us, and grabbed her by the chin harder than necessary.

—Is this what you do? —I told her, very close to her mouth—. Do you get into a man’s bed to get what your family wants? First my brother, now me.

—No —she whispered—. I’ve wanted you since before any of that existed.

I kissed her to shut her up, and it was like opening a door that had been sealed for ten years. There was nothing sweet about that kiss. I bit her lip until I tasted the hot salt of her mouth, pulled her hair back, and let her feel the resentment in every press of my tongue. She answered instantly, pressing into me with a desperation that dirtied my head more than any fantasy ever could. Her hands went to my jacket, then to the buttons of my shirt, searching for skin, searching for heat, searching for something she no longer had any right to ask me for and was asking anyway.

I shoved her against the glass wall. Outside, the city lights trembled in the distance; anyone with a decent telescope could have seen us, and at that moment I didn’t care. I slid the lace straps down with two fingers and bit her shoulder while she threw her head back against the cold pane. The contrast made her gasp, and I took the chance to slide my hand along the curve of her waist, up over her taut stomach and to the edge of her bra, already soaked with her heat and my anger.

—Adrián —she panted, and my name in her mouth no longer weighed on me: it lit me up.

I pulled the lace away from her breasts and lowered my mouth. I remembered the taste of her skin better than that of any woman I’d touched afterward: salt, expensive perfume, that warm dampness that gathered at her throat when she was nervous. I sucked one nipple through the fabric, then the other, until a broken moan slipped out of her and she buried her fingers in my hair as if she meant to force me to stay there forever. I slowly lowered her bra, looking at her, and then I took one breast into my mouth, sucking hard, licking the hardened nipple until I heard her breathing in ragged little bursts and trembling all over. She pushed my head with her palm, asking for more without saying it, arching her body to rub against my chest.

—Ten years imagining this —I whispered in her ear—. Do you know how many times?

—Me too —she answered—. Every night. Beside him.

That confession, which should have disgusted me, lit me up like gasoline. Knowing she thought of me while she slept with my brother was the most perfect revenge fate could offer. I lifted her in my arms and carried her to the long sofa in front of the window. She didn’t protest; she spread her legs wider to wrap them around my waist, and I felt the press of her sex, hard with desire, against my thigh, wet, urgent, desperate for something I’d denied it for too long.

I laid her on her back and took off the little she still had on, slowly, watching her, letting her feel exposed. First the black lace, then the underwear, slid down over her hips with cruel slowness. Her breathing was unsteady and her body arched toward me, asking without words. I parted her legs with my knee and slid my hand between her thighs. She was soaked, hot, open for me as if she had been preparing herself all night.

—Look at you —I murmured—. So wet for the man you left behind.

—Shut up —she begged, but she lifted her hips to seek my fingers.

I touched her without haste, finding the rhythm my memory had kept all those years. I ran two fingers through her opening, slowly at first, feeling her shudder and clutch my forearm with trembling nails. Then I sank one finger inside, then another, slowly, opening her from within while my thumb rubbed her clit in short, hard circles. Helena moaned, and the sound hit me straight in the pit of my stomach. She was wet to the wrist. I finger-fucked her calmly at first, then faster, drawing more and more broken gasps from her until she started moving on her own over my hand, chasing pleasure like a hungry bitch.

—Please —she begged at last, her eyes glassy—. Don’t make me wait any longer. Not after so long.

I unbuckled my belt. When I entered her, we both held our breath at the same time, as if the body remembered something the mind had insisted on denying. I settled her beneath me, opened her wider with my hands on her hips, and sank my cock into her tight, hot, throbbing cunt. I went in slowly the first time, feeling how she took me, how she clenched around me until it almost hurt, and then I pushed deeper, until she was completely full. She let out a muffled moan and dug her heels into my lower back, asking me not to stop.

I wasn’t gentle. I moved with all the resentment of a decade, holding her by the hips, watching her face tense every time I drove into her. I fucked her over the sofa with deep, hard strokes, tearing the breath from her throat. With every thrust, the leather creaked beneath her back and gave me back an image of what I had lost: her open mouth, her tits bouncing with each impact, her legs wrapping me tighter when I sank all the way in. She answered every thrust by murmuring my name, whispering between gasps that she had been wrong, that she had never stopped loving me, that tonight she was mine and no one else’s.

I seized her wrists and pinned them above her head on the sofa so I could keep her still while I fucked her harder. I wanted to see her surrender completely. I wanted to feel her cunt clamping around me in little spasms every time I hit the exact spot that made her arch and cry in my ear. The smell of her arousal filled the room: sex, hot skin, my own whisky spilled in some collision. I took one hand between her thighs and drove my thumb brutally over her clit while I kept driving in and out, and she screamed my name with a shattered voice, no longer ashamed, no longer restrained.

—Say it again —I ordered, without stopping.

—Yours —she moaned—. Only yours. I was never his.

I covered her mouth with my hand when she started to cry out, not out of discretion, but because I wanted to feel the tremor of her pleasure against my palm. I felt her tighten suddenly around my cock, the walls of her cunt contracting in a long, fierce spasm that arched her back and drove her nails into my wrist. She came apart beneath me with a shudder that ran through her entire body, and that was my limit. I kept thrusting into her a few more times, deeper, harder, until I lost control. I drove in to the hilt and let go, emptying myself inside the woman who had broken me and who that night, at last, belonged to me again. I felt the hot rush shoot into her, my cock pulsing as I spilled into her to the very end, and she stayed trembling beneath my weight, breathing as if she had just learned how to do it.

***

We stayed silent for a while, our bodies tangled on the leather, catching our breath. Outside, the city kept on indifferently.

—What happens now? —she asked softly, drawing circles on my chest with her finger—. Are you going to accept the company?

I smiled in the dark. There she was again, the real Helena, calculating even while naked.

—I’m going to accept it —I said—. And I’m going to sit every day in the same room as my brother. And every time I look at him, I’ll know his wife came looking for me in the middle of the night.

She sat up, alarmed.

—You won’t tell him.

—I don’t need to —I replied, pulling her back against me—. It’s enough that I know. And that you come back tomorrow.

She didn’t say no. And as I felt her settle against my body, I understood that old Esteban, without meaning to, had given me back the one thing money could never buy me. Betrayal, after all, had its echoes. And some of them sounded exactly like revenge.