Three Months Keeping Quiet Until the Annual Awards Dinner

The question fell into the after-dinner conversation like a stone into a still pond. Sofía, Mateo’s wife, asked it while serving the coffee: «Do horns hurt more when they come out or when they grow?» It was the kind of line that would have provoked laughter on any other night, but that time something in the air twisted ahead of schedule.

Mateo answered first, with the clumsiness of someone trying to sound profound. Tomás, Daniela’s husband, added something about the conscience of betrayal. And Hernán, my lifelong friend, married to Camila, delivered the line that blew the afternoon apart.

—We’d better ask Martín. He surely knows about that, and feels it more deeply than any of us.

He said it without a hidden meaning. I had known him since we were twenty, and he was incapable of deliberately needling anyone. But as soon as he finished the sentence, Camila went white as a sheet, fixed her husband with a look as if she wanted to strike him dead, and then lowered her eyes to the tablecloth. Beside me, my wife Elena choked on a cookie and began to tremble.

Three reactions at once. Three warnings.

Hernán apologized, confused, and I told him there was nothing to forgive, that the day he spoke with bad intentions it would hail upside down. While I answered the question with some cheap theory about emotional pain, my mind was already far from the table. I watched the rest of the group from a false distance for the remainder of the night. Camila avoided my gaze whenever I looked directly at her, but she spied on me out of the corner of her eye whenever my eyes met Elena’s. My wife, meanwhile, couldn’t take her hands out of her lap for the entire after-dinner conversation. She squeezed them together so the trembling wouldn’t show.

By the time we got home that morning, I was certain. The only thing I lacked was the name.

***

The exercise for finding it was simple: make a list of everything that existed in our lives now but hadn’t existed three months earlier. Federico Vargas appeared within twenty minutes, the owner of the appliance chain that had become the star client of the agency where Elena was a partner. Federico, married to the heiress who owned most of the shares. Federico, with his silver hair and the smile of a buyer accustomed to buying everything.

That same week I called a technician and asked him to install discreet cameras in the living room, kitchen, and bedroom. Not just to watch, I clarified: to listen, too. I made up a story about burglaries in the neighborhood. The guy took his payment up front and asked nothing else.

The following Friday I announced to Elena that I was going fishing with two colleagues from the hospital. I’d leave Friday afternoon and return Sunday at noon. I gave her the news on Wednesday, two days in advance, enough time for her to arrange whatever she needed to arrange.

At seven on Friday evening I kissed my wife at the door, loaded the portable cooler into the car, and drove to a hotel fifteen blocks from home. At seven twenty I was connecting my laptop to the cameras. At seven thirty the doorbell rang in my own living room.

And it wasn’t one man who came in. It was two.

***

What I’m telling you now was told to me by Elena months later, when she had nothing left to lose, in one of the few emails we exchanged during the divorce. Although I saw much of it with my own eyes, frame by frame, on the hotel screen.

When she opened the door and found Federico and his manager Esteban—whom she barely knew from a few introductory meetings—she didn’t manage to close it. They charged in, kissed her at the same time, one from the front and the other from behind, and turned her into the filling of a sandwich before she could say a word. Federico bit her neck while Esteban lifted her dress with one hand and pulled down her panties with the other. Within seconds my wife had her tits hanging out of her bra, her nipples pinched between Federico’s thick fingers, and a stranger’s hand between her legs, spreading the lips of her cunt to announce aloud how wet she already was.

—She’s dripping, boss —Esteban said from behind, holding up his glistening fingers—. We’ve got her ready.

—Almost two weeks waiting for this moment, baby —the younger man whispered in her ear while licking the nape of her neck—. You’re going to suck mine first, to warm up your mouth.

They shoved her toward the living-room sofa, stumbling with their trousers down. Elena dropped to her knees on the rug without needing to be told. Federico planted himself in front of her and yanked out his cock: a thick, veiny dick that bounced hard against my wife’s cheek. Elena opened her mouth and swallowed it whole, all the way to the base, until she made that wet, forced-throat sound I had never heard from her in thirteen years of marriage. Meanwhile, Esteban had knelt behind her and lifted her dress over her waist, leaving her ass bare. He ran his tongue up and down her slit, lingered over her asshole, and then penetrated her with one hard thrust, driving deep into her cunt and wrenching a muffled moan from her around the cock in her mouth.

They both laughed.

—Look at the arch in her back —Esteban said, taking her by the knees while gripping her hair—. She likes getting it from both sides.

Federico yanked her off his cock and hauled her onto the sofa. He sat down first, settled her backward across his lap, and drove his cock up into her cunt from beneath. Esteban positioned himself in front, spread her legs, and began sucking her clitoris with his whole tongue, while two of his fingers slid in and out of my wife’s ass in the same rhythm as the cock underneath her.

Elena came for the first time in less than two minutes, screaming without shame, squeezing her own tits, her legs trembling open like a pair of scissors.

—Oh, fuck —she gasped—, I can’t take any more, I can’t take any more…

—Yes, you can —Federico told her from below, biting her shoulder—. We’re just getting started. Now we’re going to fuck you both at once, one cock in each hole. Alternating or simultaneous, Esteban?

—Alternating first. Then we split her in half.

Federico was the one giving the orders. I understood immediately: when one went in, the other came out, and vice versa, in a rocking motion that turned her into a flesh rocking chair. Esteban had climbed on top, Federico remained underneath, and the two cocks entered Elena in turns, cunt and ass, ass and cunt, with an obscene sloshing sound that came through the living-room microphones perfectly clearly. My wife didn’t speak; she moaned like an animal, mouth open and eyes rolled back, drool running down her chin to her tits.

When they switched to simultaneous thrusts, both of them driving in and pulling out together, they split her in half. Elena came again without warning, biting the back of her hand to keep from screaming, while Federico twisted her nipples until they turned purple and Esteban ran his tongue over her clitoris between thrusts. She came a third time a few minutes later, this time with a long, hoarse howl that rose from her chest as if something were being ripped out of her.

—Finish inside her, Esteban —Federico panted—. Fill her properly with cum; mine’s going in her mouth.

The younger man sped up, seized her hips with both hands, and unloaded inside her cunt with three brutal strokes, groaning like a bull. Federico pulled her off the sofa while she was still trembling, put her on her knees again, and emptied his load into her open mouth and across her face. Elena swallowed what she could, while the rest dripped down her chin, neck, and tits.

They asked her to go to the bedroom, to our bed. She refused. She wouldn’t let them stay the night, either. Before they left, however, she still sucked them both again, kneeling on the living-room rug, alternating one cock and the other in her mouth until she emptied them. That night, in her own words, she left both men drained.

Meanwhile, I watched everything from the hotel. Every thrust, every moan, every cumshot, every grimace. The red-hot iron didn’t enter my stomach: it went straight through it.

***

Late Saturday morning, the doorbell rang again. This time it was a single man. Gonzalo, another executive from the same chain, whom she had received the previous afternoon with a mate when he came to pick up some papers at the agency.

With Gonzalo it was different. She dragged him to the sofa as soon as she closed the door, pulled down his pants, and straddled him without a single word passing between them except his name, breathed through gasps. She pulled his cock out of his briefs, spat on her hand, lubed it herself, and impaled herself in one motion, taking him all the way in, eyes closed and mouth pressed to his. There was no order, no choreography, only a different kind of urgency.

She rode him slowly at first, moving her hips in circles, squeezing her cunt around his cock as if she wanted to memorize it. She pulled off her shirt by herself, unclasped her bra, grabbed Gonzalo’s head, and buried his face between her tits. He sucked her nipples and bit her breasts with a devotion that had nothing to do with the brutality of the night before. She spoke softly to him between moans, things I couldn’t quite make out but that sounded like names, promises, lovestruck nonsense.

They came together, her on top, him inside her. Then they stayed wrapped in each other on the sofa for nearly half an hour, semen dripping between Elena’s legs and neither of them wanting to move. They fucked once more, this time slowly, her facedown over the cushions, him on top covering her back, sliding in and out with a slowness that was almost obscene in its tenderness.

That hurt me more than the night before, although it shouldn’t have, because I understood that there wasn’t only desire there: there was something resembling tenderness.

I switched off the laptop screen. I spent two hours staring at the ceiling of the hotel room.

***

On Sunday night, after going through the pantomime of returning with two trout bought at the supermarket, I told Elena that the following Saturday I was going to use the high-definition photocopier they had at the office. I needed to print some statistics for a presentation at the hospital, and my printer couldn’t produce the quality. I clarified that I’d go early, before anyone arrived, and that I’d bring the material on a thumb drive. She nodded without looking up from her plate.

On Saturday I went in with the key she herself had given me months earlier. I walked past the photocopier and sat at her desk. The computer password was her mother’s birthday, as always. The emails with Federico filled two and a half months of history: nothing explicit, only scattered phrases about «seeing each other again» and a recurring request to «not wear pants next time». Enough to confirm the dates, not enough to humiliate her publicly.

What I was looking for was in a folder hidden three levels down, labeled «Jer». Three files. Three points of the same iron.

The first was a photograph. Elena in her own individual office chair, blouse open, bra pushed aside, one tit bare and the other squeezed by a hand whose fingers looked like claws. Her knees draped over the armrests, panties pulled to one side, her own fingers spreading the lips of her cunt for the camera, her clitoris swollen and shiny with saliva. Federico’s face, in profile, pressed against hers in a tongue kiss. Behind them, above the man’s head, I could make out the abstract painting I had given her for the office’s first anniversary.

The second was a short video, taken minutes later. Elena sprawled in the large chair, eyes closed, head lolling to one side, a whitish thread escaping the corner of her lips and another running between her thighs, from her open cunt down to the upholstery. Her skirt rolled up around her waist, ass on the edge, legs spread wide, displaying the semen Federico had just left inside her. The same mouth that said good morning to me every morning now had cum drying on her chin.

The third, the last one, I shut after ten seconds. The camera showed my wife from above, kneeling on the office tiles, sucking with both hands as if she were holding a trophy, looking into the lens with tearful eyes and a happy-whore smile she had never once given me.

I closed the session. Turned off the machine. Turned on the photocopier to preserve my alibi. Printed forty pages of technical garbage she would never check. Locked up and went for a two-hour aimless walk through the park.

***

The opportunity fell from the sky three weeks later. The Advertising Council awarded Elena and her three partners a national prize for Federico’s chain’s campaign. A gala dinner at a downtown hotel, with forty guests, the partners’ husbands, and, of course, the award-winning client and his wife Verónica, the true owner of the controlling share.

I took care of the seating arrangements myself. I asked the organizer, a young, nervous assistant, to put Verónica beside me and Federico beside Elena. I invented a story about strategic alliances and pending conversations. The girl wrote everything down on her seating chart and asked no questions.

During dinner I was the most charming guest that table had ever seen. I poured wine for Verónica, asked about her children, and listened with genuine interest to her complaints about private schools. Meanwhile, on the other side of the table, I watched Federico bring his phone close to Elena under the pretext of showing her a picture, watched his arm disappear beneath the tablecloth toward her skirt, and watched my wife close her eyes and clench her fists over her napkin.

Hernán, seated two places to my right, was telling an anecdote about a woman he had helped that afternoon put out an engine fire in her car outside his shop. The laughter was polite. I waited until he finished, took a sip of water, set down the glass carefully, and spoke.

—Since Federico has Elena on the verge of orgasm, fingering her cunt under the tablecloth, and continuing with the subject of the roles each of us plays in life, I want to confess something. For three months I’ve been playing the role of cuckold. The two of them have been lovers since before the contract was signed. Since I don’t want to keep the news to myself, it’s only fair to inform Verónica, too, that the two times a week her husband tells her he’s in meetings, he’s fucking my wife on the office sofa, filling her cunt and mouth with semen. And manager Esteban and executive Gonzalo are involved as well, because Federico is the kind of man who shares what he considers his, and my wife loves being fucked by two men at once.

The silence was so dense you could have cut it with a knife. Verónica stared at me, went pale, placed her folded napkin on her plate, and left without saying a word. Federico, paralyzed, reacted when he heard the door slam and went after her. Elena started to rise, and I stopped her without raising my voice.

—Don’t bother going home. The locks have already been changed. Send me a text telling me what address you want me to send your things to.

***

The consequences were predictable: two divorces, an agency with three partners instead of four, one executive fired, and one lost client. There was also the initial anger of the other partners’ husbands, who accused me of showing disrespect toward the host. I let three weeks pass, then sat down with Hernán for coffee. I explained the complete chronology: the cameras, the files, the dinner. When I finished, he squeezed my shoulder and said nothing.

—How did you figure it out? —he asked at last.

—The night your wife went pale at your joke about horns. Camila knew from the beginning. I suppose she was waiting for mine to change.

—I’m going to talk to her.

—Don’t tell her I told you. She did what she could.

These days I still meet up with the group on Friday afternoons. The three women have made a bet among themselves over which one has the best eye for finding me candidates. So far they’re all losing, because I’m not ready yet. But time, as my old man used to say, smooths everything out.