What I Saw Through the Window of Her Boss’s Office

Four days earlier, the interview had taken place. Marina came home with a tense face and a short sentence clenched between her teeth: “I told him no. I don’t like that company.” I didn’t press her. Néstor Valbuena ran Visnex, a construction company that smelled of dirty money, and the mere idea of my wife working for him had made my blood boil from the first time she mentioned his name.

That morning, the phone rang. Unknown number.

“Hello, this is Néstor. You see, your wife told me about you during the interview. She said that, in your line of work, nothing gets the better of you.”

“I do what I can.”

“I have a very old safe in one of my offices. It was there when I bought the warehouse. I’m curious to know what’s inside. Are you up for it?”

Work was work. I told him I’d come by midmorning.

The warehouse was in an industrial park on the outskirts of Toledo, far from everything, far from any reasonable explanation as to why a man with his money needed a discreet locksmith. When I arrived, the secretary smiled at me over a pair of oversized glasses and ushered me inside.

“Mr. Valbuena is running late. He got a flat tire. He says you should go ahead with the safe.”

What an incredibly convenient coincidence, I thought.

***

It was a beautiful piece, one of the kind made by Quintanar’s widow at the beginning of the twentieth century. Key lock, wheel, and four bolts. The key was missing, of course. For the bolts, a stethoscope and half an hour of patience were enough. The lock would have required picks, but the bolts gave way first, and the wheel turned by itself as soon as all four yielded. It sighed metal against metal and opened with the slowness of things that had been silent for a hundred years.

Inside were pocket watches, two bundles of banknotes, and a stack of yellowed documents. I called him and described them.

“And the banknotes?”

“Pesetas. From the Republic.”

There was a long silence on the other end, followed by a swear word not worth writing down.

“Leave it open,” he said, restraining himself. “Come up to the office. I trust you.”

It struck me as odd. The warehouse was still empty. I had passed through the street and the office downstairs and hadn’t seen anyone come in. But I went upstairs.

***

The office was at the end of the hallway on the first floor, behind a solid oak door. When I reached it and raised my hand to knock, I stopped dead.

A sound was coming from inside that should not have been coming from there.

Panting. A woman’s voice breaking against the wood and assembling itself into another breath a moment later. And that voice, that cadence, that little break at the end of every moan—I knew it. I knew it far too well.

I stood there with my hand suspended in the air. The tingling traveled from my stomach down to my crotch before I understood what I was hearing. My cock grew hard as a stone inside my trousers, and shame burned across my face. How could I be getting hard from this? How could I be thinking, at the same time, that Marina had lied to me four days earlier and that she was in there, legs spread, her pussy impaled on Néstor Valbuena’s cock?

I didn’t dare open the door.

But beside the office was a high window overlooking the side hallway, almost closed, with a finger-width gap between the frame and the sash. I leaned toward it, holding my breath.

I saw a woman lying on her back across the desk, her skirt pulled up to her waist and her legs raised in the air. Her white blouse was unbuttoned to the navel, her tits spilling out of her disheveled bra, her nipples stiff and red from having been sucked for a long time. I saw Néstor standing between those legs, his trousers fallen to his knees, gripping her beneath the backs of her thighs and fucking her with animal violence, without rhythm or care, as if she were a thing. Every thrust made his balls slap against the woman’s ass with a wet smack that pierced the wooden door.

“Take it, you slut,” I heard him growl. “Take cock—that’s what you came for. Open that pussy wide. Open it.”

She moaned something, a broken plea, and he laughed and spat between her tits before thrusting into her even harder.

From my angle, I couldn’t see her face: her body was hidden behind the man’s. The only thing I could see clearly was that cock going in and out, thick and glistening with fluids, of her gaping pussy. A completely shaved pussy, swollen and dark, her inner lips spilling out and hanging around his cock as if she had been hammered for hours. A thread of old semen, undoubtedly from an earlier ejaculation, ran down the crack of her ass onto the desk.

Néstor pulled all the way out in one sudden motion, and the woman let out a howl of emptiness. His cock gleamed in the air, soaked and streaked with white fluids. He shoved it back in with a single thrust, burying it to the root, and she screamed in a way that made me clench my teeth.

“Open your mouth for me,” he ordered.

The woman obeyed. He spat into it and closed her jaw with two fingers.

“Swallow. Swallow and squeeze that pussy like I taught you.”

And that was when I latched onto it.

Marina didn’t shave. Marina said that shaving meant becoming someone else, losing something of her own, letting them tear away a piece of her femininity. She had repeated it for ten years, with the stubbornness of things one truly believes. So the woman at that desk, no matter how much she wore the same white blouse and gray skirt my wife had worn four days earlier, couldn’t be her.

She couldn’t.

I repeated it to myself as I watched her wrap her ankles around Néstor’s back and dig her heels into him so he wouldn’t stop. I repeated it as he flipped her over in one pull, put her on all fours across the desk with her ass sticking up, and drove his cock into her from behind with a single thrust. I repeated it as he grabbed two handfuls of her hair and used it as reins to fuck her as deep as he could, smacking her ass with his open palm on every thrust. I repeated it as I heard the howl with which the woman came, a long, guttural moan, exactly the same moan Marina released in my bed when her orgasm went off like a gunshot.

“Now swallow,” he panted, pulling out and dragging her down until she was kneeling on the floor. “Open that whore’s mouth and swallow every last drop.”

I didn’t see him come. I stepped away from the window first, my heart pounding against my ribs and my cock dripping with rage inside my underwear. I went silently down the stairs, sat waiting in an armchair by the entrance with sweaty hands and a pulse of two hundred beats a minute.

***

Ten minutes later, the secretary arrived. Two minutes after that, Néstor opened the office door, straightened his shirt collar, and came down the stairs with the air of a calm man.

“Sorry to keep you waiting. I had to deal with a delicate matter.”

He said it with the half-smile some men reserve for showing you that they know something you don’t.

“No problem.”

We went upstairs to look at the safe. He rummaged through it without much interest, as though something else had been the important part. Then, in the middle of some stupid comment about the watches, he let slip:

“By the way, I’ve just been with your wife.”

I turned slowly. He wasn’t looking at me. He was speaking to a bundle of banknotes he held between his fingers.

“Oh, really?”

“Yes. She came this morning. A quick meeting.”

“Marina told me she wasn’t going to accept the position.”

“And she didn’t. But we’d been talking about other things.”

He smiled. This time, he did look at me.

“Come upstairs with me to the office. She’s there. I want you to see her.”

We went upstairs. When he opened the door, Marina was sitting in the guest chair, wearing the gray skirt and white blouse, her legs crossed. Beside her, standing and wearing the same gray skirt and the same white blouse, was another woman. Young, dark-haired, about my wife’s height. Her hair was tied back in exactly the same way.

“My new assistant,” Néstor said. “Sofía. She starts next week. They’re wearing the same uniform, aren’t they? Curious, isn’t it?”

Marina looked at me without understanding what I was doing there. I didn’t understand what she was doing there either. Sofía looked at me as though the whole thing were uncomfortable and she wished she were somewhere else. Néstor was enjoying himself.

I said goodbye in a dry voice. I told Marina I’d see her at home. I went down the stairs, trying not to run.

***

We got home at the same time, in separate cars. She went upstairs to the bathroom first and closed the door. I sat on the edge of the bed, still wearing my jacket, and tried to think.

The explanation was simple. The woman I had seen in the office was Sofía, not Marina. Same clothes, same figure, same hairstyle. Néstor had fucked his assistant and taken advantage of the opportunity to drive suspicion between my ribs. That was all.

But then, why had he called me to open the safe precisely that morning? Why had he sent me upstairs when, according to him, he hadn’t even arrived yet? Why had the woman at the desk moaned exactly like Marina moaned when she came?

Too many coincidences for one man.

I got up.

The bathroom door gave way without a creak. Marina was humming softly under the water, and the shower screen was ajar, a five-centimeter gap between the glass and the frame. I peered inside. Her face was covered in soap, her eyes closed, her head tilted back.

I looked at her as I had looked at her a thousand times. Her skin, her shoulders, that waist of hers narrowing exactly where it should, her firm buttocks, the reddish mark the bra band had left across her back. I had been in love with that body for ten years, and there hadn’t been a morning when it failed to confirm why.

Then I saw the marks.

Three purple hickeys on the left side of her neck, hidden until then by her wet hair. A perfectly clear bite on her right buttock, the tooth marks still red. Another higher up, on her lower back. Small bruises on the insides of her thighs, the kind left by fingers squeezing very hard and for a long time to force her legs open. A scratch on her shoulder. Another hickey between her tits, smaller, almost timid, as if whoever had made it had finally run out of reasons to hide.

And when she turned to rinse herself, I saw it.

Marina’s pussy was completely shaved. The skin was still reddish from the edge of a fresh razor, with those tiny red dots left by hair plucked against the grain. Her pubis was swollen, dark, irritated. Her outer lips were thick and parted, as though they hadn’t quite managed to close. Her inner lips peeked between them, long and congested, with that particular sheen women have after being fucked for hours. And on the inside of her thigh, almost at the groin, a whitish thread was sliding toward her knee, which the water hadn’t quite washed away.

Semen. Semen that wasn’t mine.

She didn’t notice. She ran a soapy hand over her pussy, accidentally spreading it open with two fingers to wash inside, and the shower stream dragged another thread from there, thicker than the first. A gasp escaped her, a small gasp, the one she let out when she was highly sensitive and something brushed where it shouldn’t. The after-gasp. The one women make when they have finished recently and their flesh is still trembling.

I released the breath I had been holding for minutes. I closed the bathroom door without her noticing and went downstairs like a sleepwalker, one hand against the wall to keep from falling, my cock throbbing with pure hatred against my zipper.

***

Three hours have passed since then.

Marina has dressed to go out. Black dress, low heels, a perfume that isn’t her usual one. She told me she was meeting some friends at a bar downtown. I smiled at her. I told her to have fun.

I followed her from a reasonable distance.

She didn’t go downtown. She took the road toward the mountains, toward that enormous development where the rich build their isolated villas and where, supposedly, things happen that don’t happen anywhere else. Masked parties. Women brought in from everywhere. Very powerful men who pay very well for silence.

I’m on the rear wall of one of those villas. The most remote one, the one you can’t see from the road. There are no neighbors, no witnesses, no streetlights. Only the moon and a silence heavier than the entire night.

I know Marina is inside.

I know she didn’t come here to have drinks with her friends.

I know I’m not going to like what I find in there.

And I know that, when I find her, this story will end in two acts. First hers. Then mine.

But first I’m going to open the last lock I will ever open in my life. I have my picks in the inside pocket of my jacket, next to my heart, and they have never failed me. That door will give way just as the four bolts gave way this morning, with a metallic sigh that only I will know how to hear.

And I will go in.