When My Lover Died, My Boyfriend Stopped Being Himself

After that afternoon when I left Renata humiliated on the marble floor of my study, something inside me finally broke. Subduing her hadn’t been enough. I wanted something more concrete, darker, something with a proper name and a man’s body. What I wanted was Mateo. And I gave myself to him like someone hurling herself into a dry well, knowing there would be nothing but stones at the bottom.

For almost an entire year, we lived in a kind of constant drunkenness. There were weeks when we saw each other five or six times, hidden away in suites in the financial district or anonymous motels on the outskirts, where nobody asks anything and the only law is money up front. We also used the apartment he rented by my order, as soon as I ordered him to leave Renata. I had turned him into my voluntary prisoner, and he had accepted the role with an almost religious devotion.

I, who all my life had been the orderly woman, the one with perfect calendars and punctual meetings, began weaving lies with an ease that frightened me. Dinners with clients who didn’t exist. Urgent trips to Rosario or Córdoba. Invented conferences I “had” to attend for three straight days. Every excuse was a key that opened the door to entire hours devoted to using Mateo’s body however I pleased.

Because that was what had happened between us: the roles had been reversed. Now I wielded the whip and he kissed it before asking for more. I chained him to the bed, marked his skin until red prints remained on his ass, whispered in his ear that he was nothing more than my toy. He loved to beg. He cried when I denied him orgasm for hours, keeping him on the edge without letting him fall, only to grant it at the end with a cruelty that tasted like triumph.

And I surrendered with the same intensity. I came home with trembling legs, with marks on my neck I had to conceal with makeup, with swollen lips from biting them so much. And still, when Diego held me at night with his usual tenderness, my body responded as if an чужд shadow had taken over my nerves.

Guilt appeared only in fits and starts, like an unwelcome visitor arriving without warning. When Diego made me breakfast with his calm smile. When he wrapped his arms around me from behind while I washed the dishes. In those moments I felt a stab in my chest, knowing I was betraying him in the dirtiest way. But the desire for Mateo was a drug stronger than any morality. A drug I injected into myself again and again.

I barely heard anything about Renata in those months. Diego told me, as if it were nothing, that she had resigned from Vega and disappeared from the professional map. I wasn’t surprised: her family allowed her those luxuries. Andrés, on the other hand, had moved to Madrid and opened two exclusive clothing boutiques. He wrote to me every so often by message. More than once he tried to warn me: “Don’t trust Mateo so much, that man owes Renata far too much.” I answered him with elegant evasions. I know exactly what I’m doing, I thought, while feeling the weight of the chains I had placed on my lover myself.

But then came one morning that shattered the whole illusion.

***

Three days had gone by with no word from Mateo. Three whole days without a message, without a call, without an order of mine being obeyed. I wrote to him several times. First playfully, then with the impatience of a woman used to being obeyed, and finally with a fear poorly disguised beneath the mask of indifference. Nothing. Only silence.

On the fourth day, while I was making coffee in the kitchen and Diego had already left for work, I turned on the television without paying much attention. The announcer’s voice cut through me like a knife:

—“...was found dead in his apartment in the north district. According to initial findings, Mateo Aldana was stabbed multiple times. The main suspect is his former partner, Renata Cisneros, who apparently had not accepted the end of the relationship...”

The cup slipped from my hands and shattered against the tiles. Hot coffee splashed my legs but I felt nothing. On the screen, a recent photo of Mateo appeared, smiling with that arrogance I had learned to break and love at the same time.

Dead. Stabbed. Bleeding out in his own apartment.

The news unfurled with macabre details: the weapon found, Renata’s clothes stained with his blood, witnesses speaking of violent arguments in the previous days. A perfect crime of passion. And all of it, according to the narrative, because he had left her for another woman. For me.

I collapsed among the porcelain shards. I cried with a sound I had never heard come out of my own throat before, a cry with no consolation, animal. My chest hurt, my hands hurt, my entire skin hurt, the skin he had learned to read by heart.

Because despite everything, despite the original betrayal, despite the manipulations and the drugs he had poisoned me with at first when he was obeying Renata, I loved him. I loved him with an sick, absolute devotion. He was the only man with whom I felt goddess and slave at the same time. And now that altar was empty.

***

The following days dissolved into a fog. I barely slept. When exhaustion won, I dreamed of Mateo chained to the bed, his voice begging for more. I woke soaked through, not knowing if it was sweat or tears. I lost several kilos. I canceled meetings, ignored my family, stopped answering the phone. I spent hours staring at the bedroom ceiling.

Diego tried everything. He took me to the doctor, suggested therapy, offered me a vacation. I rejected each proposal in monosyllables. One night he tried to make love to me. He was tender, patient, as always. My body responded by inertia while my mind remained trapped in the memory of Mateo’s brutal thrusts. I had an empty, mechanical orgasm, and when Diego fell asleep holding me, I cried silently into the pillow.

But one night, something changed.

I was facing away from him, staring at the wall without seeing it. Diego came up behind me. His hand slid from my waist to one of my breasts and began to caress it with a new, different slowness. He moved down my stomach and slipped between my legs with a determination I didn’t know in him. His fingers opened me slowly. At first I felt almost nothing. But he persisted, with firm patience, and my traitorous body finally responded.

—Turn over —he said, in a low voice that wasn’t his.

He turned me over, spread my thighs, and went down with his mouth. His tongue was slow, then insistent. I moaned without meaning to. Then, without warning, I felt his finger pressing against my ass. I tensed. Diego had never been bold with anal sex. In all the years we’d been together we’d done it four times, and always because I had asked for it. Now it was he who was seeking it.

His finger entered slowly, lubricated with my own wetness. A second finger. A third. When I was fully stretched, gasping against the sheets, he settled behind me, reached for a lubricant from the nightstand (I didn’t even know it was there), and pushed firmly.

The initial burn gave way to a wave of pleasure that made me arch my back. Then, without warning, he gave me a hard slap on the ass. The sharp sound echoed through the room.

—That’s it. Open that ass wide for me —he growled, in a voice I didn’t recognize.

Another slap, harder.

—You’re my whore. Say it.

His words set me on fire like gasoline. I started screaming with pleasure. When I came, I convulsed all over, and he emptied himself inside me with an animal growl I had never heard from his mouth before.

When it was all over, we lay in silence. I looked at him from the pillow. His face, always serene, now had a hardness carved from stone, and in his eyes a dark fire that seemed to have been sleeping for years. He leaned down and kissed me on the lips with reverent slowness, as if sealing a pact neither of us had spoken aloud.

***

That wasn’t an isolated event. It became our new normal.

Diego took me against the kitchen counter while I tried to make coffee. He pushed me against the cold bathroom tiles in the shower. He bent me over the desk when I tried to check my emails. His desire had become insatiable, and mine, against all logic, had too.

The following Friday, while we were finishing dinner, he said in a low voice:

—Put something nice on. We’re going out tonight.

I looked at him, surprised. Diego had never been one for nights out. But there was a determination in his eyes that brooked no questions. I put on a short, tight dress, with red lingerie underneath. When I came downstairs, he looked at me with a slow smile I didn’t know.

He took me to a place in the old part of the city. From the outside it looked like a discreet lounge. Inside, the atmosphere was different: dim lights, sensual music, expensive perfume mixed with something more primitive. A tall woman dressed in black welcomed us and whispered something to Diego. He nodded and turned to me.

—My love… whatever happens, if you want to leave, we’ll leave. I love you more than anything.

That sentence threw me off balance. Only then, scanning the room, did I understand where we were: velvet sofas, couples kissing openly, half-naked silhouettes. It was a swingers’ club.

We sat on a secluded sofa. On the main floor, a couple began an explicit show. The music grew slower. Diego slid the strap of my dress down and left my breasts bare. His fingers moved my thong aside and began fingering me with expert precision. I was soaked.

A blonde girl approached our sofa. Without asking permission, she sat beside me and kissed me on the mouth. Her boyfriend, an athletic dark-haired man, joined in a second later. Four bodies, four mouths. My mind spun but my body burned.

At some point the guy stood up in front of me. Diego looked me in the eyes and said, in a hoarse voice:

—If you want… suck him off.

The kink won. I did it while looking at him. Then I alternated between the two, feeling Diego get turned on with each foreign lick. Someone pulled my thong aside. The dark-haired man settled between my legs with a condom and entered me in one thrust. The blonde sat on Diego and started riding him.

Then I felt something cold against my ass. Lubricant. Fingers. And then a second cock opening me slowly. My first double penetration. And I was having it right in front of my partner.

I came several times in a row, lost in a tide of hands and voices. Diego watched me from the other sofa, sunk into the girl, his eyes shining with a lust that seemed bottomless.

***

We kept going like that for two more weeks. We went back to the club several times. We made love in parking lots, in bathrooms, on dark terraces. The adrenaline had me addicted. At times I almost managed to forget Mateo. Almost.

One afternoon I got home later than usual and found Diego in the living room with two suitcases at his feet. His face, usually serene, had hardened. There was no tenderness in that gaze.

—We need to talk, Camila —he said in a low voice, as if each word cost him blood.

I froze in the doorway.

—For weeks I noticed something was wrong. Your behavior was strange. You went out a lot, barely looked for me. I decided to hire a detective.

I felt the floor tilt beneath me.

—The report reached me the day before Mateo died. The photos. The videos. I was going to confront you that same night. But the next day the news broke, and then I saw you so shattered that my love wouldn’t let me do it. I wanted to comfort you, even though every caress tasted like a lie.

He paused for a long moment.

—I went to prison to talk to Renata. And that’s where I found out everything. How she had been the one to set up the original plan. How you decided to keep going even after. The man from Cartagena, Mateo during all those months. She told me with a coldness that froze my blood.

He swallowed hard.

—Instead of hating you, I was terrified of losing you. I thought that if I gave you what I believed you needed, the club, the risks, the other bodies, I might keep you. So I came up with all this. But seeing how much you truly enjoyed the others, how you moaned for them… in the end I couldn’t take it. The jealousy was eating me alive. I stopped respecting myself.

He looked me straight in the eyes.

—I accepted the transfer to the new office Vega is opening in Miami. I’m leaving tonight.

I rushed toward him, tears spilling uncontrollably.

—Diego, forgive me. Please. I was an idiot. I can’t live without you. Give me another chance.

He stroked my cheek with a broken tenderness.

—Let’s give time to time, Camila. Maybe someday. But right now I can’t stay.

A soft horn sounded outside. His car had arrived. He kissed me on the forehead, a long, final kiss. He took the suitcases and left. Before crossing the door, he turned back one last time.

—Sell the car if you want. After that we’ll sort out the rest as best we can. I never wanted to hurt you.

And he was gone.

***

The following months stretched out like a silent desert. I tried going back to the club, sought out other bodies, tried to recover at least that escape valve. But it no longer worked. Where there had once been fire, there was only ash. Diego’s departure had dried me out from the inside in a way even Mateo’s death had not managed.

I took refuge in work. I sold houses. I closed contracts. I looked after my parents, called my brother more often. I built small anchors, fragile but real. From Diego I heard scattered things: he was promoted to partner, he married a woman named Isabel, they had two children. Sometimes, in the solitude of my apartment, I wondered whether one night, holding his wife, he remembered how he had called me a whore while he emptied himself inside me.

Renata served fifteen years in prison. Andrés kept having children, he was up to four now. I kept waiting, on long nights, to find true love someday. One that wasn’t born from grief or emptiness. One I would know how to care for without breaking it. A serene love, one that didn’t need clubs or double penetration to feel alive.

Sometimes, on Sunday afternoons, I sat on the balcony with a glass of wine and wondered whether that woman I was —the one who let strangers fuck her while her partner watched— was still alive in some corner of me, or whether she was now only cold ash.

I didn’t know. I only knew I was still here, breathing, waiting with an almost religious patience for a second chance. Not for another man to save me, but to finally learn not to destroy what I love.