I Became Another Woman Every Time He Came Back

I never thought I’d write something like this, not even anonymously, but there are things a woman needs to get out of her system or they end up rotting her from the inside. Ever since I separated, my life had become a routine of schedules, cartoons, and nights when I fell asleep before ten with the TV on. Until Bruno started coming to the building.

He was in charge of pool maintenance and trimming the garden in the complex. He was tall, broad-shouldered, with the kind of body that isn’t built in a gym but from carrying real weight. The first time I saw him I thought he was handsome, nothing more. The second time I caught myself staring at him from the balcony longer than necessary, with cold mate in my hand and a thought flashing through my head that made me blush.

What happened after that was inevitable. One night, when my youngest son fell asleep early, Bruno came upstairs “to check a leak” and stayed until dawn. I don’t need to tell that first time. What really marked me came later, in the days when I learned how to live a double life inside my own house.

***

That first morning I woke up with him beside me, completely asleep, the sheet tangled around his legs. I watched him for a long while before getting up. At what point did I become this?, I thought, and the question didn’t make me feel guilty but rather gave me a kind of flutter in my stomach.

My son, as every morning, had gotten up on his own to watch his shows in the living room. I put on my robe, with nothing underneath, and went out to make him breakfast. I sat him in front of his bowl, fixed his hair, and stayed with him until he finished. Then I took him back to the couch and changed the cartoon. Everything normal. Everything motherly. And three meters away, behind a door, there was a naked man in my bed.

I heard my bedroom door open. Bruno came out like a thief, making a shushing gesture with a finger over his lips, and crossed the hallway toward the bathroom with nothing on, with no trace of shame, smiling at me like a boy who knows he’s doing something forbidden. I waited for him to finish. When he opened the bathroom door, I grabbed his hand and pulled him back into my room.

The stretch was short, but passing behind my son with Bruno pressed against my back, holding my breath, was the most exciting thing I had felt in years. I knew it was wrong. And precisely because of that I couldn’t stop.

Once the door was closed, we lay down on the bed and started kissing slowly, quietly. His hands roamed all over me over and under the robe; mine moved up and down his back. He yanked the fabric up and, in one motion, he was inside me.

“Do you like your breakfast?” he whispered in my ear, laughing.

“Shut up,” I told him, biting my lip so I wouldn’t scream.

He fucked me with steady strength, unhurried, as if we had the whole morning. I clamped my legs around the sides of his body and dug my nails into him to keep my voice down. Each thrust tore a moan from me that I buried against his shoulder, against the pillow, against my own hand. We stayed like that for a long while, until I felt him tense, pull out sharply, and finish over my stomach with a long exhale.

We lay still for a few seconds, breathless, listening in the background to the cartoon theme song. Then came the hard part: getting him out of there without my son seeing him. While Bruno got dressed, I went out to the living room like I was just passing through. The kid had fallen asleep on the couch. I gave Bruno a sign, he crossed quickly to the door, I gave him a short kiss, and he left.

“That was the best night of my life,” he told me in the doorway.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” I replied, even though for me it had been too.

***

I closed the door and leaned against it with my heart still pounding. I cleaned the kitchen, washed the dishes, and got into the shower. I stayed almost an hour under the water, soaping myself until I erased any trace of him, any smell. When I got out, I looked at myself in the mirror, hair a mess, red marks on my neck, and laughed by myself. I had put the responsible woman away in a drawer to become, for one night, someone I didn’t even know. And the worst part was that I liked that other woman more.

That day I didn’t leave the apartment at all. I spent the whole afternoon in my robe, putting lotion on my body, massaging my shoulders, trying to hide the hickeys he had left me, the ones peeking out everywhere.

***

The next two weeks were a delicious torture. Bruno couldn’t come upstairs: my oldest son had come to stay for a few days while his father was traveling, and with two kids in the house there was no way. We had agreed that our meetings would be only on the nights when his friend, the building’s doorman, was on duty, or on the days when he came to maintain the pool.

So all we had was the phone. We started with normal conversations: how my day had been, what he had trimmed, any old nonsense. And suddenly his voice would change, get deeper, and I knew exactly where this was going. He would tell me in my ear what he would do to me next time, in what detail, in what position, and I would shut myself in my room under the pretense of resting, slip my hand under my clothes, and touch myself while I listened to him breathing hard on the other end.

The call would end and I’d be left wet, burning, staring at the ceiling. I’m going crazy, I thought. I didn’t recognize this woman who was masturbating in the middle of the afternoon, listening to the voice of a man she barely knew. But there she was, counting the hours until I could see him again.

***

Saturday was pool cleaning and tree trimming. Since the night before we had worked out the plan over the phone, like two teenagers. Early in the morning I took my kids down to the water. I put on short shorts and a light white cover-up, and waited for the moment.

When the two of them were busy splashing around in the shallow end, I asked the neighbor across the hall to keep an eye on them for a minute and slipped away toward the pump room, that damp, dark little room at the back of the garden where Bruno kept his tools. I walked in with my heart pounding. He was already there, waiting for me.

We barely spoke. He threw himself at me and we started kissing against the wall, with an urgency that had nothing elegant about it.

“I missed you,” he told me between kisses, trailing down my neck.

“Me too. We don’t have much time,” I replied, already unbuttoning his pants.

I slipped my hand in and found him rock hard. Instinctively I wanted to crouch down and take him in my mouth, but he stopped me gently.

“There’s no time for that,” he gasped. “Turn around.”

He turned me toward the wall, yanked my shorts down, and bent me slightly forward. I felt his firm hand on my hip and, a second later, I felt him enter all at once. A moan slipped out of me that I had to swallow whole. Anyone could walk by outside. My children were thirty meters away. And that idea, instead of stopping me, made me hotter.

He fucked me fast, without ceremony, both of us breathing hard in that little room that smelled of chlorine and wet earth. I pressed my palms against the cold wall and pushed back, looking for him.

“Harder,” I whispered. “Don’t stop.”

But time was working against us. Just when I was starting to lose myself completely, Bruno tensed, pulled out sharply, and finished against the cement floor with a muffled growl.

I jerked my shorts back up, frustrated. I’d waited two weeks for this, and “this” had lasted just a few minutes. I felt half-finished in everything, hotter than before I went in.

“Don’t get mad, baby,” he said, taking my hand. “We didn’t have time. It was a quickie. I’ll make it up to you, I swear.”

I didn’t answer him. I turned my back and left the room, fixing my hair, my legs still trembling.

***

I went back to the pool as if nothing had happened. My kids hadn’t even noticed I was gone; the older one asked me where I’d been and I told him I’d gone to the bathroom. I sat on the edge with my feet in the water, watching them play, smiling at them, being the same mother as always again. On the outside everything was calm. On the inside, I was on fire.

That night, when both of them fell asleep, I got into the shower and finished by myself what he had left half-done, remembering the whole night we’d had and the few stolen minutes that afternoon. I leaned against the tiles with the water running over me and let my imagination do the rest.

I don’t know how long this will last. I don’t know whether it’s right or wrong; I don’t even ask myself anymore. I only know that every time I hear the mower start up in the garden below, my pulse races and I lean out onto the balcony to look for him. And that, no matter how responsible I am the rest of the day, there’s a part of me that lives waiting for the next time he comes back.