The Double Life I Don’t Tell My Girlfriend About

I started seeing Lucía a little over two months ago. She’s an incredible woman: intelligent, affectionate, with that way of laughing that makes everything else disappear for a moment. I really love her. I say that plainly and without using it as an excuse for what comes next. I love her and I want this to work between us.

But there’s something she doesn’t know.

I’m not exactly sure how to define what I am. Men don’t attract me in the broad sense — their faces, their bodies, their everyday presence — but there’s something about cocks that’s had me obsessed since I was a teenager. What I enjoy most in sex is the feeling of having one in my mouth. The texture, the weight, the temperature, the way it changes when you work it right. And being fucked. That too. Trans women turn me on in a different, more complete way, because in them I find everything together with no internal contradiction. But with men it’s different: specific, physical, almost mechanical. It’s not love. Not even attraction to them as people. It’s pure desire aimed at something concrete.

I know it sounds strange. I understand that. For years I tried to put a name on it that wouldn’t make me uncomfortable, a category that would explain it without leaving too many questions unanswered. I never found one. In the end I stopped looking.

Before I met Lucía, I’d already been having encounters with men irregularly for two years. It started almost by accident on a dating app I opened without much conviction, more out of curiosity than with any real plan. I discovered that what I wanted was there, available, without emotional complications. Two of those encounters eventually became regular.

The first is Marcos. He’s in his forties, married, has children, and lives a life that from the outside seems completely ordinary. He works for a distribution company, has a family car, and spends the weekends doing family things. No one who knew him would suspect that two or three times a month he meets me in a short-term rental apartment near his office.

We met the first time through the app. He wrote to me very cautiously, weighing every word, as if he were disarming an alarm that had been set for a long time. It took him several days of messages to clearly say what he wanted. By the time he said it, I already knew from the first message. We met on a Tuesday afternoon. There was no small talk beforehand, no coffee, no detours of any kind. We closed the apartment door and he stayed standing in the middle of the living room as if he were waiting for someone to give him instructions.

I unbuckled his belt.

He kept looking at my hands, breathing faster than normal, with that strange tension of someone who has imagined the moment for a long time and still can’t quite believe it’s happening. I slowly pulled down the zipper of his pants, feeling how his cock was beginning to press against the fabric of his briefs. When I took him in my hand, he was hard and hot, heavy in that way that forces you to adjust your grip. Marcos let air out through his nose without saying anything, and his chin dropped toward his chest.

—Like that — he murmured, almost to himself.

I pulled his pants down to his ankles and then his briefs, leaving him in front of me with his embarrassment already broken. He had dark trimmed pubic hair, and his cock stood up against his abdomen, thick, with a wet head. I knelt down with no ceremony whatsoever and took it in my mouth. From the start I liked the lack of theatrics: he wasn’t a man who needed to be praised, just touched well. I covered him with my lips, licked him slowly along the whole length, and then started working the tip, noticing how his belly tightened when my tongue circled the glans.

Marcos braced one hand against the wall. With the other he stroked my head, not pushing, barely guiding me. I sucked his cock patiently, alternating pressure and wetness, taking him as far back as my throat would allow and then pulling the head out again to run my tongue along the frenulum. At times he trembled. At times he let out a broken, brief breath, as if his composure were leaking out through small cracks. When he started getting too tense, I looked up at him from below and he nodded once, eyes shining.

—Keep going — he said.

I led him to the bed. He sat on the edge and I spread his legs, sliding in between them. His cock was still hard, pointing upward, and I sucked it again, more slowly, until I caught the salty taste of the retracted foreskin and the pressure of his thighs against my shoulders. I ran my tongue beneath his balls, heard his breathing break, and then he grabbed the back of my neck more firmly.

—You’re going to make me come really fast — he said, with a mix of relief and anxiety.

—Then come — I answered, without lifting my face.

He came in my mouth with a restrained groan, throwing his head back. I felt him tense all at once, his cock throbbing against my tongue as he spilled hot, thick cum in short bursts. I swallowed it without pulling away, letting him keep pushing until he went slack. When he finished, his forehead was sweaty and his mouth half open, as if he’d crossed a line he’d been skirting for years. I liked that expression more than I should have.

Since then we’ve seen each other regularly. His wife, according to what he’s told me in the few times we’ve spoken about it, doesn’t understand that part of him. Or doesn’t want to understand it. The point is that there are things in his marriage that have no place there, and I’m one of those things. With Marcos we don’t talk much. There’s no need. I know what he likes and he knows what I’m looking for. It’s an honest transaction in that sense — though honest is the last word I should use when there’s so much being hidden elsewhere.

There’s something I struggle to admit about Marcos: I like him. Not as a lover, not in the sense that there’s some special connection. But as a person, in the ten minutes we talk afterward, he seems to me like someone trapped in a complicated situation doing what he can. I’m aware that’s a projection. That I like him because he feels like my mirror.

The second is Diego. Diego is twenty-eight, openly bisexual, and he cares very little about what people think about it. He works as a graphic designer, lives alone in an apartment with too many plants and a collection of books he’ll never finish reading, and has that ease when talking about sex with complete naturalness that I find almost enviable. He doesn’t hide anything. In the morning he can leave a girl’s place and that same afternoon make plans with me. He mentions it without shame or bragging, like someone commenting on anything else he did during the day.

I see Diego once a week, on Wednesdays, almost always after he gets out of the studio. He has an enormous cock. I’m not saying that as praise or rhetorical exaggeration: it’s objectively huge, and the first time I saw it I took a moment to figure out how to handle it. It took a couple of encounters to get used to it. Now I know exactly what I’m doing: how to position my mouth, what pressure to apply, when to stop and when to keep going. And I know what happens afterward, when he gets behind me and grabs my hips with both hands.

What Diego does to my body has no equivalent in any other experience I’ve had. I can come without touching myself. Without any additional stimulation. There’s something about the feeling of having him inside me that activates a part of me that normally works in silence. I don’t know how to describe it precisely and I’ve stopped trying. It isn’t just physical, though it’s mostly physical. It’s as if something that’s normally running at half power suddenly switches all the way on.

There are Wednesdays when I leave his apartment with weak legs and a completely blank head, as if the rest of the world had disappeared for a while. That kind of stillness that comes afterward is what I find hardest to forget.

***

Lucía doesn’t know any of this.

I tell her I’m going out to train on Wednesday afternoons. I tell her Marcos is a coworker I sometimes grab a drink with after a long meeting. They’re small lies, the kind that are easy to build and can hold themselves up for a while. The problem with small lies is that they accumulate and, once accumulated, they develop a weight of their own that starts to show.

The sex with Lucía is good. I want to make that clear because it would be dishonest — even more dishonest — to say otherwise. She’s very giving, very present when we’re together. She likes sex and enjoys it without pretending. She wants me and there are nights when I’m surprised by how intense what’s between us is. We fuck often and there are moments when I forget everything else. But there’s a difference I can’t ignore no matter how much I want to.

With Lucía I’m always active. With her I’m the one who leads, who takes the initiative, who’s on top. And I like that, it satisfies me on a certain level, and I’m not lying when I say it. But it’s not the same as being on my knees in front of Diego with my hands behind my neck while he decides the pace. It’s not the same kind of pleasure. They’re two experiences so different that I almost don’t feel like they’re connected at all, as if they’re happening to different versions of me.

Lucía wants a conventional relationship. She told me that from the beginning, with the same clarity she has about some things: no third parties, no practices that go beyond what she considers normal. It’s not a moralistic stance, it’s simply what she needs to be okay. And I respect that. I respect it so much that I haven’t even brought up the conversation.

What would I tell her? That I like getting fucked? That two or three times a month I see a man with a family who doesn’t care about me beyond what I do with my mouth? That on Wednesdays I meet up with a young guy who fucks me with a force that leaves me with no energy to think about anything else for the rest of the day?

I can’t have that conversation. I don’t know if it’s cowardice or consideration. It’s probably both mixed together in a way that doesn’t do me any favors if I think about it too much.

***

There are nights when I lie staring at the ceiling after Lucía falls asleep and wonder how long I can keep this up before something breaks. Not just because I’m afraid she’ll find out — though that fear exists too, and it isn’t small — but because I know what I’m doing is wrong. Not in some abstract moral sense: it’s wrong because I’m deceiving someone who trusts me completely. And that trust has real weight. I feel it every time she looks at me without suspecting a thing and I think about where I was forty-eight hours earlier.

And yet, when Wednesday comes and Diego opens the door and steps back to let me in, all that guilt stays somewhere outside the apartment.

With Marcos there’s a kind of silent complicity between people who live lives that are not entirely their own. We don’t talk about our partners, but their presence is there in the background. We both know that when we walk out that door we go back to something else, to another version of ourselves that no one else sees. That creates an emotional distance that, paradoxically, makes everything more manageable. It doesn’t give me pleasure to think that he lies at home too. But it doesn’t generate the anguish that mine sometimes does.

With Diego there isn’t that melancholic complicity. With Diego everything is direct, without layers, without any nostalgia in the background. He does what he wants, I do what I want, and we both walk away satisfied. There’s something liberating in that which at the same time makes me a little uncomfortable, because it reminds me how much effort it costs me to be that honest with the people who truly matter to me.

***

Sometimes I wonder whether what I feel for Lucía would survive her knowing the whole truth. If I told her everything — not the softened version, but the details, the Wednesdays, the hours in the apartment with Marcos — would she still love me? Probably not. And if she did, it still wouldn’t be for the right reasons.

What I am doesn’t fit neatly into any category I know. I’m not gay: women attract me, Lucía attracts me, and the idea of not having her near makes me genuinely sad. I’m not bisexual in the way Diego is, either, because men don’t attract me as people but for something specific and physical that has more to do with desire than attraction. It’s a subtle distinction that probably only makes sense to me.

I don’t know what that’s called. For a long time I thought that giving it a name would make it easier to handle. Now I no longer believe that. The name changes nothing about what happens on Wednesdays in Diego’s apartment, or what happens when Marcos texts me at midday saying he has a few hours free and asking if I can make it.

I always can.

***

The last time I was with Diego was four days ago. Afterward, while we were catching our breath lying on the bed, he told me he liked the way I looked at him when he was fucking me. He said it calmly, like an observation with no special weight. There’s something about that kind of post-sex conversation — direct, without forced affection, without sentimentality of any kind — that feels more honest to me than a lot of other things I do in my life.

I went home. Lucía had made dinner. She asked me how training went. I said it went well, that I was tired.

We ate together, talked about unimportant things, and then sat on the sofa with a series neither of us really followed. At some point she put her head on my shoulder. I put my arm around her without thinking. She settled in and sighed in that way she has when she’s happy.

And I stayed there, completely still, not knowing what to do with all of it.

I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up. Not because the desire is going to disappear — I know it doesn’t disappear like that — but because every time I’m with Lucía after being with either of them, the weight of what I don’t tell her grows a little more. It accumulates silently, the way all the things we choose not to say accumulate.

And I don’t know what to do with that weight. Not yet.