The Letter in Which I Confessed Everything to My Husband

Dear Andrés, as you can see, I’ve packed up all my things and left the house. I left my keys in the mailbox, underneath the pile of junk mail we never throw away. I know you’re going to be shocked, and that this is the last thing you expected from me—from the quiet woman you’d been married to for nine years.

I’m afraid to write this. I was even more afraid to tell you to your face. I didn’t want to crumble when I saw you cry; I didn’t want to hold your gaze while you asked me for an explanation I don’t know how to put prettily into words. That’s why I chose paper. It’s cowardly, I know, but it’s the only thing I can do without falling apart.

This goes back a long way, much further back than you imagine. You knew, even though you insisted on looking the other way. I stopped enjoying sex with you years ago, and I’m sure you noticed. You noticed in the way I lay still when you slipped your hand beneath my nightgown, in the way I closed my legs when you searched for my pussy with those fingers of yours that never knew how to find anything, in the excuses about being tired that I repeated until they became true. Every time I tried to talk about it, you changed the subject, turned up the television, or rolled over in bed. You never wanted to touch that subject. And now everything blows up all at once, with no safety net.

I wish you had asked me just once what was wrong.

I know you thought it was strange that I went up to the rooftop so many afternoons. You joked that the laundry had never been so clean. And at first it was true: I went up to hang clothes, nothing more. Until it stopped being true. One day, while I was hanging the sheets with the clothespins in my mouth, someone put a hand on my waist from behind. I wasn’t frightened, and that was the first thing about myself that frightened me. I felt the hard bulge of his cock pressing against the cleft of my ass over my skirt, and instead of pulling away I stayed still, with the clothespins still between my teeth, letting him leave his mark back there.

It was him. I’m talking about the man I’m in love with, the man I’m leaving you for today, although the truth is that I had given myself to him long before. He’s our neighbor, Babacar, the Senegalese man from the fourth floor. Please don’t even think of going after him. We’ve moved in together; we’ve been sharing a place since this very morning. It took us months to save the money, counting every bill, and I’m not going to let you ruin it.

I didn’t want to humiliate you by staying in the same building, running into you in the entrance hall with him holding my hand. That’s why I’m moving far away. You deserve not to have to see him.

***

I remember perfectly the day they arrived. Babacar and his two brothers, with enormous suitcases and boxes tied up with rope. It bothered you that they were moving into the building; you said so that night at dinner, in that uncomfortable-man voice of yours. I kept quiet. I kept quiet because I had long since accepted something about myself that you never wanted to know: I liked those men. I liked them in a way I had never felt with you, a way that warmed the back of my neck just thinking about it, that dampened my panties whenever I passed them on the stairs and caught the scent of their cologne.

I tried it, Andrés. I tried that impressive man and fell madly in love, like a fifteen-year-old girl, with my stomach churning and my hands trembling. The first time was at his place, one July afternoon when you had gone to a soccer match with your friends. I went upstairs on the pretext of returning a tray. I took three hours to come back down.

I’m not going to spare you the details because I think you’re owed them, even if they hurt. Babacar undressed me slowly right there in the hallway of his apartment, looking me in the eyes, saying things in his language that I didn’t understand but that still raised gooseflesh on my skin. He pulled down the zipper of my dress with one hand and let it fall at my feet. I wasn’t wearing a bra. He stared at my tits for a long while without touching them, and that alone made my nipples stiff as stones. Then he crouched down and tore off my panties with his teeth, pulling at the elastic with his mouth until they split. I was trembling all over when he took me to the mattress.

He spread my legs and got between my thighs with his head. With you, oral sex was a quick thing, a two-minute chore before I climbed on top of you. He spent nearly half an hour eating my pussy, Andrés. Half an hour with his tongue going in and out, sucking my clit until I howled into the pillow so the neighbors wouldn’t hear us. He made me come three times with his mouth before pulling out his cock. And when he finally took it out of his trousers, I understood why his brothers’ women screamed at night: it was huge, dark, thick, with prominent veins, very different from yours. He held it in front of my face and I opened my mouth without him asking.

I sucked him off the way I never sucked you off in nine years. I licked it from the balls to the tip, took it down my throat until I gagged, and let him hold my head and fuck my mouth at his own pace. My nose ran and drool spilled down my chin, and he loved it; he told me so in his language and in mine: “That’s it, that’s it, suck it all.” Then he laid me on my back, spread my legs wide, and thrust inside me in a single stroke. I screamed. I screamed so loudly that he had to cover my mouth with his hand. He drove it all the way in, to the hilt, and stayed there motionless for a few seconds, looking into my eyes while I struggled to breathe.

And then he started fucking me. Really fucking me. His big hands gripped my hips and slammed me against the bed with every thrust. He turned me over and put me on all fours, grabbed me by the hair, and pushed it in from behind while calling me his slut in two languages. He put me on my back at the edge of the mattress, with my legs over his shoulders, and drove it so deep that I felt the tip striking somewhere inside me you had never touched. He made me come twice more with his cock inside me, something that had never happened with you in my entire life, and when he finally came, he did it inside me without pulling out, filling my pussy with hot semen while he bit my neck. He knew and I knew that he hadn’t even asked whether I was taking anything. He didn’t care, and neither did I.

So this was it. This was what I had been missing.

The strangest thing was how little guilty I felt going down the stairs that afternoon, with his semen still running down my thigh inside the panties he had torn and that I’d had to stuff into my purse. I expected remorse, a knot in my throat, the urge to confess. None of it came. I got home, found you asleep on the sofa with the game still playing, and caught myself thinking that I’d spent years sleeping beside a good man I didn’t desire. I made myself a coffee and drank it in the dark kitchen, feeling more awake than I had in a long time. Still with his cum drying between my legs.

From then on, every encounter was different from the last. There were days when we barely spoke; we simply sought each other out with an urgency that left marks on me. He fucked me in the elevator during a two-floor ride; I barely had time to pull down my panties, and I got off on the first floor with my legs trembling while he went back up to the fourth as if nothing had happened. He fucked me in the landing against the wall, covering my mouth with one hand and holding one of my thighs up with the other, terrified that a door might open at any moment. Other times we stayed wrapped in each other’s arms listening to the noises of the building, and he told me about his village, the sea he had left behind, the mother he sent money to every month, his cock still soft and sticky against my thigh. I fell in love with both things at once: the body that made me lose my mind and the man who cried when he talked about home. With you, I never had either.

After that afternoon there was no turning back. The rooftops, the invented errands, the naps I actually spent in his bed with my knees drawn against my chest while he thrust into me from behind. I learned to lie to you with an ease that shames me. I’d tell you I was going to the supermarket and come back smelling of his cologne, my pussy freshly fucked and his fresh semen inside me, and you wouldn’t even notice. Some nights you asked me for sex and I had to go into the bathroom first to wash myself out with the bidet, because he had come inside me two hours earlier and I couldn’t stand the thought of anything of yours mixing with his. Sometimes I think part of you preferred not to notice.

***

There’s something I need you to know, for your peace of mind and for my conscience. You don’t need to worry about your health. With Babacar I do it bareback, always, because it drives me crazy to feel him come inside me and because we’re a real couple now, but with you I always used a condom during the few—very, very few—times we were together these past months. I did it for him, not for you, and I understand that makes it hurt even more. I’d rather tell you than have you find out from a doctor.

Do you remember the scare a month ago, when my period was late and I saw you turn white as a sheet? You thought it was ours. It wasn’t, and it couldn’t have been. By then I had already been with him almost every day, letting him come inside me two or three times an afternoon, and the possibility of pregnancy was real. That night you talked about names, about painting the little room, and I smiled while something inside me broke. That was the night I decided I had to leave before I did something unforgivable to you.

Because yes, Andrés, I’m going to be honest to the end. I stopped taking the pills. I want to get pregnant by Babacar. I want the next time he puts it inside me and comes inside me to leave me truly knocked up. I want to start a family with him, a project for the two of us, a life that makes sense instead of this routine of silent Sundays. I know that means breaking the vow I made to you in white in front of everyone, and I don’t expect you to understand. But when it comes to matters of the heart and the bed, no one is in control, and mine stopped obeying me a long time ago.

***

I want you to understand one thing, even if it’s the only thing you understand: I’m not leaving because you’re a bad man. You’re a good person, hardworking, tidy, the kind of man who pays the bills on the first and never raises his voice. The problem is that you went out with me. You stopped looking at me the way you look at a woman and started looking at me the way you look at a piece of furniture that has always been there. In bed, you’d lie on top of me, put it in, thrust four times, and come, and you didn’t even realize I was still dry. You neglected me, and a man like Babacar knew how to see the opportunity and slipped into every cell of my body without asking permission, with that cock of his that opened me up inside and taught me what it meant to come until I saw stars.

I’m angry that it had to be a stranger who reminded me I was alive. That it took someone else’s hand on my waist, one ordinary afternoon among the sheets hanging out to dry, for me to want something again. That anger is directed at me too; don’t think it’s only directed at you.

I want to get him out of the traffic light where he earns a living selling tissues and lighters under the sun. I want to marry him so he can have his papers, so he can walk down the street without glancing nervously at every police car. I want to give him children someday. It sounds crazy written down like this, I know, but it’s the only thing I’m sure of in this entire storm.

***

I’ve deleted our photos from social media. All of them. The ones from our trip to the coast, the ones from my cousin’s wedding, the one from the first apartment we bought together with those foolish smiles. I’ve blocked you everywhere, not out of spite, but because I owe respect to the man with whom I’m going to start over. It wouldn’t be fair to stay connected to my past while asking him to trust my future.

I’m moving to the outskirts, to a neighborhood where nobody knows us. I’m doing it deliberately. I’d rather neither our friends nor my family run into me in the street pushing a stroller with a baby of another color and stand there staring open-mouthed. I wanted to tell you myself, in my own handwriting, before gossip reached you distorted and cruel. You deserve to hear the truth from the only person who can give it to you whole.

I know that for weeks you’re going to turn over every detail in your mind. You’ll remember my afternoons on the rooftop, my two-hour showers to wash the smell of semen off me, the times I got home late, breathing hard, my panties soaked, and told you I’d run up the stairs. You’ll put the pieces together and hate me, and you’ll be right to. I only ask that your hatred not turn into something that makes you go to his door. Babacar didn’t take anything from you that you hadn’t already let go of.

I wish we had talked in time. I wish I had been braver and you less comfortable.

I don’t know how to end a letter like this. There’s no formula for saying goodbye to nine years on a sheet of paper. I can only tell you that, from the bottom of my heart, I hope that someday you find someone who looks at you the way I stopped looking at you. Someone who makes you feel what Babacar made me feel that July afternoon, with his hands on my waist, his hard cock against my ass, and half the city’s laundry drying in the sun.

Take care, Andrés. Lock the door properly when you leave; the latch has been broken since March and they never fixed it. Water the pothos in the living room; it was the only thing in that house I cared for lovingly. And forgive me, if you can, although I completely understand if you can’t.

Goodbye.