The Man I Took In Took Me Out of Doubt

It was close to one in the morning on a freezing Saturday in January when we pulled the car into the building’s garage. That was a little over a year ago now. Between two parking spaces, huddled against the wall, there was a lump covered by a gray blanket blackened with grime. I can’t quite explain why I went over there. I suppose it was the values I was raised with, a mixture of faith and guilt that has never let me walk past someone in need.

My wife, Raquel, stayed several meters away and motioned for me to leave it alone.

“Leave him. He’ll go away on his own. Or call the police,” she said in a low voice.

I didn’t listen. I put my hand on the lump and from beneath the blanket a man emerged, African, about thirty, with curly, tousled hair and a face twisted by fright. He spoke impeccable Spanish. He said his name was Tomás, though that wasn’t his given name; it was the one he used here.

I asked him a couple of things, among them whether he had eaten anything that day. He told me very little. The look of disbelief on Raquel’s face was a poem when I helped him to his feet and offered to bring him upstairs for a hot meal.

We live in a central neighborhood of Valencia, a city that receives people from everywhere. Since our daughter left for Germany to do her internship, we had an empty room, and I didn’t hesitate to offer it to him that night. His tired eyes looked at me as if he had seen an angel.

As we went upstairs, Tomás told me his story. He had been working in Spain for seven years, in warehouses and on construction sites, without proper papers. He had even managed to rent a flat on the outskirts, but lost it when he lost his job, and now he was under a deportation order and sleeping wherever he could, waiting for work or for them to send him back.

Raquel shut herself in the bedroom and locked the door, and went to bed without dinner. I made the boy something to eat, set up the bed in the guest room, and stayed in the living room for a while, half awake, keeping watch. I found it hard to trust him completely, but something about him told me there was no danger.

***

The next morning, when Raquel got up, we argued at length in the kitchen. Tomás appeared after eleven, refreshed, and an awkward silence fell.

“I’m leaving,” he said. “Thank you very much for everything.”

I had already pulled a few strings. I knew a contractor in the area who was looking for people, and I also spoke to an acquaintance in the neighborhood to speed up his papers. I only asked him to hold on one more day, until Monday. Raquel, very upset, went to spend Sunday at her mother’s house. When she came back, Tomás was gone already: I had put him up in a boarding house at my expense, and a few days later I got him a cheap rental, the empty apartment belonging to a friend’s son.

My wife didn’t speak to me for almost a week. But little by little she came to value the gesture. From that tall man, nearly six foot three, I only received good reports. He worked seriously, paid what he owed on time, and called me from time to time to say he’d be at my disposal for whatever I needed. I didn’t yet know how much I would take him up on that.

***

April arrived. One night, after Raquel had turned me down in bed for the umpteenth time, I lay staring at the ceiling in the dark and started turning over an idea that frightened me even as it turned me on. I can’t fool anyone: the night Tomás showered at my house, I saw him come out of the bathroom and couldn’t help noticing him. There isn’t much more to say.

Raquel, like me, was nearing fifty. After almost twenty-five years of marriage, passion had gone out between us like a candle burning down to the wick. She is, by nature, reluctant about sex; it takes her a while to get going, but once she’s in it, she enjoys it as much as anyone. Dyed blonde, five foot three or so, with generous curves she fights to keep through exercise. Her lack of interest always irritated me, especially now that we lived alone and still had plenty of energy. I came to the conclusion that the problem was monotony. And perhaps that I was no longer enough to pull her out of it.

The more I imagined putting another man in our bed, the more aroused I became. I started spending hours reading about couples who opened their relationship, about husbands who watched, about fantasies I had never even come close to before. And, without meaning to, the face I gave to all those imagined scenes was Tomás’s. It had been three months since I’d last seen him, and he owed me a huge favor.

Bringing a stranger into the house was a risk. That he might later talk, give compromising details, show up where he shouldn’t. With Tomás, though, there was trust. So one day I called him.

We met at the bar beneath my building. We started with coffee and ended with several drinks, almost four hours of conversation. He paid. When I finally laid out the plan, he smiled slowly and told me he accepted, that the situation turned him on in a way he hadn’t expected to feel at his age. I only asked one thing in exchange for the favor I had done him: absolute discretion.

“That stays between us,” he said, holding out his hand. “You have my word.”

***

Two Saturdays later was Raquel’s birthday. She was turning fifty, just like me. She had lunch with her friends and, in the afternoon, I gave her a massage and dinner at one of the best restaurants in the city. After that we went out for a drink downtown. We don’t usually drink, and I know my wife loosens up with a good meal, a good wine, and a bit of sparkling wine on top. I had told Tomás where we’d be.

When we got to the place, he was already there. He welcomed us warmly, stuck close to us for the two hours we spent over drinks, and even danced with Raquel, who was surprisingly receptive. When we left, as we said goodbye, I suggested having a final drink at home, since I still had some cava in the fridge. My wife accepted delightedly. I could tell she was loose, happy, comfortable in the company. On the way to the car, Tomás hugged her to thank her for everything, wrapped her in that huge body, and she laughed, happy. That was when I understood the game had begun.

It was warm in the house. Tomás took off his shirt and stayed in a sleeveless T-shirt, showing worked arms, the torso of a man who takes care of what he has. Raquel went to the kitchen for the glasses and I followed her. I kissed her for a good while against the counter, something we hadn’t done in years, and I felt my pulse racing, more for what was about to happen than for the kisses. She was wearing a long blue party dress with a deep neckline.

As she was going out toward the living room with the glasses in one hand and the bottle in the other, I hiked her dress up to her hips and yanked her underwear down in one pull. She froze in the middle of the hallway and looked at me, frightened. I ran my hand through her crotch: she was soaking wet. She said nothing. I turned her around, looked her in the eyes, and whispered in her ear:

“Happy birthday, my love.”

She looked terrified, but deep in her eyes there was desire. I know it. I had seen it very few times in twenty-five years, and never so clearly.

***

We got to the living room and poured the drinks. The three of us toasted: Tomás to the family that had saved his life, Raquel to a husband with a good heart, and me to a very special night. The big sofa took all three of us in, with her in the middle. She tried to move away, but that night that was her place.

I kissed her again and, this time, she didn’t close her eyes as she usually does. She was as turned on as she was terrified. Seated between her husband and another man, with nothing under her dress, one drink too many and the music low, there was little to guess. Without her noticing, Tomás knelt in front of her legs and buried his head under the blue skirt. I stopped kissing her when she started moaning. I lifted her dress to her navel and witnessed how he held her by the hips while she writhed like a twenty-year-old, gripping the back of his neck to pull him against her.

I moved a few meters away and, almost without thinking, pulled out my phone and started recording. My wife was panting, lost, completely surrendered.

Before she came, Tomás made her stand up. I unbuttoned the dress myself, and it fell to her ankles. She kissed his chest as far as she could reach, because he towered over her by more than a head. By then she was already caressing the bulge in his trousers without trying to hide it, and sighing as she did. I poured myself another drink and kept recording, feeling both aroused and diminished. I had never seen her so hot.

Then came the moment I had imagined most over the past months. Raquel had always refused to use her mouth on me; she said she didn’t like it. But that night she knelt in front of Tomás without anyone asking her to and tried it with an appetite I had never seen in her. I leaned toward her ear, irritated and turned on in equal measure.

“You’re a liar,” I whispered. “You do like it. Just not with me.”

She didn’t stop. She glanced sideways at me, never letting go of him, and for the first time all night she smiled for real.

“You’re right,” she said. “I think tonight I’m going to scream.”

***

What happened after that lasted almost the whole night. Tomás laid her out on the sofa and took her slowly at first, then hard, until Raquel came screaming in a way I had never heard from her. I, seated opposite, watched a scene I had longed for and that, once real, hurt me as much as it excited me. Every moan from her was a mix of pleasure and silent reproach for all the years she had denied me the same.

At one point she made room for me. I knelt beside her and asked her in her ear if she wanted to stop. She could barely speak.

“No,” she murmured. “Keep going. Please, don’t let it end.”

I turned her so she could rest her head on my shoulder while he held her by the hips. She squeezed my hands with hers and, between gasps, described to me everything she was feeling. She thanked me and insulted me in the same sentence, as if the air wasn’t quite reaching her brain. Sometimes she laughed, sometimes she cried from pure pleasure, and I held her, witness to something that had been my idea and that I no longer controlled at all.

They finished together, both on the edge, and Raquel collapsed on the sofa, unable to move, with a stupid smile on her face. Tomás poured himself one last drink, picked up his shirt, and dressed without hurrying.

Before leaving, he looked at me from the doorway.

“This stays here, Esteban,” he said. “I’ve left her well taken care of. And, you know, we’re all the same. Even the ones who look like ice.”

He closed the door. Raquel was asleep. I remained standing in the middle of the living room, with the phone still hot in my pocket, wondering what the hell had been awakened that night in my house. And, above all, whether we would be able to fall asleep again without it.