The Masquerade Night at the Cartagena Mansion

My name is Camila, I’m thirty-five years old, and I’ve spent years carrying a curiosity I never dared tell anyone about until tonight. What I’m going to write here happened two summers ago, in Cartagena, in a restored colonial mansion whose owner I can barely even remember now—if it was a friend of a friend or someone even more distant. What I do remember, in a detail that’s almost frightening, is every sensation.

The invitation arrived in a brief message. A couple with whom I had shared dinners and rum on another trip was organizing a private dance at a house on the outskirts of the city. One rule only: masks required, identity forbidden. No one could recognize anyone, and no one could say who they were. I read it twice before answering yes.

I spent weeks thinking about what I was going to wear. In the end, I bought a black Venetian mask that covered me from my forehead to the middle of my nose, leaving my lips and eyes free. I found a long red velvet cape in a costume shop downtown. And underneath, I decided to wear nothing. No underwear, no dress, no stockings. Just skin, exposed beneath the fabric, already sensitive to the slightest brush, as if the night had begun touching me before it even started.

The night of the party, while I looked at myself in the taxi mirror, I thought I still had time to ask the driver to take me back. I didn’t.

“Is this it, ma’am?” he asked when he stopped in front of a gate lit by torches.

“Yes,” I said, and paid him without looking him in the eye.

I crossed the inner courtyard with my cape fastened up to my neck. The Caribbean air was heavy and smelled of jasmine, aged rum, and something I took a while to recognize and later understood was the sweat of bodies that had been there for hours. The music was a slow, almost lazy salsa, and every note seemed to push my hips in a different direction.

A woman wearing a golden feather mask welcomed me at the entrance to the main hall. We didn’t speak. She pointed me toward a side corridor, some kind of antechamber with an iron coat rack, and I understood what she wanted without needing words. I let the cape fall. The velvet slid over my shoulders and down my back, and for a second I stood still, listening to my own breathing above the music, feeling the damp air brush my bare breasts, my stomach, my completely exposed pubis. Entering like that, with nothing beneath the cloth, left my skin prickling with an almost offensive excitement.

When I entered the hall, I felt the gazes before anything else.

There were men and women dancing, half naked, others completely naked, others in only the barest of garments. The lights were dim, everything in red and gold. Some couples were already kissing in the corners, others were caressing each other without any hurry, as if they had the whole night ahead of them. In the back, several bodies formed a tangled group on a large rug. I didn’t stop to look at them. I moved to the center and began to sway alone, letting the open cape slap against my thighs, letting everyone see what was underneath whenever I turned.

I hadn’t been dancing long when a tall man came up behind me. He wore a black leather mask and tight pants, no shirt. He had a broad torso and dark skin shining with heat. He didn’t say his name. I wouldn’t have wanted to know it.

“May I?” he asked, nothing more, in a low voice with a coastal accent.

I answered by pushing my back against his chest.

His hands held my hips and he let me feel what was already hard against me. We danced like that, aware that the rest of the room was watching us too. One hand rose to one of my breasts, squeezed it without any gentleness, and the thumb brushed the nipple until it stood hard in an instant. The other slid down my stomach, slowly, as if asking permission step by step. When it reached between my legs and checked how wet I was, it stayed outside no longer: it parted my lips with two fingers, felt my dampness, and sank in a little farther until it found me slick and throbbing. He let out a low sound near my ear that wasn’t a word.

“You’ve been like this all night,” he said after that. It wasn’t a question.

“I’ve been like this for weeks,” I answered.

His fingers were not shy. They came back to me between my legs, now without hesitation, pressing at my entrance with the tips of two fingers while his thumb rubbed my clit in a slow back-and-forth that made me arch my back against him. I kept moving against his body, never stopping the dance, feeling the rough brush of his pants against my ass and of his fingers against the exact place I needed them. When he pulled back just enough to look at my face, his hand was shining with me.

I wasn’t the only one who noticed what was happening. The woman with the golden feathers came up in front of me. She was wearing a transparent top and a thong that barely existed. She kissed me on the mouth without warning, tongue and all, and I knew in that very instant that the night was going to go much further than I had imagined. Her mouth tasted of rum and mint, and her fingers slid between my thigh and hip with the same natural ease one would use to greet an old friend.

“Come on,” she murmured, pulling away a little. “We’re in the way here.”

She led us to a side room where there were low sofas, thick rugs, and cushions on the floor. There were other couples, other threesomes, already lost in what they were doing. No one looked at us when we came in. No one was looking at anyone in particular and, at the same time, everyone was looking at everyone.

They laid me back on one of the sofas. The woman knelt between my legs and opened my thighs with both hands, unhurried but without asking for any more permission because she had already had all of it in my body from the moment she kissed me. The man sat behind my head and offered me his mouth before anything else. He kissed me upside down, his chin against my forehead, while she parted my lips with her fingers and began to work on me with a calm I hadn’t expected at a party like this. First I felt the damp air, then the heat of her tongue, and then the exact pressure of its tip against my clit.

Her tongue was patient. It moved up the inner face of my thighs without touching me yet, then circled without entering, then stopped exactly where I needed it to stay. When she finally focused, she did it slowly, licking me with firm pressure, flattening her tongue against me and drawing circles that tore a rough moan from my throat. The man, meanwhile, had gone down to one of my breasts and started sucking it with the same calm. He took my nipple between his lips, tugged it just slightly with his teeth, then suckled it until it ached beautifully, while his free hand held the back of my neck so I wouldn’t move too much.

“Slowly,” I told him, not because it was too much, but because I wanted to feel everything.

She obeyed. She leaned in closer, slid two fingers into my cunt while keeping her tongue working above, opening me from the inside with a slow motion, searching for that wet, deep spot that made me moan without shame. Her fingers went in and out with obscene precision, and every time they returned they brushed the edge of my entrance, my whole body pulsing tight around them. The man kept sucking my breast, and I had the sense of being eaten from both sides, open, taken, used with brutal tenderness. Then, without warning, she pushed two more fingers into me while still using her tongue above, and I came for the first time with the man’s chin against my temple and her fingers still inside, trembling around her hand as if something in me had broken open to make room for something else.

“That was only the first one,” he laughed against my ear.

***

What happened after that is harder to sort out.

I remember the man stripped completely, and the woman helping me turn over. I remember the hardness of his cock brushing me before he entered, the heat of his tip pressing at my entrance, and how he took a moment to push just a little, just enough to make me feel the full length of him. He entered me slowly the first time and quickly the second, first filling me with a deep thrust, then pulling almost all the way out before sinking back in harder, ripping a gasp from me that left me breathless. The woman positioned herself in front of me, sitting against the cushions, legs open, offering herself for me to do what she had done to me. And that I did. I leaned between her thighs and tasted her whole, licking her from the slit of her cunt up to her clit, sliding my tongue between her wet lips while my own breathing was cut off by the thrusts he was giving me from behind. Every blow from him moved my face against her, and that mix of a little pain, pleasure, and dizziness made me even more voracious.

“Look at her,” he said. “Look at the way she looks at you.”

And I lifted my eyes and found hers behind the golden feathers, bright, fixed on mine, and then I lowered my head again and kissed her harder, sucking, licking, sinking into her wetness until she arched and gripped my neck with both hands. The man behind me didn’t let up for a second; he held my hips, opened me wide to take me deeper, and started fucking me with sharp, hard thrusts, each one deeper than the last, until his pelvis was slamming against my ass and my cunt was tightening around him as if it wanted to swallow him whole.

At some point others arrived. A couple stood watching from the sofa opposite and then joined in. Another man, in a silver mask, came close to my face and I gestured for him not to stay so far away. I took him in my mouth with one hand, grasping his cock and bringing it to my lips without hesitation, while the other stayed on the feathered woman’s thigh, while the first man kept going behind me, while someone else caressed my lower back with an open, firm palm. The silver-masked one slid his cock between my lips and I sucked it hungrily, tasting the salty flavor of his skin and the living hardness against my tongue. Every time I sank deeper onto him, the woman moaned in front of me, and the man behind me increased the force of his thrusts as if he wanted to push all the air out of my body.

At one point I realized I no longer knew how many hands were on my body. One held a breast, another opened my ass with two fingers, another massaged my mound of Venus, another held my jaw so I wouldn’t stop sucking. I wasn’t scared. On the contrary, I let myself go as if I were floating over all of it, my pussy burning, my mouth full of flesh, my whole body turned into a single sensitive surface.

I remember a girl with a white mask, very young, who came over just to kiss me on the mouth and then left, without saying anything to me and without letting me say anything to her. I remember an older man, with a gold mask and a short beard, who didn’t touch me but sat a meter away to watch us and touch himself slowly, with an expression of almost religious concentration that I found more arousing than many other things that night. He had his cock in his hand, hard and gleaming, and he stroked the head with his thumb as if he were praying with his body. I remember the woman with the feathers settling me again, opening me with her fingers so I wouldn’t close up, putting her tongue in me once more when I could hardly take any more, making me cry from pure excess.

I remember, above all, one moment when I ended up sitting on top of the first man, with my back to him, the woman with the feathers in front of me kissing me with her hands on my face, and another man behind me kissing my nape, while he held my hips so I could bounce on his cock until I found the exact rhythm. I moved up and down, feeling every inch going in and out, the brush of his hips against my ass, the heat of my sex open and wet around him, and I thought very clearly: I’m never going to tell anyone about this and, for that very reason, it’s going to be mine forever.

After that they made me lie on a low table in the center of the room. Four people tended to me at the same time; I don’t remember exactly who or in what order. What I do remember is that they opened my legs without ceremony, that one tongue drove me crazy between my thighs, that another mouth sucked my nipples until they were burning, that one hand slid two fingers into me and then three, finding me from the inside while another hand caressed my asshole with a slow insistence that made me shiver. I came twice more, once with her tongue between my legs and once against the fingers of the man in the silver mask, and at some point I started crying without sadness, just from excess, from vibration, from having my whole body turned into a delicious wound. Someone wiped my cheeks with a cloth handkerchief before kissing me again.

***

When I began to notice the first noises of dawn beyond the shutters, the music had already lowered. The mansion smelled of sweat, stale perfume, sex. Bodies lay stretched out on sofas, on rugs, embracing each other in whatever way. Some slept, others spoke in low voices. No one had taken off their mask. That was, I think, the holiest rule of all.

I got up carefully. My legs were trembling. My body felt deliciously worn out, with that exact heaviness left only by long, shared pleasure. I walked barefoot to the antechamber, picked up my red velvet cape from the iron rack, and wrapped it closed against skin that was still damp.

In the inner courtyard, two women wearing matching masks were smoking beside an unlit fountain. One smiled at me, lifting two fingers in a silent greeting. I returned the gesture. We didn’t say anything.

I went out into the street and the morning air hit me with a smell of sea I hadn’t noticed on arrival. I walked a couple of blocks until I found a taxi. The driver looked at me in the mirror, saw the mask still on my face, and asked nothing.

“To the old quarter,” I said.

He nodded and drove off.

I rested my forehead against the window. The sky was turning from gray to pink very slowly, as if it too were in no hurry for anything. I thought about my bed, the shower I was going to take, the coffee I was going to make afterward. I also thought, and this is what I remember most, that all night long I hadn’t known the name of any of the people who had touched me and yet I felt that some of them knew me better than people I had lived with for years.

Two summers have passed since that night. I haven’t gone back to Cartagena. The couple who organized the party invited me again twice, and both times I said no, not out of fear or regret, but because I understand that some things become less when repeated.

I still keep the Venetian mask in a box, beneath some sweaters I almost never wear. Sometimes, when the house is empty, I open it and look at it. I don’t put it on. I don’t need to. Just seeing it takes me back there. Back to the dark corridor, to the first hand on my hip, to the eyes behind the golden feathers, to the older man watching me without touching me, to the cloth handkerchief against my cheeks.

And then I close the box, cover the sweaters again, and go on with my life, knowing that I have, hidden inside it, an entire night that belongs to no one else but me.