The Night at the Jazz Club I Never Confessed

There are things a woman doesn’t tell even her best friend. This is one of them, and I’m writing it only because it’s been burning inside me for months and I need to get it out somewhere. If you read it, then there are two of us keeping it now.

The place was called El Pulso, though it had no sign or address you could find on a map. You went in through an iron door at the back of an alley, went down twenty-two damp stone steps, and at the bottom the sax greeted you before the light did. A long basement with a low ceiling, where the smoke hung in the air like a warm mist and the jazz sounded so thick it sank into your chest.

I went down on Daniela’s arm. My partner. The woman I’d been with for three years and who that night had decided we were going to cross a line we’d talked about in whispers many times, always half-joking, always with a dry mouth afterward. We had said it so many times in bed, after fucking, with our bodies still pressed together and his cum still dripping down the inside of my thigh: “What if one day…?” We never finished the sentence. That night we were going to finish it.

I remember the feel of the railing under my palm as I went down. Cold, metallic, worn smooth by thousands of hands before mine. Each step took me a little farther from the woman I was upstairs and closer to the one I was going to be downstairs. I’m not exaggerating when I say my heart was already racing before anyone even touched me, and that I was already soaked just from thinking about what was coming.

“Are you sure?” she asked me at the foot of the stairs, her hand squeezing mine.

“No,” I told her. And we both laughed nervously, because we both knew we were going in anyway.

Daniela was wearing a wine-colored silk dress that clung to her body as if it had been painted on. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath; I knew because when she leaned down to leave our coats, the fabric outlined her in a way that left no doubt: her hard nipples pressed into the silk, the slit of her cunt drawn against the material when she took a step. I was in a short skirt and a blouse that suddenly felt like too much, too much clothing, too much of everything.

***

We hadn’t even settled into a corner when a man approached her. Tall, broad-shouldered, with a slow smile that took its time. He didn’t say much. He put a hand on her waist, whispered something in her ear I didn’t hear, and Daniela laughed with that deep laugh of hers I knew so well, the one she gets when she’s already decided yes.

I watched her let herself be guided against the brick wall beside the little stage where the band was playing. I watched her close her eyes when he pulled her dress up to her waist and left her ass naked in the air, pale against the shadow of the brick. The man’s hand went straight to her cunt, no preamble, and from where I stood I saw his fingers sink into her and come out shining. Daniela opened her mouth in a silent O and bit his shoulder so she wouldn’t scream. The man pulled his cock from his pants without stopping the fingers inside her—a thick, dark cock, the head already wet—and made her turn against the wall. He spread her legs with one knee, set the head of his cock at the entrance to her cunt, and drove it all the way in with one single thrust.

And I saw her bite her lip and look for me over the stranger’s shoulder, eyes glassy, while the man fucked her standing up against the brick, as if to say to me look, this is really happening, he’s putting all of it inside me.

It was really happening.

The sax kept playing. No one in the club seemed surprised. There were other couples in the corners—a girl on her knees sucking a seated man’s cock, another couple fucking on a sofa with a third woman licking the breasts of the one on top—other silhouettes moving in the dimness, and I understood that this was the place’s pact: down here nobody looks surprised, nobody judges, everyone is coming down the same steps we came down.

I stayed leaning on the bar, a sweating glass in my hand, feeling heat rising inside my thighs and feeling my cunt clench on its own every time the man shoved hard into Daniela and made her breasts slam against the brick. I couldn’t stop looking at her. The way she arched her back to push her ass out and offer it better, the guttural sounds that escaped her—“like that, harder, harder”—half-covered by the jazz, the way her fingers clutched the back of the man’s neck when he turned her and lifted one of her legs to fuck her facing forward and she could see me while he ate her out with kisses. I had never wanted her more than in that moment when she belonged to someone else, when another cock that wasn’t my tongue or my fingers was making her come.

And she came. I saw her come. Her lower lip trembled, she shut her eyes, her mouth fell open and a long moan came out of her that cut right through the blues, and the man didn’t stop, he kept driving into her until he came inside her too, his mouth pressed to her neck. When he pulled out, a thick white rope ran down Daniela’s thigh. She wiped it off with one finger, brought it to her mouth, and looked at me while sucking it off.

It was a surprise discovering that about myself. I thought seeing her with someone else would hurt, that rage would come up, jealousy, that ugly knot in the stomach. Instead the only thing I felt was desire. Desire for her, desire for the night, desire for everything that still hadn’t happened. Fear and desire had become the same thing, and I no longer knew where one ended and the other began. My cunt was swollen and throbbing under my skirt, and my panties had stuck to my lips from how soaked they were.

The band shifted into something slower, dirtier, a blues that seemed to set the pace of what was happening in every corner of the basement. I closed my eyes for a second, and when I opened them, I was no longer alone.

***

“You’re not going to stand there all night.”

The voice came from my left. Two men, both smiling, both with that calm of people who are in no hurry. One took the glass from my hand and set it carefully on the bar, as if it were an important gesture. The other brushed the hair from my face and ran his thumb over my lower lip, slipping it a little into my mouth. I sucked it without thinking.

“Coming?” the first one asked.

I looked toward Daniela. Her head was thrown back now, another guy between her legs eating her cunt, and even so she found a second to nod at me. Permission. Breath. Do it.

I nodded because my throat couldn’t manage anything else.

They took me to a deep velvet sofa in a corner where the light barely reached. They sat me down, opened my blouse button by button without rushing, left my tits bare, and one of them bent down to suck them while the other hiked up my skirt and yanked off my soaked panties in one pull. He brought them to his nose, inhaled deeply, and smiled.

“You’re dripping,” he told me, and shoved two fingers into my cunt without warning.

I moaned so loudly I had to cover my own mouth. The one licking my nipples pulled my hand away.

“Down here you scream,” he said. “No one’s going to hear you over the sax.”

One of them knelt between my legs and spread them all the way, folding them up against my chest to leave me open, exposed, with my cunt offered to the dimness. What he did with his mouth made me grip the back of the sofa with both hands. Slow at first, attentive, reading me—flat tongue over the clit, circles, then sucking—until I stopped thinking and started only feeling. He put his whole tongue inside me and fucked me with it, then went back up to my clit and didn’t let go, and I pushed my hips against his face, looking for more.

The other sat beside me and kissed me as if we had all night, which we did. He bit my neck, spoke softly to me, whispered things in my ear—“you taste so good, look how well he’s eating you out, look how you’re moving that ass, slut”—that I don’t remember clearly and that still made me shake. He pulled his cock out of his pants and put it in my hand. It was hard, hot, throbbing against my palm. I started stroking him while the other man kept eating me, and a few seconds later he brought it up to my mouth and I opened without hesitation. I took it all the way to my throat, gagged a little, and took it again. It tasted like skin, sweat, salt.

Between the two of them they brought me to the edge once—the one below felt how everything tightened and sucked my clit harder, and I was a second away from coming—and then again—this time with the one above pushing two fingers into my mouth at the same time as the cock, while the other fingered me with three fingers and found my spot inside—and when I thought I couldn’t take anymore, they stopped. On purpose. So the desire could build up.

“Not yet,” one of them said, and the word “yet” left me vibrating, my cunt opening and closing on its own, empty, begging.

The one who had been between my legs stood up, took his pants all the way off, and made me turn around on the sofa. He put me on my knees on the velvet, ass up and my face buried in the backrest. I felt the head of his cock sliding along the slit of my cunt, wetting itself in me, slipping between my lips without going in yet. I was losing my mind.

“Ask for it,” he told me.

“Fuck me,” I said, and my voice came out broken. “Put it in, please, fuck me now.”

He sank all the way into me in one thrust and tore a moan out of me that, yes, the sax didn’t cover. He started fucking me from behind, holding me by the hips, pulling almost all the way out before driving back in to the hilt, and the sofa creaked and my tits bounced against the velvet. The other knelt on the sofa in front of me and brought his cock to my mouth again. I opened without him asking. Both of them were fucking me at once, one from the front and one from behind, and I had become an instrument between the two of them, with my mouth and cunt full at the same time, moaning against the cock of the one above every time the one behind drove in hard.

***

I don’t know how much time passed. In that basement, time was measured in songs, not clocks. I know that at some point Daniela appeared beside me, sweaty, hair disheveled, eyes bright and a catlike smile on her face, her dress pulled down to her waist, her tits out, marked with bites. She lay down next to me on the velvet and kissed me with the whole taste of the night on her—an alien semen taste I recognized without thinking and that made me even hornier.

“Are you having a good time?” she asked against my mouth, while she slipped a hand between my legs and checked with her fingers how soaked and open I was.

I didn’t answer with words. I bit her lower lip and pushed her head downward.

What came after that blends together in my memory like those sax notes: skin, hands I didn’t know whose they were, her tongue sliding down my belly and burying itself in my cunt with that precision only three years of practice can give, while one of the men was taking her from behind, his cock going into her ass slowly, and both of us were moaning out of sync. She was eating my cunt while she was being fucked in the ass, and every thrust he gave her was transmitted to her tongue against my clit, and I watched the scene from above and couldn’t believe that it was me there.

At some point it was me between her legs, my face pressed to her cunt, licking her while another man fucked me from behind, and I heard her say my name in a way I’d never heard in three years of sharing a bed with her—broken, high, obscene. She came in my mouth. She shouted it into my lips: “I’m coming, I’m coming in your mouth, lick me,” and I licked her clit until her thighs trembled and she squeezed my head with both hands.

There was a moment when one of them asked permission for something I had never done before. He asked in a low voice, against my nape, with the head of his cock already resting at the hole in my ass. He waited for my answer. I nodded slowly and he went slowly: he spat into his hand, coated me well, pushed the tip in patiently until the ring gave way, and kept easing it in millimeter by millimeter. It hurt and then it stopped hurting, and it turned into something new that split me in two in the best way—a feeling of being filled in a way I didn’t know, with every nerve in my ass awake and throbbing. Daniela held my face between her hands as it was happening, looking into my eyes, telling me to breathe, that she was there, that she wasn’t letting go, putting three fingers into my cunt herself so I’d be filled doubly. And when I got used to it, he started fucking me for real, with long thrusts, and I came harder than I ever had in my life, screaming into Daniela’s mouth, with both holes occupied and my whole body trembling.

And he didn’t let go.

In the end he pulled out, turned me onto my back, and came in streams over my stomach and tits, while the other came into Daniela’s mouth and she looked at me with her lips full, semen running down her chin, not swallowing yet, smiling at me. She leaned down and kissed me, and she passed all of the other man’s semen into my mouth, and I swallowed it while looking her in the eyes.

***

What I remember most isn’t the sex. It’s the other thing. The way, in the middle of all that, Daniela and I found each other’s gaze over the shoulders of strangers and recognized each other. As if all that disorder of bodies, of cocks and cunts and asses and mouths, was, at heart, a conversation between the two of us. A way of saying things we couldn’t fit into ordinary words.

The men were generous and then they left, the way they came, without names, without phone numbers, without promises. That was how the place worked. What happened at El Pulso stayed downstairs, in the basement, beneath the city that kept sleeping twenty-two steps above.

When we came out, it was almost day. The street was cold and gray and smelled like fresh bread from some nearby bakery, a smell so ordinary and so clean it almost made me laugh. Daniela put an arm around my shoulders. We were both disheveled, marked, with our clothes all wrong, with dried semen on our thighs and our whole bodies still throbbing.

“Do you regret it?” she asked me.

I really thought about it before answering. I searched inside myself for the shame, the guilt, the reproach a woman is supposed to feel. I didn’t find them. I found something else: a strange calm, a feeling of having seen a locked room of myself.

“No,” I told her. “Do you?”

She shook her head, smiling down at the ground, and squeezed me against her.

***

We went home in silence, that good silence of people who don’t need to fill it. We showered together—and in the shower, with hot water falling over us, she knelt and ate my cunt one more time, slowly, unhurriedly, as if to seal the night with her signature—we got into bed with the sun coming through the blinds, and slept until midafternoon wrapped around each other like two shipwreck survivors.

Several months have passed. We haven’t been back to El Pulso, though I know one day we will. We don’t talk about it much; it’s like a secret we share only with each other, a place we go to in our heads when we’re together and want to feel that vertigo again. Sometimes, when we fuck, she whispers things from that night in my ear—“remember the one who fucked you in the ass?, remember how you screamed?”—and I come in two minutes.

Sometimes, in the middle of dinner with friends, or in the supermarket line, Daniela looks for me over the cart and smiles in a way that only I understand. And I smile back, and for a second we’re both in that basement again, with the sax sinking into our chests and the whole night ahead of us.

I haven’t told anyone. Until today.