The Night Nobody Knew My Name

I’m 32 years old, with a sexual curiosity that has taken me to places many women wouldn’t dare go. What I’m telling here happened three years ago, on a trip I took alone to Cartagena de Indias. I didn’t have any concrete plan. I just wanted to escape my life in Buenos Aires, my job, my ex. I wanted to feel truly free, without witnesses or consequences.

The person who changed the course of the trip was Camila, a Colombian designer I met on my second night at the hotel bar. She liked to speak plainly and laugh loudly. When I told her I was looking for something different, something where I had no idea how it would end, she looked at me over her glass with an expression that was hard to define.

—There’s a party on Saturday —she said—. Don’t ask where. I’ll take you.

I didn’t ask anything else. I accepted the mystery with a determination that surprised even me.

The party was in a restored colonial house on the outskirts of the city, forty minutes away along a road that ran beside the sea. Camila told me to bring a mask and to dress according to my mood. My mood that night was radical, so I acted accordingly.

I put on a long white linen coat, buttoned to the neck. Underneath, nothing. No underwear, nothing even resembling it. Just my freshly showered body, with a few drops of argan oil on my shoulders and neck. The mask was a black domino mask with silver-embroidered details that covered me from my forehead to the bridge of my nose. I tied it slowly in front of the mirror and didn’t recognize the woman looking back at me from the other side of the glass. She was someone completely different. That was exactly what I was after.

***

The house had an inner courtyard with orange trees and a fountain no one could hear over the music. It was Caribbean percussion mixed with something electronic: a slow, steady pulse that got into your chest and stayed there. There were about forty people inside, all masked, all with that particular air of someone carrying something hidden. The candles gave enough light to move around, but not enough to read anyone’s expression.

Camila whispered in my ear before leaving me in the main room:

—Nobody asks names here. Two rules: nothing you don’t want too, and nothing that isn’t explicit. The rest is yours.

She disappeared into the crowd before I could answer.

I stood by a stone column, holding a glass of rum someone had put in my hand without me asking. I watched. There were couples dancing pressed close together, other people talking in dark corners, a woman sitting on a man’s lap while he spoke slowly into her ear and she closed her eyes and unbuttoned his pants under the table with complete shamelessness. Cartagena’s heat came in through the open windows and stuck to the skin like fabric.

I shrugged off the coat and let it fall to the floor.

The room’s air brushed my breasts, my stomach, my thighs. I stood completely still for a moment, feeling the contrast: the heat outside, the ceiling fan turning slowly, the fresh oil on my skin, my nipples hardening in the breeze, and at least three different gazes fixed on me at the same time. I didn’t do anything. I just lifted my glass, drank slowly, and began to move to the rhythm of the music, aware that my cunt was already wet before anyone touched me.

***

The man who came up to me first wore a brown leather mask that covered his eyes and part of his forehead. Shirt half open, dark trousers, big hands I saw before I felt them. He positioned himself behind me without announcing himself and started following my rhythm, still without touching me, just answering the movement of my hips with his own. I could feel his heat two inches from my back and the bulge of his already hard cock testing the air between us.

I waited.

When his hands found my waist they did it slowly, with a firmness that wasn’t urgent but certain. I pushed my hips back and he understood the answer without needing anything more. He pressed his cock against the crease of my ass, still over the fabric of my trousers, and started rubbing himself against me in the same beat as the percussion. We moved together for several minutes: his clothes against my bare skin, his breathing gradually quickening against my neck, his fingers climbing from my waist to cup my tits and pinch my nipples with maddening calm.

One hand slid down my stomach. It stopped just above my pubis, as if asking.

I took that hand and guided it without hesitation, opening my legs myself, pressing his fingers into my soaked cunt so there’d be no doubt about what I wanted.

His fingers found my clit without missing a beat. Two fingers inside to the knuckles, his thumb drawing circles outside, a steady rhythm that made my knees buckle and forced me to lean back against his chest so I wouldn’t fall. I laced my fingers with his to set the tempo, faster, deeper, curving his fingertips against the exact point that made me tremble. He said nothing. He just pressed harder, until the wet slapping sound of his hand moving inside me was audible over the music. I felt a third finger forcing its way in and opening me a little more, and the moan that slipped out of me was so loud the couple dancing beside us turned their heads to look.

I came standing up, braced against him, his hand gripping my hip hard so I wouldn’t fall, soaking his fingers and wrist. The spasms shook me twice, three times, and he didn’t pull his hand out until they were done.

—Jesus —he murmured at last, in a voice so low I barely heard it, while he brought his shiny fingers to his mouth and sucked them one by one.

That was all he said for a good while.

***

The woman came from the left. She wore a red feather mask and a black dress that was basically a piece of fabric crossed over her chest and nothing more. She stopped in front of me without preamble and kissed me straight on the mouth. It wasn’t a tentative or exploratory kiss: it was the kiss of someone who already knows what she wants and simply takes it. She shoved her tongue all the way in, bit my lower lip, grabbed one of my tits with an open hand and pinched my nipple between index finger and thumb until I moaned into her mouth.

She took my hand and looked at both of us. A wordless question.

The three of us moved toward a side corridor. The house had several rooms in the back: wide beds, white sheets, a slow-turning ceiling fan. We went into the first one that was free and she shut the door with her foot.

The woman gently pushed me toward the bed and knelt in front of me. She opened my legs with both hands and took a second to look up at me from below, with that deliberate pause that’s half cruelty and half promise. She licked her lips without taking her eyes off my open cunt.

—You’re soaked —she said, almost admiringly—. The one who was with you did a good job.

—Finish it for me —I told her.

She lowered her head.

Her tongue was slow and methodical. No rush. It went up and down, learning what produced which reaction, adjusting the pressure to whatever she heard, pausing to suck my lips between hers, slipping the tip of her tongue inside to lick me from within and then pulling back to return to my clit. When she found the exact rhythm, she planted her open palms on my thighs to keep me still and didn’t move from there. She sucked hungrily, making a wet, filthy sound that was driving me insane, and every so often she slid in two fingers while still working me with her mouth.

The man had taken off his shirt and his trousers by then too. I looked at him from where I was, lying back with my legs open and my head thrown back, and signaled him to come closer. He sat on the edge of the bed beside me, his hard cock pointing straight at my face, and I turned my head and took it into my mouth without further ado. It was heavy, hot, thick. I sucked it to the base, let it touch my throat, stuck my tongue out to lick his balls while I held it with my hand and kept jerking the base with my fist. He tangled his fingers in my hair and started fucking my mouth slowly, setting the pace, pushing a little deeper each time.

Between her mouth between my legs and his cock filling my throat, the orgasm came without warning, hard, with a contraction that arched my back and made me tighten my fingers around the base of his cock until he gave a low protest.

—Stay still —he said, though not really complaining, pulling it out of my mouth with a thread of saliva hanging from it.

It was the only time I laughed all night.

***

We changed positions several times. On all fours on the bed, ass lifted and face buried in her cunt, as she reclined against the pillows with her legs spread wide. I licked her slowly, learning her taste, sliding my tongue inside and then up to her clit to suck it until she tugged my hair. He positioned himself behind me and drove his cock into me in one thrust, without warning, all the way to the hilt. I screamed into her cunt and she let out a low laugh.

—Fuck her hard —she told him over my head—. She loves it.

And he obeyed.

He fucked me deep, one open hand in the small of my back to keep me bent over, pulling his cock nearly all the way out before slamming it back in. The sound of his hips hitting my ass filled the room. I kept eating her cunt, my chin and cheeks soaked with her wetness, unable to focus completely because each thrust from behind tore a moan from me that sank into her thighs.

Then on my back, with my legs over his shoulders and her sitting on my face. I licked her without stopping, holding her by the hips so she wouldn’t get away, feeling the weight of her thighs pressing my ears. I came again with his cock pounding deep into me, so deep I felt a tug in my stomach, and she came almost at the same time, soaking my mouth and chin, trembling above me with a series of short moans.

On my side too. He entered me from behind while the woman positioned herself at an angle so she could use her mouth on my clit at the same time, and on his cock whenever he pulled it out. It was coordination that spoke of practice: they knew when to move, when to stop, when to let one sensation take up all the space and when to add another on top. At one point she pulled his cock out of me, sucked it clean while licking my wetness off his skin, and pushed it back in to the hilt with her hand.

—All yours —she told him, and bit his ass cheek.

At some point I turned around and rode him face-to-face. His hands on my hips, guiding me but leaving me control of the rhythm. I fucked myself on him, rising and falling, feeling how he opened me each time I let myself drop fully onto him. The woman sat behind me, wrapped her arms around me, and rested her mouth against my neck while I moved. One hand grabbed one tit, the other slid between my legs and started rubbing my clit to the rhythm I was setting with my hips. I could feel the heat of her chest against my back. Her breathing following the beat of mine. Her fingers wet with my own moisture, making exact circles.

—Like that —she said softly, once, biting my earlobe—. Come again for us.

And that’s what happened.

I came riding him, with her fingers inside me alongside his cock, with the contractions squeezing him so hard he let out a long gasp and dug his nails into my hips. He came too, a second later, driving me down all the way to the hilt and staying inside while he finished, filling me with hot semen that I felt spilling inside me in pulses.

I lost all sense of time. There was only heat, the weight of two bodies, the sound of music coming from the main room muffled by the stone walls, and the thick smell of sex already filling the room. I had at least three orgasms I can remember clearly. There were probably more I didn’t properly register.

***

I went out of the room to look for water sometime in the early hours of morning. I could still feel semen slowly running down the inside of one thigh. The main room was still alive: other people, other combinations, the same heavy air of slow music and moving bodies. On the long sofa in the corner, two women were eating each other’s mouths while a man kneeling between them ran his tongue from one cunt to the other. I stopped in the doorway for a moment, watching without anyone looking at me yet.

A man with a silver mask saw me from the other side of the room. He crossed toward me with two drinks in his hands and offered me one without saying a word. I took it. It was rum with something cold and sweet.

—Are you okay? —he asked quietly.

—Very —I answered.

He looked at me for a moment as if he wanted to ask something more. He didn’t ask. He stayed standing beside me, drinking his glass, the two of us watching the center of the room, with no need to fill the silence with anything. There was something about that situation I found more intimate than anything else that night: two complete strangers sharing a moment without pretending anything, without any past or future story to protect.

I glanced at him from the side.

—Come on —I said.

And he followed me back to the corridor.

***

What happened after that was different. Slower. Without the energy of the previous threesome, without the charge of having to prove anything. He unbuttoned my coat calmly, one button at a time, and laid me on the bed without speaking. He kissed my mouth first, long, with tongue, tasting the rum. Then he kissed my neck, my collarbones, each breast with devotion, stopping to suck my nipples until they hardened again. He worked his way down my stomach, biting my skin softly, and when he opened my legs he took his time there too. His tongue was different from hers: broader, slower, with no urgency at all. He licked my whole cunt from top to bottom several times before focusing on the clit, and when I started trembling he deliberately eased off, forcing me to wait.

—Not yet —he murmured against my skin.

When he finally slid inside me, he did it slowly, looking into my eyes through both masks, pushing his cock in a centimeter at a time until he had me filled to the hilt. He stayed there still for a moment, letting me feel him, and only then did he start moving. He was careful in a way I hadn’t expected: attentive to my reactions, changing the angle when he found a new sound in my throat, stopping to kiss me every time he felt I was close and didn’t want it to end yet. He fucked me slowly on my back, then on my side, then put me on top again, all without rushing, all stretching the moment. He made me come two more times before letting himself go, and when he came he did it silently, with his face buried in my neck and a long tremor that went through me too.

He wasn’t in any hurry. That was, in some strange way, what surprised me most of the whole night.

I fell asleep a little later, without meaning to. When I opened my eyes he was gone. On the pillow, folded in four, there was a napkin with a sentence written in ballpoint pen: “It was a pleasure not knowing you.”

I kept it in the coat pocket.

***

When I left the house, dawn was already breaking. The garden with the orange trees smelled of damp earth and a night that was ending. I tied my coat slowly, alone among the trees, listening to the last chords of music drifting from inside.

I didn’t say goodbye to anyone. I didn’t know anyone’s name. They didn’t know mine.

I walked to the entrance and called a taxi from my phone. It arrived in fifteen minutes. The driver didn’t say anything strange when he saw the mask I was still wearing. I took it off only when I got to the hotel, in front of the bathroom mirror. I looked at my bare face, my tangled hair, my lips still a little swollen.

The woman in the mirror looked completely different.

Not different like someone who had had something bad happen to her. Different like someone who had just remembered who she is.

***

Three years have passed. I went back to Buenos Aires, went back to my job, dated other people, unraveled and remade my life in the usual ways. But there are nights, when I can’t sleep and summer makes everything unbearable, that I remember the courtyard with the orange trees and the smell of rum and the slow pulse of that music and the weight of the coat falling to the floor.

And I know, with a certainty I have for almost nothing else in my life, that that night I did exactly what I wanted to do.

That isn’t forgotten.