What I Did to Make My Wife Look at Me Again

I'm going to tell this exactly as it happened, without embellishing it, because I've been turning it over in my mind for months and I need to get it out. When I married Carmen, I thought desire was built with patience and affection. It took me years to understand that she was playing a different game, one in which I was always late.

We had a young son, a mortgage, and a routine that seemed solid. Every afternoon, Carmen pushed the stroller through the park with that serene mother's smile that fooled the entire neighborhood. It fooled me too, for a long time.

At night, when she thought I was asleep, I felt her moving slowly beneath the sheets, holding her breath, searching for something I wasn't giving her. I heard her carefully part her thighs, her hand buried between her legs, two fingers sliding in and out of her wet pussy with a slick sound I pretended not to hear. Sometimes a muffled moan escaped against the pillow, and I clenched my teeth, knowing she was coming inches from me without needing me for anything. I never asked her. I was afraid of the answer.

“Are you all right?” I said one of those nights.

“Tired,” she replied, turning her back to me.

Tired of me, I thought, and lay staring at the ceiling until dawn.

***

The day everything changed, I left work early. A meeting had been canceled, and I decided to go home and have lunch with her, a silly surprise from a husband in love. I bought some cheap flowers on the corner. I still remember the cellophane crackling between my fingers as I climbed the stairs.

The door wasn't locked. That was the first thing that struck me as odd. The second was the voice: a deep male voice, laughing softly in my kitchen. I froze in the hallway, flowers in hand and my heart pounding against my ribs.

Carmen was leaning against the counter, disheveled, her blouse open to her navel and her tits spilling out of her bra, her nipples hard and glistening with saliva. Facing her was a man I recognized from the neighborhood gym, Damián. He held her waist with one hand while squeezing one of her tits with the other until she moaned. Her skirt was hiked up to her hips and her panties hung from one ankle. I saw his cock out of his pants, thick, red, soaked with whatever they'd just been doing, and Carmen licking her lips as though she'd just taken it out of her mouth. They didn't see me. They were too absorbed in their own world. She gripped his cock with both hands and put it back between her lips in front of me, unaware that I was watching, and I heard her say thickly, “Come on my face, you bastard, give me everything.”

I didn't scream. I didn't smash down the door. I did something worse to myself: I turned around, left the flowers on the landing, and walked away without making a sound. I wandered through the city for hours, repeating to myself that I had to make a decision.

That night, Carmen came home late, kissed me on the cheek, and asked what I wanted for dinner. I told her I'd already eaten. I watched her play the part of the perfect wife and understood that I'd been losing a war for years without even knowing I was fighting it.

***

I could have left her. That would have been the logical thing. But I didn't want to go: I wanted to win. I wanted her to desire me with the same desperation with which she spread her legs for other men. I know it sounds sick. It was. But wounded pride has a logic of its own.

I started with myself. I joined the same gym where Damián worked out, not to spy on him, but to look myself in the face in the mirror and recognize what I'd forgotten. I changed my diet. I stopped apologizing for existing. I slept little, read a lot, and learned things about the body and desire that I'd never bothered learning when I believed love was enough. I learned where to touch a woman to make her wet without her realizing it, how long to hold out before coming, how to fuck slowly until they begged, how to fuck hard until they screamed.

For months I was another man, building himself in silence. Carmen noticed before she understood. I caught her watching me when I came out of the shower, her eyes fixed on my cock as if she were seeing it for the first time. She asked where I was going in those new clothes. For the first time in years, I felt something in her leaning toward me instead of away.

“You're acting strange,” she said one afternoon, watching me through narrowed eyes.

“I'm awake,” I replied, holding her gaze until she was the one who looked away.

***

The night I decided to reclaim what was mine, I put our son to bed and returned to the bedroom without hurrying. Carmen was reading in bed, pretending not to care, but the sheet had slipped down and the curve of her bare thigh waited for me like an invitation.

“We need to talk,” I said.

“About what?” she asked, setting down the book.

I sat on the edge of the bed and told her what I'd seen that afternoon. I didn't shout or insult her. I described the flowers, the cellophane, her open blouse, Damián's cock sliding in and out of her mouth, her tits exposed, his laughter. I watched the blood drain from her face.

“Rubén, I...” she began.

“I don't want excuses,” I interrupted. “I want you to understand one thing. I'm not leaving. And you're not going to go looking elsewhere for what you're going to have here.”

Then I kissed her, and it was different from every kiss before it. It didn't ask permission. I thrust my tongue deep into her mouth and bit her lip until she let out a whimper. Carmen tensed for a second, surprised, and then melted against me with a low moan I recognized because it was the same one she stole from the night when she thought I was asleep. Now it was for me.

I tore her nightgown over her head and threw her onto her back on the mattress. She was naked underneath, her pussy already glistening, her thighs opening on their own. I squeezed her tits with both hands, licked her nipples one by one, and bit them until she arched her back and sank her nails into my neck. I moved slowly downward, kissing her belly, her hip, the insides of her thighs, while she breathed in ragged gasps.

“Open up,” I ordered.

She obeyed. She spread her legs for me as she hadn't in years, and I buried my mouth in her wet pussy. I sucked her lips, ran my tongue all the way up from the bottom, pressed the tip against her swollen clitoris, and licked it in circles until she began to tremble. I slid two fingers inside her and curled my fingertips against the spot she touched herself in secret, rubbing it slowly while I kept sucking her clit. Carmen writhed, pressing my head against her sex, panting my name like a prayer.

“Rubén, please, please, don't stop, bastard, yes, just like that...”

She came in my mouth with a hoarse cry, her hips lifting off the mattress, her pussy squeezing my fingers in spasms that left her breathless. And I had only just begun.

I climbed on top of her with my hard cock dripping, ran it over the lips of her wet pussy, coating it with her juices, and shoved it all the way inside her. She moaned so loudly that I had to cover her mouth with my hand. I began fucking her slowly and deeply, pulling almost all the way out and sinking back in, looking her in the eyes so she couldn't hide. I grabbed one leg, lifted it onto my shoulder, and penetrated her deeper, feeling her pussy squeeze my cock every time I drove it into her.

“Who else has fucked you like this?” I whispered in her ear without stopping my thrusts.

“No one,” she gasped. “No one, I swear, no one, no one...”

“Say it again.”

“No one fucks me like you do, my love, no one, keep going, don't stop...”

I put her on all fours, gripped her hips, and pounded her from behind. I watched her round ass smack against my thighs, her pussy swallowing my entire cock, shining with her juices. I slapped one cheek, and she moaned for another. I pulled her hair, forcing her head back, and fucked her like that, hard, until I felt her come again around my cock, screaming into the pillow.

I held out until I couldn't anymore. I rolled her onto her back, pulled both her legs against her chest, and penetrated her with my final thrusts, deep and brutal, until I emptied myself completely inside her. I felt my cum fill her, running between our bodies, and stayed inside her until my cock softened, marking her as mine for the first time in years.

That night I left her trembling, empty and satisfied, semen sliding down her thighs and her mouth open as she searched for air, and for the first time in years she fell asleep holding me instead of turning her back. I thought I'd won. I was naive.

***

Carmen's desire was a bottomless well, and I'd awakened something she no longer knew how to contain. The following weeks were the best of our marriage and also the beginning of the chaos. She sought me out at all hours, climbed on top of me on the sofa, sucked my cock on her knees in the bathroom while I shaved, and woke me in the middle of the night by straddling me with her pussy already soaked. But she also began testing the limits, telling me fantasies she'd previously kept to herself, watching how I reacted whenever she mentioned other men.

“Would it bother you if someone watched us while you fucked me?” she asked one night, her voice hoarse as she slowly rode me. “If he watched me come on your cock?”

I should have said yes. But the new man I'd built felt a dangerous curiosity about how far she would go, and how far I would go. I answered by driving my cock deeper into her, and she came instantly, screaming into my neck.

Damián was still hanging around. I ran into him at the gym and, instead of avoiding him, met his gaze with a smile that unsettled him. He knew that I knew. The tension between us was electric, a silent rivalry between two men fighting over the same woman without ever naming her.

“Your wife is an interesting woman,” he said to me one day, sizing me up.

“I know what her pussy tastes like better than you do,” I replied softly, and left before I did something stupid.

***

Then Lorena appeared, the woman from the third floor, a sharp-tongued, mature woman who had spent years competing with Carmen over everything: the car, clothes, the looks they received at building meetings. Lorena smelled the crack before anyone else. She began greeting me in the elevator with newfound insistence, inventing excuses to touch my arm, asking me with feigned innocence whether Carmen treated me well. One afternoon, alone with me between two floors, she took my hand and placed it on one of her tits over her dress.

“Do you feel that?” she whispered. “My nipples get hard every time I see you. If you were mine, you'd have me on my knees sucking your cock every morning before you went to work. I wouldn't let you leave the house.”

I didn't play along, but I didn't stop her completely either, and that was enough to ignite something. Carmen, who has a radar for these things, caught the tension at a neighbors' dinner and put on a mask of ice. That night, as soon as we came through the door, she knelt in the entryway, opened my pants, and took my cock into her mouth all the way down her throat. She sucked me furiously, looking up at me from below, letting saliva run down her chin to her cleavage. She pulled me all the way out, rubbed me over her lips, and swallowed me again, gagging.

“Does that slut suck you better?” she gasped between licks. “Huh? Tell me I'm the one who sucks you better.”

I lifted her by the hair, dragged her to the bedroom, and threw her facedown on the bed. I tore off her panties, spread her ass cheeks, and buried my cock in her wet pussy in a single thrust. I fucked her furiously, marking her as my territory, whispering in her ear that she was mine and no one else's while she screamed into the sheets that yes, she was mine, that I should split her in two, that I should leave it inside her forever.

“Do you see?” she said afterward, her head on my chest and semen still running between her thighs. “Now you understand what it feels like.”

And there was the truth I'd refused to see: she'd needed to see me desired by someone else before she could desire me completely again. Jealousy was the fuel our bed had been missing.

***

What came next, I still don't know what to call. One afternoon, Carmen sat me down on the sofa with an odd calmness and took my hands.

“I have to tell you something,” she began. “I'm pregnant.”

The world stopped for me for an instant. I counted the days, the weeks, the nights we'd reclaimed. I looked at her, searching for a certainty her eyes didn't entirely give me.

“Is it...?” I couldn't finish the question.

“It's yours,” she said too quickly. “I want it to be yours.”

“I want it to be yours” is not the same as “it's yours.” That sentence lodged itself in me, and I still carry it. Damián disappeared from the gym soon afterward. Lorena stopped seeking me out in the elevator, as though she'd suddenly lost interest. Carmen became affectionate and attentive, a model wife again, and I learned not to ask certain questions.

***

Today I sleep holding my wife almost every night. I desire her more than ever, and she desires me too—or that's what I tell myself when I turn out the light, slide my hand between her thighs, and find her already wet. I built a new man to win her back, and I succeeded, but I won a woman who only burns when she feels she might lose me.

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I hear her breathing softly beside me and wonder whether the war is over or whether we're only in a truce. I don't know who really won. I only know that neither of us is willing to let go, and that desire, when born from the fear of losing, never fades. That's why I confess it here, where no one knows us: so I can finally understand what it was we did to each other.