What My Wife Did When She Went Out With Her Friends

Today marks thirty-five years since I signed the papers with Mariana and, looking back, I still struggle to understand how I lived the first five years of marriage without suspecting a thing. Five years believing that woman was exactly who she said she was, until time eventually taught me that only the first month had been truly mine. Then a Brazilian businessman she had dated before meeting me came back into her life, and from there it was an endless string of encounters she knew how to hide perfectly.

What’s most curious is that I was helping her without knowing it. I trusted her blindly and celebrated her plans with her friends, her office dinners, her trips to her sister’s house on the coast. There were nights when I personally dropped her off at the entrance to a building, believing she was being waited for at a birthday party and, as I found out many years later, inside there were two men and a bottle of whiskey waiting for her, with her cunt already wet before she even got in the elevator.

Mariana had that quiet intelligence of someone who watches before speaking. She knew which excuse worked for each occasion, knew when to hug me harder to seal the lie, and above all knew I wasn’t going to ask uncomfortable questions. She didn’t do it out of cruelty. She did it, as she later confessed to me herself, because she understood from a young age that pleasure was one thing and marriage quite another, and she never wanted to give up either. Neither the house with the garden nor the other men’s cocks that tore her open twice a month in hotel rooms.

Today I want to tell one of those stories. One among many, but surely the first that left me with that strange feeling of having been in the wrong place at the wrong time, without realizing absolutely anything.

It was Friday and I was dealing with a serious problem at the bank. A corporate account had gotten out of whack because of a duplicate charge, and if I didn’t sort it out before Monday, my job was on the line. I’d slept badly all week and that afternoon, when my coworkers invited me to the usual brewery, I said no. I just wanted to get home, eat whatever, take half a sleeping pill, and disappear until the next morning.

I got home around seven. Mariana was already upstairs, in the bedroom. I turned on the living room stereo, put on an old bolero record my father had given me, and opened a beer. I wanted to think. I made two calls to colleagues at the bank for ideas, jotted names and numbers in a notebook, and all the while I heard her moving above my head. Heels against the floor. Drawers opening and closing. The shower. The hair dryer.

When she came down the stairs, I looked up and for a moment I forgot about the bank problem. She was wearing a short black dress, with two slits at the sides that rode up above her hips. Very high, strappy shoes. Her hair pulled to one side, leaving her neck exposed. She smelled of a perfume I didn’t know.

—What a miracle, daddy. You home on a Friday? —she said as soon as she saw me, with that crooked smile she always used to disarm me.

I answered with a kiss on the cheek and asked where she was going all dressed up. She stepped over to the hallway mirror, pulled a wine-colored lipstick from a tiny purse, and reapplied it without looking at me.

—I’m going to Lorena’s apartment, a woman from upstairs. Her daughter’s birthday, but afterward us grown-ups are staying a while to have a drink.

A car horn sounded in the street. Mariana turned her head toward the window, nodded as if they were rushing her, and came over to me. She gave me a long kiss, far too long for a normal goodbye.

—Are you going to be out long? —I asked.

—No idea, daddy. Better if you go to sleep. You know how these things are, we start talking and before we know it it’s five in the morning.

—I might take a pill too. I can’t go on without sleeping.

—Take it, my love. Rest. I’ll find you fresh tomorrow.

She leaned down again, kissed me on the forehead, and walked toward the door. I watched her go, her hips marking each step, the two slits in the dress opening and closing like shutters, revealing that she wasn’t wearing anything underneath. I thought, with that innocence I only understand now, how lucky I was that she was going out with her friends and not somewhere where someone else would be looking at her.

The door closed. I stood there for a moment staring at the space she’d left behind, went to the kitchen, reheated some stew from the day before, ate without appetite, and went upstairs to the bedroom. The pill kicked in before I finished the second episode of the series. I was out cold.

***

I woke up with the sun coming through the window and the warm sensation of a body beside mine. Mariana was asleep face down, hair mussed, a pillow mark crossing her cheek. The lipstick was still intact at one corner of her mouth. I went downstairs, made two strong coffees, and came back to the room.

—Good morning, my love. How are you feeling? You must’ve been wrecked, right? —I said as I set the cup on the nightstand.

She stretched slowly, smiled with her eyes still closed, and propped herself up on her elbows.

—No, daddy, I barely drank anything. But I had an amazing time. We said we’d do it again soon.

—I’m glad, baby. You need to let loose with your friends.

Mariana looked at me over the rim of the cup, with a smile that at the time seemed mischievous to me and that years later I understood as something else.

—My crazy friends… you can imagine.

I couldn’t imagine a thing. I stroked her back over the sheet, drank my coffee, and went back to the bank issue, which ended up getting resolved by Monday with less drama than expected.

***

It took me almost twenty years to find out what had happened that night. And I found out because she herself wanted to tell me, once we were both fifty, during a long after-dinner conversation in which we’d opened the second bottle of wine and were alone. It was raining. We were talking about old things. Suddenly she lowered her voice, looked at me from the other side of the table, and said:

—Do you remember that Friday when you came home wrecked from the bank and took a pill?

It took me a while to place it. So many similar Fridays had passed. But something in her tone made me pay attention.

—More or less. Why?

—I didn’t go to Lorena’s daughter’s birthday party. Lorena didn’t exist. The horn you heard was Esteban’s.

Esteban was a merchant from Mendoza who came by Mariana’s office once a month to renew policies. I’d shaken his hand a couple of times at work events. He must have been ten years older than me, broad shoulders, the kind of way of looking at women that back then I had found pleasant.

—That day Esteban was in town for a congress —she went on, without taking her eyes off the plate—. He’d written to me at midday asking if he could see me that night, and I’d said yes. When you got home early from the bank I almost had a fit, because everything was already set. I’d shaved from top to bottom, daddy. Freshly showered, with a smooth cunt and an ass perfumed for him. I thought about canceling, but when I saw how tired you were, how willing you were to take the pill, I told myself it was a sign.

I set the glass down more carefully than necessary. I wanted her to keep talking.

—He took me to an apartment the company rented for its executives’ trips. A fifteenth-floor place with a view of the river. We went up without speaking. As soon as he closed the door he shoved me against the hallway wall and shoved his tongue down my throat. His hands were everywhere at once, one squeezing a tit over the dress and the other already lifting my skirt and between my legs. He put two fingers in me at once, without warning, and laughed softly when he felt how wet I was. “You came with your cunt ready, whore,” he whispered in my ear. And my knees were shaking to hear it. He ripped the dress off me before we got to the sofa, buttons flying everywhere. I was left naked in the entryway, still in my heels, and he was still dressed. He sat on the sofa and made me kneel between his legs.

—Mariana… —I tried to interrupt, but she lifted a hand.

—Let me finish, daddy. You’re going to hear everything. I undid his belt, pulled down his pants, and took out a cock I wasn’t expecting. Thick, long, veins standing out, much bigger than yours, and forgive me for putting it that way. I put it in my mouth without thinking. I sucked him like a hungry woman, daddy, all the way down, making noise, letting saliva drip from my chin. He grabbed my hair and rammed it down my throat, and I’d choke and come back up for air and go down again. I licked his balls one by one while I gave him a handjob. He looked down at me and said filthy things, that I was a pig, that I sucked cock so well, that he was going to fuck me in every hole. And the more he insulted me, the more my cunt ran down the insides of my thighs.

—Go on —I said, my voice rough, and I didn’t recognize myself.

—He threw me onto the sofa on my back and opened my legs like he was opening a book. He bent down and ate my cunt for I don’t know how long, daddy. He sucked my clit, shoved his whole tongue in and out, gently bit my lower lips. He made me come twice with his mouth before he put his cock in me. I was screaming, pulling his hair, digging my heels into his back. When he finally climbed on top of me and drove into me in one thrust, I felt like he split me in two. He started fucking me slowly, looking me in the eye, all the way in. “Do you like it, married woman?” he kept asking. “Do you like my dick inside you?” And I told him yes, more, harder. He rammed it so deep I could feel the blows in my stomach.

I listened with that strange mix of pain and arousal only someone who’s been through this will understand. Part of me wanted to get up from the table and break something. The other had a hard cock under the tablecloth and wanted her to keep talking.

—He put me on all fours on the rug and fucked me from behind while pulling my hair. He slapped my ass, daddy, so hard that the next day I still had the red marks from his fingers. He made me say dirty things and I said them. I told him he had the best cock I’d ever tasted, I told him to fuck me like a cheap slut, I told him things I’d never said to you and that came out of me all on their own in that moment. He changed positions a thousand times. He sat me on top of him and made me ride him until my thighs hurt. He laid me face down and entered me with my legs closed. He pressed me against the fifteenth-floor window and fucked me with the city below, the glass fogging up from my breath, and I thought that if anyone looked up with binoculars they’d see a married woman opening herself for a stranger.

—And…? —I said, unable to say anything else.

—And he asked for my ass, daddy. And I gave it to him. I’d never given it to you because I was embarrassed, and that night I gave it to him with my cunt burning. He put saliva on his cock, spread my cheeks open, and went in slowly, and when he was all the way inside I stayed still, feeling him throb. He fucked my ass patiently, without hurry, until I started moving on my own against him, asking for more. He came inside me, daddy. Inside my ass. A long, hot stream that I could feel rising through me. And then he laid me back on my back and put his cock in my cunt until it got hard again and he made me come again.

She paused, took a sip of wine, and finally looked at me.

—We stayed until five in the morning —she said—. Six hours. I’d never been with a man that long straight. Esteban had patience. He knew how to wait. He did things to me I hadn’t even dared ask you for because I was too shy. He finished me off four times that night, daddy. Twice in the cunt, once in the ass, and once in the mouth, and I swallowed everything, not letting a single drop fall, as if it were the most important thing in the world. And when I thought I couldn’t take any more, he’d take me to the edge again and let me fall. I came home at six, took a shower for half an hour rubbing myself well to get his smell off me, and got into bed beside you with my cunt still throbbing.

—He called me twice more that week. And he kept calling for years, every time he passed through the city. The last time was here, in this house, one afternoon when you’d gone to a game with your brother. We went upstairs. To our bed. He fucked me on top of the comforter you chose, daddy. He made me come face down against the pillow where you sleep, biting it so I wouldn’t scream. He filled my ass with cum again and I went downstairs to wash the sheets before you got back. And I don’t regret it, daddy. I’m not telling you this to hurt you. I’m telling you because we’re old now and because you needed to know who you slept with all these years.

***

I don’t know what expression I wore that night. I know I didn’t yell, didn’t break anything, didn’t get up from the table. I know I poured more wine, let her keep talking until she ran out of names and hotels, and that when we went upstairs to the bedroom we held each other like two old friends who had survived a war they could only now name. That night, with everything she’d told me turning over in my head, I undressed her slowly and ate her cunt for an hour, imagining it was him who had done it before, and she came three times screaming his name by mistake. I said nothing. I fucked her from behind like she’d told me he had fucked her, and she squeezed my cock with her ass as if she’d spent years waiting for me to ask.

Today, thirty-five years after that yes at the courthouse, I still sleep beside her. I didn’t forgive her right away, or all at once. I forgave her in layers, over months, sometimes grudgingly. I learned that the woman I had married was bigger, more complicated, and more alive than I had needed to believe for two decades. I also learned that my peace of mind had come at a cost, and that she had paid that cost in lies and I in ignorance.

Sometimes, when she gets dressed to go out and paints her lips in the hallway mirror, I still think of that Friday. I think of the black dress, the slits at the sides, the car horn in the street. I think of the man waiting for her on the fifteenth floor, the thick cock that split her in two against the window, the cum that rose through her ass to her throat. It doesn’t do me any good to remember it, I admit it, but it doesn’t hurt me nearly as much as it should. Sometimes, even, I get hard.

Maybe that’s why I keep writing these stories. To understand, thirty-five years later, what kind of man I was and what kind of woman Mariana is. And to finally accept that I wouldn’t trade her for any other.