I Imagined My Friend’s Boyfriend and He Came Into My Room

Every weekend is the same ritual, and none of us complain. A group of friends gets together, some with their partners and others single, and the more people show up, the better the night turns out. This time, as always, we stayed at the house Mateo’s parents have on the outskirts. He lends it to us when they travel, and that saves us the rent anywhere else: all the money goes to food, snacks, and alcohol.

The plan never changes. We dance until we’re out of breath, throw ourselves into the pool with our clothes on, drink until the sky changes color, and go back to our routines counting down the days until the next Saturday. It sounds repetitive, I know, but there’s something about that predictability that comforts me. Or there was, until that night.

Because that night someone new came.

Carla, one of the girls in the group, showed up with her boyfriend. She’d mentioned him a couple of times, but none of us had met him in person. And when he walked through the garden door, in that half-open shirt and with the smile of someone who doesn’t need to try to be liked, I felt the air thicken in my throat. He wasn’t just handsome. He had something harder to name, the kind of presence that forces you to look even when you tell yourself not to.

At first he kept quiet, a little on the sidelines, watching us like someone studying unfamiliar ground. But liquor does its work, and after the second round he was laughing at Mateo’s jokes and talking music with the rest of us as if he’d known us all his life. I kept watching him without meaning to. Every time he leaned in to whisper in someone’s ear, every time he threw his head back laughing, something tightened inside me.

He’s Carla’s boyfriend. Behave.

I repeated it to myself several times. It did no good.

Close to midnight I went upstairs to one of the rooms to look for a hair tie, because the heat and sweat had already stuck my hair to the nape of my neck. I took the tie from my bag and, on my way back through the hallway, I passed the upstairs bathroom. The door was ajar. And what I saw froze me to the spot.

It was him. He had Carla sitting on the sink, her dress hiked up to her waist and her legs wrapped around his hips. He was kissing her neck while moving against her, slowly, with a confidence that left me speechless. Neither of them saw me. They were too deep in their own thing.

I should have kept walking. Any decent person would have looked away and gone downstairs. I stayed. Just a few seconds, but enough for my heart to start racing and a thick heat to slide from my chest down to my stomach.

And then I did the worst thing: I replaced Carla’s face with mine.

I imagined myself on that sink. I imagined his hands on my thighs, his mouth on my neck, the weight of his body pushing against mine. The fantasy hit me so hard I had to lean against the hallway wall. I was so turned on I could feel my underwear wet against my skin, and I knew, with a shameful certainty, that I couldn’t go back to the party like that.

***

I slipped into the room I’d claimed as mine when I arrived, closed the door, and leaned against it with my eyes shut. The bass from the music thudded downstairs, distant, as if it belonged to another world. Up here it was only my ragged breathing and that image I couldn’t get out of my head.

I didn’t think about it too much. I took off my T-shirt and unclasped the top of the bikini I was still wearing from the pool. I lay down on the bed with my legs open and let my hands do what my body had been asking for since he walked through that door. One hand on my breast, massaging slowly; the other sliding down, finding what was already soaked without any effort.

I moaned very softly, biting my lip so I wouldn’t make a sound. Every time I closed my eyes I saw him, his fingers instead of mine, his voice whispering in my ear. I slid two fingers inside and arched my back against the mattress.

More. I want more.

I remembered that in my bag, among my spare clothes, I kept the toy I always brought on these outings, in case the night ended with me alone in a borrowed bed. I fumbled for it, turned it on, and the vibration tore a long sigh from me. I inserted it slowly at first, holding back, and then I picked up the pace, chasing the orgasm I needed with an almost painful urgency.

I was so deep inside my own fantasy, so surrendered to pleasure, that I didn’t hear the door. I didn’t notice that someone was opening it carefully, coming in, watching me for a few seconds from the threshold. The first sign I wasn’t alone was a warm hand sliding along the curve of my hip.

I opened my eyes sharply. And it was him.

For an instant my brain short-circuited. I thought I was still imagining him, that the fantasy had become so vivid I could now feel it on my skin. His fingers moved up my side to my breast and covered it as if they had every right to be there. I was so aroused I didn’t even cover myself. Being heard, being seen, at that moment I didn’t care about anything.

—Aah, yes… —escaped me, still hardly able to believe it.

I felt his hand replace mine. His fingers stroked me with a skill that had nothing to do with the awkwardness of a stranger, and when they went in, two at first and then three, I knew they knew exactly what they were doing. I gripped the sheets with both hands, twisting beneath him.

—That’s it, beautiful, keep going for me —he murmured against my ear—. Don’t stop.

And then I understood completely. It wasn’t my imagination. It was real. I had him between my legs, in his underwear, with the bulge in his boxers pressing against the fabric as if demanding to get out.

***

For a second shame tried to get the better of me and I tried to pull away, to sit up, to recover some of the sense I’d lost when I came up to that room. He wouldn’t let me. He tugged gently at my legs, pulling me back toward him, and kept moving his fingers inside me, faster now, without mercy. I didn’t resist. Why lie to myself: it was exactly what I had been wanting.

—Do you like that? —he asked, and he didn’t wait for an answer.

I felt the first wave run through me, that warning that the orgasm was already close. He noticed it too. He pulled his fingers out, pushed his boxers down, and positioned himself against me, and when he thrust inside I let out a moan that must have been heard all the way in the garden. I didn’t care. Let them think whatever they wanted.

—Faster —I asked him, clutching his shoulders—. Don’t stop, please.

He moved with an intensity that left me breathless. With every thrust he pushed me against the mattress, and I met him by lifting my hips, seeking him, wanting him even deeper inside. I wrapped my legs around him and dug my nails into his back, and he leaned down to kiss me as if he wanted to devour me, his mouth open and his breathing ragged.

—Turn over —he said then, pulling back only slightly—. I want to see you while I’m moving you.

I obeyed without thinking. I turned around, bracing myself on my hands and knees, and felt him enter me again from behind, at an angle that made me clench my fists over the sheets. Now the only sounds in the room were our bodies crashing together and our broken breathing, and the bass from the music downstairs seemed like the most distant thing in the world.

—Like this, give it to me hard —I panted—. Make me come.

He grabbed my hair and pulled firmly while he slapped my ass, tearing a muffled cry from me. The sting of that hit mixed with everything else and I felt myself losing my mind completely. I was being fucked by a man whose name I barely knew, on a borrowed bed, with the entire party oblivious to what was happening over my head, and never in my life had I felt so alive.

And then it came. I felt something explode inside me and I let myself go with a shudder that ran from the nape of my neck to my feet. He followed seconds later, driving himself all the way in without pulling out, gripping my hips as he finished. I collapsed onto the bed, weak, breathless, my skin burning and a stupid smile I couldn’t wipe off my face.

I watched him in silence as he dressed. He pulled up his boxers, picked up his shirt from the floor, and, with his hand already on the doorknob, turned back for a moment to look at me.

—You’re delicious —he said slowly—. The kind a man would want to taste many times.

And he left, leaving me there sprawled out, undone but more satisfied than I remembered ever being.

***

I went back down to the party half an hour later, my hair finally tied up and a strange calm in my body. Carla was still laughing on the couch, wrapped around him, oblivious to everything. Our eyes met for barely a second, enough for us to understand each other, and then I carried on with the night as if nothing had happened.

What nobody knows is that that wasn’t the last time. Since then, every Saturday when the group gets together, we find a way to sneak off for a while. An empty room, the laundry room, the car parked at the back of the garden. The place doesn’t matter. We relive that first night over and over, chasing that fire I discovered while spying through a half-open door.

Sometimes, when I’m alone in my house, I close my eyes again and imagine him. Only now I don’t need to make anything up. I just remember.