The Fantasy Valeria Turned Into My Sentence

The first time Valeria took me down to the basement room, I thought it was a game. A game between adults, a shared fantasy that would end with the two of us laughing in the upstairs bed, with things going back to where they belonged.

It was not a game.

The room smelled of leather and her expensive perfume, but mixed with something denser, more чуждо. There was a padded chair in the center, with leather straps on the armrests and at the ankles. Valeria pointed to it without a word and I sat down. She tied me up with a precision that was not new, that did not improvise. She had practiced this before, or thought about it many times before carrying it out.

—Tonight you don’t take part —she said—. Tonight you only watch.

I understood when I heard the footsteps on the stairs.

They were two men I had seen before at work dinners: Valeria’s partners, men in expensive suits and callused hands who treated business as if it were an act of conquest. They took off their jackets without looking at me, as if I were just another piece of furniture. Valeria took off her dress and stood under the only lamp that was on, lit in a way that was anything but accidental. She turned toward me, looked me straight in the eyes, and then turned her back on them to face me.

The first, the taller one, came up behind her and took her tits in both hands, squeezing them with the same certainty he would use gripping the wheel of a car that belonged to him. He pinched her nipples until they went hard and dark, and Valeria moaned for the first time without taking her eyes off me. The second knelt in front of her, spread her legs with his palms, and put his mouth on her cunt. I could see the back of the man’s head moving between her thighs, his tongue working her clit with an office worker’s patience, and I could see Valeria’s face above all of it, calm, attentive to me.

—Watch closely —she said to me—. Don’t miss a thing.

The one behind her slid a hand down her belly until it met the other man’s mouth. He slid two fingers inside her and started fucking her with his fingers while the other kept sucking her clit. The sound of her wet cunt could be heard over the breathing of the three of them. I pulled at the straps by instinct and the leather buckles creaked. Valeria smiled.

She broke free of the hands holding her and walked to a low bench upholstered in leather, in the exact center of the room, where the lamp’s beam fell straight down. She lay on her back, with her head hanging over the edge toward me, her throat exposed and her eyes turned upside down, seeking mine from that position. The taller one stood in front of her, opened his trousers, and took out a thick cock already hard, which he rested on her lips without ceremony. Valeria opened her mouth and he shoved it all the way in at once, to the hilt, until I saw her swallow and jerk with the reflex. The other settled between her open legs, spit into his hand, slicked his cock with saliva, and drove it into her with one thrust. Valeria moaned with a mouthful of cock, choking.

The two of them started fucking her at the same time, at a rhythm that synced on its own, as if they had already done it before or as if her body were setting the beat. Every thrust from below pushed her upward and drove the other man’s cock deeper down her throat. I heard the dry smacks of hips against her thighs, the wet sounds, the short grunt that came out of Valeria each time the man on top pulled out of her mouth to let her breathe. Strings of spit dripped down her cheekbones into her hair. Her tits bounced with the rhythm. And she never stopped looking at me, inverted, her eyes shining in a way I had never seen in bed with me.

They changed her position without asking. They lifted her, bent her over the bench on her knees, and pressed her face to the leather. The one with the callused hands climbed on from behind and grabbed her hair, yanking her head up so she would keep looking at me. The other stood in front and shoved it into her mouth again, now with her on her knees. They fucked her cunt and her mouth for an hour, taking turns without saying a word, spitting on her, biting her nipples, prying her ass open with their thumbs to look. When the first one came, he pulled out of her mouth at the last second and emptied his load all over her face, on her lips, on her eyelashes, in her hair. The second finished inside her, his hands on her hips, growling through clenched teeth. Valeria stayed still for a moment, with cum running down her chin and someone else’s semen slipping out of her thighs, and she never stopped looking at me once.

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t look away. And the hardest part, the thing that fucked me up inside in a way it took me weeks to understand, was that Valeria never stopped looking at me once. Every time her body tensed, her eyes sought mine. Not to ask for my approval. To confirm my defeat. There was a huge difference between those two things, and she knew it better than anyone.

When the men left, Valeria untied me with the same calm with which she had tied me up. She asked if I wanted water. I said yes. She brought it to me. We didn’t say anything else that night.

***

The dinner at the Malpartida residence was in March.

Valeria arrived in a black dress, fitted, with a side slit that showed her hip without effort. I accompanied her. I took the coats at the entrance. I poured the wine when I was told to. No one at that table addressed me with more than two words in a row.

There was a man at the back of the room: Don Federico, owner of several hotel chains on the northern coast. Sixty years old, low voice, the kind of man who doesn’t need to raise it because everyone is used to listening to him. He ignored me all evening, except once when he asked me for more sparkling water.

At dessert, Valeria slipped me a folded note under the tablecloth. I opened it with one hand, without lifting it from the table.

“When everyone leaves, wait in the hallway. Don’t come in until I call you.”

I waited forty minutes leaning against the cold wall of the corridor, listening to the sounds coming from Don Federico’s study. The dragging of furniture. Valeria’s voice, transformed into something I didn’t quite recognize, like when you hear a familiar song in a language you don’t understand. The dull, repeated impact of something against wood. Through the thick door, a clear “like that, like that, give it all to me” was heard in a broken voice, followed by the grunt of an old man who knew what he was doing. Then the rhythm quickened and what was hitting the wood stopped being furniture: it was her, it was Valeria’s body against the desk, taken from behind with a steadiness that didn’t tremble even at the end.

When she opened the door, her hair was messed up and her lips swollen. Her chin was shining. She had a dark mark on her collarbone, and another lower down, at the base of her breast, which she hadn’t bothered to cover. She looked down at me with that calm she had after getting something important.

—Come in and say hello to Don Federico.

Don Federico was in the leather armchair, reclined, his shirt collar open and a brandy glass in his hand. His fly was still open. On the side table, an empty glass, and on the rim of the crystal, the unmistakable mark of my wife’s lipstick. He extended his other hand to me. I shook it. I smelled her semen and cunt on his fingers, mixed with the expensive soap she had just washed herself with on top.

—Your wife is remarkable —he said—. I hope you know what you have.

—I do —I replied.

It was completely true.

***

In July, Valeria organized a trip to the coast in a rented van. There were seven of us. I was driving.

In the back seats were Nicolás, a photographer Valeria had admired for a long time; Ramón, who bought and sold contemporary art in galleries in the capitals; and a man everyone called “the Croat,” whose real name nobody ever said in front of me. Valeria sat between the three of them.

The first two hours of the trip were normal. Music, conversation, a stop at a fruit stand by the side of the road where Valeria chose three oranges and put them in my hands as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Then night fell and the voices dropped until they faded out.

In the rearview mirror I started seeing what was beginning in the back seats. Nicolás’s hand on Valeria’s neck. Her throwing her head back, eyes closed. The Croat leaning in from the other side, unhurried, like someone who knows he has all the time in the world. I kept my eyes on the road just long enough not to run us off it, but the mirror pulled at me like a magnet.

Nicolás unbuttoned her dress in front and took out her tits with a photographer’s calm, as if he were framing a shot. He licked them and bit them without urgency, and Valeria arched her back against the seat. Ramón, on the other side, slid his hand under her skirt and started doing something I couldn’t see but that made her spread her knees and bite her lip. The Croat took his cock out of his pants without pulling them down all the way, put it in Valeria’s hand, and closed her fingers around it. She started jerking him off slowly, her wrist loose, looking out the window with that distracted concentration she had when she was thinking about several things at once.

At some point she turned and took his cock into her mouth. She sucked him while Ramón kept working her cunt with his fingers and Nicolás sucked one nipple like a man who had no intention of letting go. From the driver’s seat I could hear the wet sloshing, the contained gasp when she gagged, the Croat’s low voice praising her in a language that wasn’t ours. The van smelled of cunt and men’s sweat and the wax of the new upholstery.

At some point after midnight, Valeria said my name. Not like a cry for help. Like a short, precise command. I pulled the van over onto the shoulder, turned off the running lights, and walked to the back.

—Here —she said, pointing to the floor between her feet.

I knelt.

She was naked from the waist up, her dress rolled up like a belt. The three men had settled around her without moving away. The Croat shoved it back into her mouth from the side; Ramón sank his fingers between her legs to the knuckles; Nicolás squeezed her tits with both hands, pressing them together, biting the hollow between her breasts. And over all of that, Valeria’s hand on my head.

Ramón let out a short laugh. The Croat said nothing. Nicolás ignored me as if I were part of the luggage. Valeria rested a hand on my head with a gesture that, from the outside, would have looked almost tender.

—Lick me —she said, without stopping sucking the Croat’s cock—. Eat me while they fuck me.

I buried my face between her thighs. She was soaked, swollen, warm against my mouth. I licked her slowly at first and then with more hunger, searching for her clit with the tip of my tongue, feeling Ramón’s fingers going in and out beside my face. I licked her clit until her hips started moving on their own against my mouth. When she came, she clamped her thighs against my ears until I stopped hearing; I felt the tremor run through her whole body, and above, far away, I heard the Croat grunt once and her swallow without protest.

—Good —she said—. Like that.

That’s how I spent the rest of the trip: without a seat, on the van floor, feeling every curve of the road in my body, with Valeria’s taste and the sweat of the other three in my mouth.

***

In September, Valeria tied me to the study chair.

Not roughly. Calmly. She adjusted each knot with the attention of someone preparing something delicate for an important occasion. When she was done, she checked that circulation wasn’t being cut off, that the sightline to the bed was completely clear, that I could see without effort.

She brought two people: a woman with very short hair and a deep voice whom she called Sonia, and the Croat, who by then was already as familiar to me as an object that had always been in the same corner.

What happened on the bed during the next hour was not for me. It was for me to witness without being able to touch it or interrupt it.

Sonia tore Valeria’s clothes off with her teeth, unhurried, and spread her legs over the white duvet. She ate her cunt with an open, hungry mouth, without a man’s technique and without his haste, pressing her thighs outward with her palms to expose her more. Valeria moaned differently with a woman: lower, rougher, almost in surprise. The Croat watched her from the headboard, naked, with his cock in his hand, not touching himself yet, waiting for his turn with the patience of someone who knows the final part belongs to him.

Sonia slid her fingers inside her and kept working her clit with her tongue at the same time, until Valeria came for the first time with a long spasm that shook her legs. Without giving her any respite, the woman climbed on top of her, tribadist, and rubbed her cunt against Valeria’s in a slow rhythm that began to build. Four breasts brushing, two wet cunts pressing against each other. Valeria dug her nails into Sonia’s back. I could see the red half-moons she left marked on Sonia’s white skin.

Then the Croat came up. He lifted Valeria by the hips and drove into her on her knees, on all fours on the bed, with Sonia lying beneath her so Valeria could keep eating her cunt while she was fucked from behind. The Croat gripped her waist with both hands and sank his cock all the way in with even thrusts, never changing rhythm. Valeria moaned with her face pressed to the other woman’s cunt. Her tits shook. The bed creaked. The lamp on the nightstand wobbled.

Every time my body reacted visibly, Sonia would slip out for a moment from underneath, come closer, and press something cold against my chest, right over the sternum: it wasn’t painful, but it was enough to cut the impulse off at the root. Valeria watched from the bed, between the Croat’s hands, with that particular attention she used when something truly interested her. I was hard enough to hurt against the fabric of my trousers, and I couldn’t touch myself, and I couldn’t close my eyes, and she knew it.

—Not yet —she said, without specifying who she was talking to.

The Croat came on Valeria’s back, with two long blows of his hand at the base of his cock that emptied his load between her shoulder blades. Sonia licked the semen from her skin slowly, with the tip of her tongue, and then kissed Valeria on the mouth, sharing it with her. I saw my wife swallow without taking her eyes off me.

When they finished, Valeria sat in front of me in the desk chair, very close, her breathing still uneven. She looked me in the eye for a full minute without saying anything. Then she ran one finger over my lower lip, slowly, as if measuring something. She put the finger in my mouth. It tasted like her, Sonia, and the Croat all at once.

—Tomorrow —she said.

Tomorrow took three days to arrive. And when it did, it was different from everything before: it was only for the two of us.

***

The board meeting was in November, on the sixteenth floor of the glass tower Valeria had chaired for four years.

I arrived with her, carrying the contract folder. I sat in the side chair by the wall, in the position that belonged to me: present but irrelevant, visible but nameless. Six men around the oval table, with views over the whole city. Investors, majority shareholders, men used to things moving when they decided they should. None of them asked my name.

The meeting lasted two hours. Valeria spoke most of the time without consulting the papers, without hesitating at any point, without conceding anything she hadn’t already decided to concede in advance. In the end, the six of them signed where she pointed.

Afterward, when the room staff had left and Valeria locked the door, she looked at me from the head of the table.

—Stay where you are.

She took off the skirt of her suit and stayed in the white blouse and thigh-high stockings, with no panties underneath. She climbed up onto the oval table, over the freshly signed contracts, and spread her legs. The six men stood up without haste and came closer one by one. The youngest, a thirty-something investor in a silk tie, knelt first and started eating her cunt over the signatures. The others undid their trousers without taking them off, with that restrained urgency of old men with money.

Valeria grabbed the cock of the one on her right and put it in her mouth without taking her eyes off the ceiling. She took another in her left hand and started jerking him off. The others waited their turn. The youngest rose from between her legs and penetrated her on the table, bracing her knees against his chest, fucking her with a face reddened by the effort. The polished mahogany creaked. The contracts crumpled beneath my wife’s back. She moaned with a mouthful of cock.

They took turns. One by one, each of the six investors fucked her on the boardroom table over the next forty minutes. They bent her over on all fours facing the glass wall, with the entire city below and the lit skyscrapers serving as her mirror. They sat her astride one while another fucked her in the ass with a finger wet with saliva. They came on her tits, on her face, on her back, in her open mouth. One finished inside her and she let him, without protest, her legs still open and his semen dripping onto the table.

What happened in the next forty minutes was a natural extension of the contracts they had just signed. Another kind of agreement, older, more elemental. The six men who had given up part of their capital acted as if they were recovering something in that sealed-off time. Valeria knew it. She had calculated it from the start, with the same coldness with which she calculated everything that mattered.

I served the whisky when they asked me to. I collected the glasses when they were done. I kept my eyes down long enough so no one had to be made uncomfortable by my presence in the room. When I passed near the table to take away the ice bucket, I felt on the sleeve of my suit a warm drop that wasn’t mine.

When the last investor left, Valeria reviewed the signed contracts in silence, checked the figures, and looked at me from the head of the table with that neutral expression she had after a victory. She still had semen on her cheek and at the corner of her lips.

—Clean your suit —she said—. We have dinner in forty minutes.

I cleaned my suit.

We had dinner in forty minutes.

***

The house by the lake was where everything took its final shape, the outline that would no longer change.

We arrived in October, alone for the first time in months. Valeria spent the first mornings reading on the terrace, her feet on the wooden railing and her coffee cooling on the little table without her noticing. I prepared breakfast, took it outside on a tray, and she accepted it without lifting her eyes from the book. We stayed like that for four days, in a silence that wasn’t uncomfortable.

On the fifth day a young man came from the nearest town. He brought a box of wines Valeria had ordered by phone. He must have been twenty-four or twenty-five, broad shoulders, that kind of body that doesn’t come from the gym but from carrying real things under the sun. His name was Bruno.

Valeria invited him to stay for lunch.

I set three plates on the table.

That afternoon, from the room where Valeria had told me to wait, I heard the voices on the terrace: her laughter, low and continuous; his laughter, nervous at first and then not. The scrape of a chair. Then silence. Then another kind of sounds, the ones I no longer needed to learn to recognize. Valeria’s breathing pushed rhythmically, her “like that, like that, give me harder” said without lowering her voice, knowing I could hear through the thin wooden wall. The impacts of Bruno’s young body against hers. A chair scraping. A very clear “put your whole cock in me” said almost as if for me. Then the long, broken moan of my wife coming, and a few seconds later the grunt of the boy emptying himself wherever Valeria had asked him to.

I didn’t move.

When night fell, Valeria came into the room. She sat on the edge of the bed where I was lying looking at the ceiling and watched me for a long while, thoughtful, her hands in her lap.

—Marcos —she said at last.

—Yes.

—Are you all right?

It was a strange question coming from her. Or maybe it was the most honest question she had asked me in a long time. I stayed silent, looking for the right answer, and I realized there wasn’t a right answer. There was only what was true.

—Yes —I said—. I’m fine.

Valeria nodded with a slowness that seemed to confirm something she already knew but needed to hear said out loud. She lay down beside me, on top of the blankets, fully clothed, and said nothing for a while.

—Bruno leaves tomorrow —she said at last—. Nicolás is coming next weekend. I want you to bring me breakfast at eight, before he arrives. I want that time with you, before everything else.

I felt something hard to name. It wasn’t relief exactly, though it resembled it. It was more like finding the ground under water after a long time floating without touching it.

—At eight —I said.

Valeria closed her eyes. Outside, the lake was still and completely dark. I stayed awake looking at the beam ceiling, thinking that the fantasy I believed I had accepted for her was, in fact, the only way I knew to be close to someone without the unbearable weight of having to be enough.

It was not a sentence imposed on me.

It was what I had chosen. I would keep choosing it tomorrow and after, without anyone having to ask me, without me having to explain it to anyone, including myself.