The Fantasy Valeria Turned into My Sentence
The first time Valeria took me 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 returning to normal.
It wasn’t a game.
The room smelled of leather and her expensive perfume, but mixed with something denser, something more foreign. There was a padded chair in the center, with leather straps on the armrests and around the ankles. Valeria pointed at it without a word, and I sat down. She tied me up with a precision that wasn’t new, that wasn’t improvised. She had practiced this before, or thought about it many times before carrying it out.
“Tonight you don’t participate,” 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 business dinners: Valeria’s partners, men in expensive suits with 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 slipped off her dress and stood beneath the only lit lamp, illuminated in a way that was anything but accidental. She turned toward me, looked straight into my 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 confidence he would use to grip the steering wheel of a car that belonged to him. He pinched her nipples until they grew hard and dark, and Valeria moaned for the first time without stopping her gaze from mine. The second man knelt in front of her, spread her legs with his palms, and pressed his mouth to her cunt. I could see the back of his neck moving between her thighs, his tongue working over her clit with an office worker’s patience, and I could see Valeria’s face above it all, calm, attentive to me.
“Watch carefully,” she told me. “Don’t miss a thing.”
The one behind her slid a hand down her belly until it joined the other man’s mouth. He pushed in two fingers and began fucking her with them while the other kept sucking her clit. The sound of her wet cunt could be heard above the breathing of all three of them. I instinctively tugged at the straps, and the leather buckles creaked. Valeria smiled.
She freed herself from the hands holding her and walked to a low leather-covered bench in the exact center of the room, where the light from the lamp fell straight down. She lay on her back, with her head hanging over the edge toward me, her throat exposed and her inverted eyes searching for mine from that position. The taller man stood in front of her, opened his trousers, and pulled out a thick, already-hard cock, which he placed against her lips without ceremony. Valeria opened her mouth, and he shoved it all the way in at once, right to the back, until I saw her swallow and shudder from the reflex. The other man settled between her spread legs, spat into his hand, ran the saliva over his cock, and drove it into her with a single thrust. Valeria moaned around the mouthful, gagging.
They both began fucking her at the same time, with a rhythm that synchronized on its own, as if they had done it before or as if her body set the tempo for them. Each thrust from below pushed her upward and drove the other man’s cock deeper into her throat. I heard the dry slaps of hips against her thighs, the wet sounds, the short groan that escaped Valeria each time the man above withdrew from her mouth to let her breathe. Threads of saliva ran down her cheekbones into her hair. Her tits bounced with the rhythm. And she never stopped looking at me, upside down, her eyes shining in a way I had never seen in bed with me.
They changed her position without consulting her. They lifted her, bent her over the bench on her knees, and pressed her face against the leather. The one with the callused hands mounted her from behind and grabbed her hair, pulling her head upward so she wouldn’t stop looking at me. The other stood in front of her and put himself back in her mouth, now with her on her knees. They fucked her cunt and her mouth for an hour, taking turns without saying anything, spitting on her, biting her nipples, spreading her ass with their thumbs to look at her. When the first came, he pulled out of her mouth at the last second and emptied his load all over her face, on her lips, her eyelashes, her hair. The second finished inside her, his hands on her hips, growling through clenched teeth. Valeria stayed still for a moment, cum running down her chin and the other man’s semen leaking down her thighs, and she never stopped looking at me.
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t look away. And the hardest part, what broke me apart inside in a way that took me weeks to understand, was that Valeria never stopped looking at me. Every time her body tensed, her eyes sought mine. Not to ask for my approval. To confirm my defeat. There was an enormous 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 whether I wanted water. I said yes. She brought it to me. We said nothing else that night.
***
The dinner at the Malpartida residence was in March.
Valeria arrived in a tight black dress with a side slit that showed her hip effortlessly. I accompanied her. I carried the coats at the entrance. I served the wine when instructed. No one at that table addressed more than two consecutive words to me.
There was a man at the back of the room: Don Federico, owner of several hotel chains on the northern coast. Sixty years old, a low voice, the kind of man who never needs to raise it because everyone is accustomed to listening to him. He ignored me throughout the evening, except once when he asked me for more mineral water.
At dessert, Valeria slipped me a folded note beneath 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 corridor wall, listening to the sounds coming from Don Federico’s study. Furniture scraping. Valeria’s voice, transformed into something I didn’t quite recognize, like hearing a familiar song in a language you don’t understand. The dull, repeated impact of something against the wood. Clearly, through the thick door, I heard a “That’s it, that’s it, give it all to me” in her broken voice, followed by the growl of an old man who knew what he was doing. Then the rhythm accelerated, and what was striking the wood stopped being a piece of furniture: it was her, it was Valeria’s body against the desk, being driven from behind with a steadiness that didn’t falter even at the end.
When she opened the door, her hair was tousled and her lips swollen. Her chin gleamed. There was a dark mark on her collarbone, and another lower down, at the top of her breast, which she hadn’t bothered to cover. She looked down at me with the calm she had after accomplishing something important.
“Come in and say hello to Don Federico.”
Don Federico was in the leather armchair, reclining, his shirt collar open and a glass of brandy in his hand. His fly was still open. On the little table sat an empty glass, and on the rim was the unmistakable mark of my wife’s lipstick. He held out his other hand. I shook it. I smelled her cunt and semen on his fingers, mixed with the expensive soap he had just used to wash himself superficially.
“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 some time; Ramón, who bought and sold contemporary art in galleries in the capital cities; and a man everyone called “the Croat,” whose real name no one used in front of me. Valeria sat between the three of them.
The first two hours on the road were normal. Music, conversation, a stop at a fruit stand by the roadside where Valeria picked out three oranges and placed them in my hands as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Then night fell, and the voices grew quieter until they faded away.
In the rearview mirror, I began to see what was starting in the back seats. Nicolás’s hand on Valeria’s neck. Her head falling back, her eyes closed. The Croat leaning in from the other side, unhurried, like someone who knew he had all the time in the world. I kept my eyes on the road long enough to keep us from leaving it, but the mirror pulled at me like a magnet.
Nicolás unbuttoned her dress in front and pulled out her tits with a photographer’s calm, as if he were framing a shot. He licked and bit them without urgency, and Valeria arched her back against the seat. Ramón, on the other side, slipped his hand beneath her skirt and began doing something to her that I couldn’t see but that made her spread her knees and bite her lip. The Croat pulled his cock from his trousers without taking them all the way down, placed it in Valeria’s hand, and closed her fingers around it. She began 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 suckled one of her nipples as if he had no intention of letting it go. From the driver’s seat I heard the wet sloshing, the restrained sigh whenever she gagged, the Croat’s low voice praising her in a language that wasn’t ours. The van smelled of cunt and male sweat and the wax on the new upholstery.
Sometime after midnight, Valeria said my name. Not as a cry for help. As a short, precise command. I pulled the van onto the shoulder, switched off the running lights, and walked toward the back.
“Here,” she said, pointing to the floor between her feet.
I knelt.
She was naked from the waist up, her dress rolled around her like a belt. The three men had arranged themselves around her without moving away. The Croat put himself back in her mouth from the side; Ramón drove his fingers between her legs to the knuckles; Nicolás squeezed her tits in both hands, pressing them together, biting the hollow between her breasts. And over all of it, Valeria’s hand on my head.
Ramón gave a short laugh. The Croat said nothing. Nicolás ignored me as if I were part of the luggage. Valeria placed one hand on my head in a gesture that, seen from outside, might have looked almost tender.
“Lick me,” she said, without stopping her blowjob for the Croat. “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, seeking her clit with the tip of my tongue, feeling Ramón’s fingers entering and leaving beside my face. I licked her clit until her hips began moving on their own against my mouth. When she came, she squeezed her thighs against my ears until I could no longer hear; I felt the tremor run through her entire body, and above me, very far away, I heard the Croat’s short grunt and her swallowing without protest.
“Good,” she said. “Like that.”
That was how I spent the rest of the trip: without a seat, on the floor of the van, feeling every curve in the road with my body, with the taste of Valeria and the sweat of the other three in my mouth.
***
In September, Valeria tied me to the study chair.
Not roughly. Calmly. She tightened each knot with the attention of someone preparing something delicate for an important occasion. When she finished, she checked that my circulation wasn’t being cut off, that my view of the bed was completely unobstructed, 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 had become familiar to me in the way an object that has always occupied the same corner becomes familiar.
What happened on the bed during the following hour wasn’t for me. It was for me to witness without being able to touch or interrupt it.
Sonia tore Valeria’s clothes off with her teeth, unhurried, and spread her legs on the white duvet. She ate her cunt with her mouth open and hungry, without a man’s technique or impatience, pressing her thighs outward with her palms to expose her more fully. Valeria moaned differently with a woman: deeper, huskier, almost surprised. The Croat watched from the headboard, naked, his cock in his hand, not touching himself yet, waiting his turn with the patience of someone who knew the final part belonged to him.
Sonia slipped her fingers inside her and kept working her clit with her tongue at the same time, until Valeria came for the first time in a long spasm that shook her legs. Without giving her a break, the woman climbed on top of her, tribbing, and rubbed her cunt against Sonia’s with a slow rhythm that began to build. Four tits brushing together, two wet cunts pushing against each other. Valeria dug her nails into Sonia’s back. I watched the red half-moons appear on Sonia’s white skin.
Then the Croat climbed onto the bed. He lifted Valeria by the hips and drove into her while she was on her knees, on all fours on the bed, with Sonia lying beneath her so Valeria could keep eating her cunt while the Croat fucked her from behind. The Croat gripped her waist with both hands and buried his cock to the hilt in even thrusts, never changing his rhythm. Valeria moaned with her face pressed to the other woman’s cunt. Her tits shook. The bed creaked. The bedside lamp wobbled.
Whenever my body visibly reacted, Sonia pulled out from beneath her for a moment, came over, and applied something cold to my chest, right above 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 gave when something genuinely interested her. My cock 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 whom she was speaking to.
The Croat finished across Valeria’s back, with two long strokes of his hand at the base of his cock that emptied his load between her shoulder blades. Sonia slowly licked the semen from her skin with the tip of her tongue, and then kissed Valeria on the mouth, sharing it with her. I watched my wife swallow without taking her eyes off me.
When they were finished, Valeria sat in the desk chair in front of me, very close, her breathing still uneven. She looked into my eyes for a full minute without saying anything. Then she ran a finger slowly across my lower lip, as if measuring something. She put the finger in my mouth. It tasted of 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 just for the two of us.
***
The board meeting was in November, on the sixteenth floor of the glass tower Valeria had presided over for four years.
I arrived with her, carrying the contract folder. I sat in the side chair beside the wall, in the position that belonged to me: present but irrelevant, visible but nameless. Six men around the oval table, with a view of the entire city. Investors, majority shareholders, men accustomed to making things move when they decided they should. Not one of them asked my name.
The meeting lasted two hours. Valeria did most of the talking without consulting the papers, without hesitating at any point, conceding nothing she hadn’t decided to concede beforehand. In the end, all six signed where she indicated.
Afterward, when the room’s 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 her suit skirt and remained in her white blouse and thigh-high stockings, with nothing underneath. She climbed onto the oval table, over the freshly signed contracts, and spread her legs. The six men rose unhurriedly and approached one by one. The youngest, an investor in his thirties with a silk tie, knelt first and began eating her cunt on top of the signatures. The others opened their trousers without taking them off, with the restrained urgency of older men with money.
Valeria grabbed the cock of the man to her right and put it in her mouth without stopping her gaze from the ceiling. She took another one in her left hand and began jerking him off. The remaining men waited their turns. The youngest rose from between her legs and penetrated her on the table, pressing her knees against her chest, fucking her with the effort reddening his face. The polished mahogany creaked. The contracts crumpled beneath my wife’s back. She moaned with her mouth full.
They took turns. One by one, each of the six investors fucked her on the boardroom table over the next forty minutes. They opened her on all fours facing the window, with the entire city below and the illuminated skyscrapers serving as her mirror. They sat her astride one man while another penetrated her ass with an index finger wet with saliva. They came on her tits, her face, her back, her open mouth. One finished inside her, and she let him, without protest, her legs still spread and the semen running down onto the table.
What happened during those 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 surrendered part of their capital acted as if they were reclaiming something during that sealed-off time. Valeria knew it. She had calculated it from the beginning, with the same coldness with which she calculated everything that mattered.
I served the whisky when they asked for it. I collected the glasses when they were finished. I kept my gaze lowered long enough that no one had to feel uncomfortable with my presence in the room. When I passed close to the table to take away the ice bucket, I felt a warm drop that wasn’t mine on the sleeve of my suit.
When the last investor left, Valeria silently reviewed the signed contracts, verified the figures, and looked at me from the head of the table with the neutral expression she wore after a victory. She still had cum 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 on the lake was where everything acquired its final shape, the outline that would never 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 growing cold on the little table without her noticing. I prepared breakfast and carried it outside on a tray; she accepted it without lifting her eyes from the book. That was how we spent four days, in a silence that wasn’t uncomfortable.
On the fifth day, a young man from the nearest village arrived. He was carrying a box of wine Valeria had ordered by phone. He was twenty-four or twenty-five, with broad shoulders, the kind of body that didn’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 places at the table.
That afternoon, from the room where Valeria had told me to wait, I heard the voices on the terrace: her low, steady laughter; his, more nervous at first and then not. A chair scraping across the floor. Then silence. Then another kind of sound, the kind I no longer needed to learn to recognize. Valeria’s breathing being rhythmically driven, her “That’s it, that’s it, give it to me harder” spoken without lowering her voice, knowing I was listening through the thin wooden wall. The impacts of Bruno’s young body against hers. A chair being dragged. A “Put your whole cock in me” said very clearly, almost spoken for my benefit. Then my wife’s long, broken moan as she came, and a few seconds later the young man’s grunt as he emptied himself wherever Valeria had asked him to.
I didn’t move.
When night fell, Valeria entered the room. She sat on the edge of the bed where I was lying, staring 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 perhaps it was the most honest question she had asked me in a long time. I stayed silent, searching for the right answer, and realized there was no right answer. There was only the truth.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m all right.”
Valeria nodded slowly, as if confirming something she already knew but needed to hear spoken aloud. She lay down beside me, fully dressed, on top of the blankets, and said nothing for a while.
“Bruno is leaving 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 difficult to name. It wasn’t exactly relief, though it resembled it. It was more like finding the ground beneath the water after floating for a long time without touching it.
“At eight,” I said.
Valeria closed her eyes. Outside, the lake was still and completely dark. I remained awake, staring at the beamed ceiling, thinking that the fantasy I believed I had accepted for her was, in fact, the only way I knew how to be close to someone without the unbearable burden of having to be enough.
It wasn’t a sentence imposed on me.
It was what I had chosen. I would keep choosing it tomorrow and afterward, without anyone having to ask me, without my having to explain it to anyone, including myself.