The Messages She Shouldn’t Have Read That Night

Valeria collapsed onto the sofa with her knees drawn up against her chest. She had been like that for an hour, maybe more, with neither the strength to move nor to do anything useful with the pain. Her chest was so tight it felt as if someone had put a brick on top of it. The glass of wine she had poured before everything went to hell was still on the side table, half-finished, already warm. She picked it up with cold fingers and drank it in one gulp. The wine was sour and far too dry, but she needed it. She needed anything that would fill the space the silence left behind.

It did nothing.

That was when she remembered the phone. Rodrigo’s work mobile, that old Nokia he always left forgotten on the bedside table because it was just for company calls, he said. She had seen it there three days in a row without touching it or looking at it. Without having any reason to.

The reasons all came at once that night.

She got up from the sofa without turning on the lights. She walked down the dark hallway, driven by something that wasn’t exactly curiosity but a uglier, more urgent need. The bedroom was dim, with the green glow of the charger blinking on Rodrigo’s nightstand. The phone was still plugged in, waiting for her. She picked it up. The screen asked for a four-digit PIN.

She typed in their anniversary date. Wrong.

She typed in Rodrigo’s birthday. Wrong.

She typed in Mateo’s birthday, their eldest son’s.

Unlocked on the first try.

—Idiot —she whispered, her voice in tatters—. Your own son’s birthday. You didn’t even bother to change it.

WhatsApp loaded in a second. The most recent chat had no profile picture, just a first name: “Sandra.” No surname. No nickname. No attempt at concealment, as if he no longer cared whether she found it.

Valeria opened the last message.

It was a photograph.

Sandra was standing beside a window lit by late-afternoon light. In profile. Bare-breasted. One hand crossed over her chest, barely covering the dark, stiff nipples slipping between her fingers. The other hand, flat and soft, rested on a rounded belly that was no longer small: five months, maybe six. Her skin glistened with cream or sweat. She smiled straight at the camera. The text under the photo read: See how beautiful your son is making me? He’s growing well in here. When are you coming to see me, love?

Valeria did not close the screen.

She kept scrolling.

She knew she shouldn’t. She knew it the way you know you shouldn’t pick at a wound, but her thumb kept moving on its own, with that absurd logic of someone who needs to measure the size of the damage even when the damage is already irreparable.

Beach photos. Sandra in a black bikini, her body wet with seawater, deep cleavage pressed against the damp fabric clinging to her full, firm tits, her nipples hardening under the nylon. In one photo she had her arms raised and her eyes closed to the sun, the bikini bottoms wedged between her ass cheeks. In another she looked at the camera with that smile of someone who knows exactly what she’s doing, her hand slipped inside the fabric as if she were about to pull it down. Rodrigo had replied a day and a half later: Sorry I’ve been quiet. Everything’s chaos here. Valeria and the kids, you know. I wish I could disappear and turn up there with you on that beach, tear that bikini off with my teeth and fuck you in the sand until you forget your own name.

Valeria read that line twice. Fuck you in the sand until you forget your own name.

She wondered how many times he had told her he was exhausted, that weekends were for resting, that he needed silence. She had always thought it was work. The children. Routine. Now she knew it was something else. That it was her. That for months he had been telling her he was tired because he was coming inside someone else.

She kept scrolling.

There was a short video, shot vertically, in low light. Sandra lying on a bed with white sheets, her hair spread over the pillow, her eyes half-lidded and her mouth slightly open. She was completely naked. Her fingers moved slowly between her legs, two of them sunk to the knuckles inside her cunt and her thumb tracing slow circles over her swollen clit. With the other hand she was squeezing one breast, tugging her nipple until it turned white. She was murmuring a name.

Rodrigo’s name.

—Fuck me, Rodrigo, put your cock in me, I want you to fill me up again —moaned the muted voice in the video—. Like Saturday. Like Saturday, love.

The video lasted sixteen seconds. Valeria made it to eight before she switched off the screen. But the sounds had already burned themselves into her with a clarity she wouldn’t lose for a long time. The wet squelching of Sandra’s fingers going in and out. The broken breathing. Her husband’s name spoken with an intimacy that only comes after fucking many times.

She stood in the middle of the bedroom with the phone in her hand and her ears ringing. The children were asleep at the far end of the hall. The TV downstairs was murmuring something unintelligible. The street was empty.

She did not think. She only acted.

She sat on the edge of the bed, opened the drawer of her nightstand and took out the vibrator she hadn’t touched in months. She yanked off her pajama pants and panties and lay back. She propped Rodrigo’s phone against her pillow, screen lit, with Sandra’s photo visible from where she was.

She switched on the vibrator.

—Pregnant —she repeated very softly, almost to herself—. How convenient for both of you.

The vibration against her thigh sent a shiver up her spine. She spread her legs, her knees falling outward, and dragged the head of the vibrator along the inside of her thigh, slowly climbing to the lips of her cunt. She was already wet. She hated herself for it, but she was soaked, the moisture sliding all the way to the crease of her ass. She pressed the vibrator to her clit and a short moan slipped out of her, which she silenced with her teeth.

She kept her eyes open, staring at the photo. Sandra had soft features, dark hair, that smile of someone who has the upper hand. The belly was already impossible to ignore. It was real now.

She pictured Rodrigo driving to Sandra’s apartment that very night, ringing the bell, climbing the stairs without hurry. She pictured Sandra opening the door with that belly, with that smile. She imagined his hand resting on that new curve with a tenderness Valeria hadn’t received from him in far too long. She imagined his mouth then sliding down Sandra’s stretched navel, biting the inside of her thighs, burying his tongue between those lips swollen by pregnancy. She imagined Sandra moaning with a roughened voice, her hands tangled in Rodrigo’s hair, forcing him to eat her whole, pushing his face against her cunt. The same voice Valeria knew. The same tongue.

Pleasure arrived without permission, mixed with a rage she didn’t know whether to direct outward or inward. She could not separate one from the other.

—If you get to take everything —she panted, pressing the vibrator harder to her clit—, then I get what I want too.

She lowered her free hand and shoved two fingers into her cunt. She was so wet they slid in without resistance. She started fucking herself with her fingers to the same rhythm as the vibrator working her clit, all the while imagining the scene with a precision that surprised her. Rodrigo’s hands grabbing Sandra’s swollen tits, his fingers around nipples darkened by pregnancy hormones, squeezing until she screamed. The voice he would use, the same voice he used to say goodnight to her, now whispering obscenities in another woman’s ear: open your legs, like that, more, let me put it all the way in. The belly between them as physical proof of everything that had happened without Valeria knowing. His cock sinking slowly into a cunt that was no longer hers. Whole months of lies built on the same calm tone he used to ask whether she wanted dinner.

Her fingers dug into the sheets. The other two kept going in and out of her cunt with a wet sound that filled the bedroom.

—Bastard —she muttered through clenched teeth—. Son of a bitch. Put it in her. Put it all in her, asshole.

The orgasm hit without warning, sudden and long. It arched her back and pressed her thighs around her hand. Her cunt clenched in spasms around her own fingers, releasing a spurt of wetness that soaked her palm and ran down to the mattress. It wasn’t sweet. It was exactly what it was: the mix of something unbearable with something she couldn’t stop. She came screaming inwardly, mouth open but soundless, her throat closing around a howl that never made it out.

She switched off the vibrator. She lay staring at the ceiling with her fingers still inside, moving them softly, drawing out the last shudders of the contraction. Rodrigo’s phone was still lit on the pillow. The photo was still visible.

She didn’t turn it off.

She waited for her breathing to settle and slid her thumb back up through the chat, looking for more. Not because she needed more reasons. The reasons had been enough for an hour already. She did it because she couldn’t stop, the way you keep reading the doctor’s messages even when the diagnosis is already clear.

The message she found three weeks further down knocked the air out of her lungs in one blow. It was from a Saturday afternoon: Rodrigo writing to Sandra that that weekend Valeria had gone away to a wedding, and if she wanted she could come over and stay at the house.

Sandra had asked: With your kids there? Really?

Rodrigo: They go to sleep early and don’t wake up. We lock the door and that’s it. They don’t hear a thing. I want to fuck you in my bed, Sandra. I need to fuck you where I sleep every night.

Sandra: But it’s your bed. Our bed.

Rodrigo: Exactly. That’s why.

A pause of forty minutes. Then Sandra: Fine. But I want it slow. No hurry. I want you to eat me out first, for a long time, until I beg you.

Rodrigo: Whatever you want. I just want you here. With your belly on my sheets. With my son inside you while I fuck you.

Valeria closed her eyes for an instant.

That wedding had been on March fifteenth. She had left on Friday afternoon with her suitcase packed. She had called Rodrigo from the hotel to say she had arrived safely, the trip had gone fine, everything was all right. He had answered in that same voice of his: the children were asleep already, everything was calm, have fun and don’t worry.

He had brought Sandra into their house. Into their bed. With the children asleep on the other side of the hallway. He had locked the door, eaten her whole, fucked her all night, and the next day had stripped the bed, started the washing machine and not said a single word.

Valeria turned the vibrator on again.

This time she did not look at the screen. She closed her eyes and let the images come on their own. The room in darkness. The door locked. Sandra slowly pulling off her T-shirt, her belly visible in the gloom and her tits hanging heavy against it, dark nipples pointing downward. Rodrigo on his knees on the floor, yanking down her panties until he ripped them off, burying his face between those open thighs and eating her until she trembled. Sandra muffling her moans into the pillow — Valeria’s pillow — while Rodrigo licked her cunt with the same slow, patient technique with which he had driven her crazy in the early years.

Then the inevitable image: Sandra on all fours over the clean sheets, her belly hanging between her arms, her ass lifted and offered. Rodrigo behind her, gripping her hips, sliding in slowly the first time and then driving deep, to the bone. Valeria’s bed creaking with every contained thrust. The sound of skin slapping against skin deliberately muffled. His cock going in and out of Sandra’s drenched cunt, his free hand running over the curve of her belly and her hanging tits, as if he were stroking something that belonged to him.

She shoved in three fingers this time, forcing them, with the vibrator smashed against her clit. She fucked herself with them in fury, imagining it was Rodrigo’s cock entering her, imagining he’d picked the wrong bed, imagining he was confusing one woman’s cunt with the other’s. She imagined him whispering in Sandra’s ear the same thing he had told her years ago, when he still wanted her: you’re mine, like that, come with me, soak my cock. She imagined him filling Sandra with his cum, the semen dripping down her spread thighs onto the sheets Valeria herself had ironed.

By now rage and pleasure were one and the same thing. Indistinguishable.

She came with her teeth clenched, without making a sound, even though no one could hear her. The orgasm twisted through her long and filthy, while she kept fingering herself until the very last tremor, until her cunt hurt from clenching so hard. She pulled out her soaked fingers and looked at them in the green light of the charger. They were shining. She brought them to her mouth without thinking and sucked them slowly, one by one, in a gesture of defiance to no one, tasting herself as if she were the only thing she still owned.

***

She lay in the dark with heavy breathing and her eyes open to the ceiling. Rodrigo’s phone charger blinked green on the nightstand beside her. Hers did too, steady, without blinking.

She didn’t know what she was going to do in the morning. She didn’t know whether she would say something or pretend she had seen nothing, whether she would call a lawyer or her sister or simply wait for him to get home and look him in the face and find out what she felt when she saw him walk through that door with his usual face.

But tonight had been hers. Only hers.

Even if it hurt to the last inch.