The Married Man Who Looks for Me When She Sleeps

—Your wife doesn’t complain, does she, with a stud like that at home…

I said it with my mouth still swollen, lipstick smeared over my cheek, and my whole body throbbing like one tired muscle. The black lingerie I’d put on for him hung in tatters from my hip, and between my legs I felt that sweet burn a man leaves behind when he’s taken his time. I stroked his cock, still halfway between hardness and rest, still wet with me, and I looked at him with the foolish tenderness of someone who has just been happy.

Damián didn’t answer right away. He stayed looking up at the stained ceiling of the motel, one arm bent under the back of his neck and the other resting across my back, fingers spread as if he wanted to take all of me in.

—Well —he said at last, his voice lower than usual—. Don’t be so sure. It’s been almost two years since anything happened at home.

Almost two years.

And something tightened inside me, not out of pity for him, I admit, but from a dirty, hot thrill that rose from my stomach. I leaned down and kissed him on the mouth with a delicacy that’s nothing like me, because I’m not delicate. I’m a soft, forty-something queen who straps herself into cheap garters and paints her lips in the car’s rearview mirror before going into these transient rooms. But he kissed me back slowly, unhurriedly, as if we had a whole life ahead of us, and that undid me.

***

We met on a rainy Tuesday, almost a year ago now, at the loading dock of the warehouse where I handled the accounts for a parts wholesaler. He came and went in his white van, unloading boxes, always with his T-shirt plastered to his back with sweat and that habit of his of glancing sideways, measuring, saying nothing.

I signed the delivery notes for him. He thanked me with a grunt. It took us weeks to exchange more than three words, and all of them were about the weather or the traffic on the ring road. But there are looks that last just long enough not to be innocent, and his always lingered a second too long on my face, like he was looking for something I didn’t show during office hours.

One Friday afternoon, with the warehouse already empty and the guard making his rounds through the back parking lot, I found him smoking by the dock. I asked him for a light without having a cigarette. He understood right away. There was no speech, no textbook seduction, no clever line: just his big hand resting on the back of my neck and my back against the cold concrete wall.

—Is this what you were after? —he asked in my ear, rough.

—Since the first delivery note —I answered.

***

Since then it’s Thursdays. His wife thinks he goes out to play cards with the guys from the garage, and maybe sometimes he really does play. But most Thursdays he takes the old road, parks the van behind the motel sign so it can’t be seen from the road, and knocks on the door of the room I’ve already paid for, with the lights half-dimmed.

By then I’ve spent half an hour getting ready. I shave my legs in the tiny bathroom, pull on the stockings, fasten the garter belt, adjust the padded bra that gives me fake but soft-to-the-touch breasts. I put on makeup. I look at myself. And when the knock comes, I open the door slowly, as if I hadn’t spent the whole afternoon waiting for him.

That night he came in smelling of gasoline and cheap cologne, the two things that have already become irresistible to me. He looked me up and down, without touching me yet, and blew out a breath through his nose like a horse.

—Fuck —he said—. You get better every Thursday.

—I get dressed up for you —I replied, and shut the door behind him with my foot.

***

He kissed my neck first, slowly, while his hands slid my bra straps down and squeezed the flesh at my sides without the slightest shame. Damián likes to take his time at what others call the beginning, as if for him it weren’t the beginning but the middle. He bit my shoulder, licked my collarbone, made me turn to face the wall, and stayed a long while tracing my back with his lips, going down vertebra by vertebra to the edge of my underwear.

When he got to the bottom, he parted me with his hands and buried his face between my ass cheeks like someone finally sitting down at a table he’s been staring at for hours. There’s no elegant way to tell it, and no need. His tongue worked with a patience that left my legs shaking, and I clung to the headboard, biting the back of my hand so I wouldn’t scream and be heard in the next room.

—Stay still —he ordered when I tried to turn around—. Not yet.

And I obeyed. With him, obeying isn’t surrendering, it’s trusting. I gave him the full weight of my body, those extra kilos I hate so much in the mirror and that he handles like a gift, arranging me however he wants, opening me, preparing me with his fingers while he whispered in my ear things I’d rather not repeat here because they still turn me on as I write them.

***

When he finally came into me, he did it slowly, holding back, looking me in the eyes through the stained mirror on the dresser. I held his gaze as long as I could, until pleasure forced my eyelids shut and made my forehead fall to the mattress.

What came after had nothing delicate about it. Damián pushes with his whole body, with that man strength of his from carrying boxes every day, grabbing my hips, setting the rhythm, stopping right at the edge only to start again deeper. The bed frame was protesting against the wall. I was begging for more in a voice I didn’t recognize as my own, a sharp, broken voice that only comes out with him. Sweat dripped from his forehead onto my back, drop by drop, and every drop felt like a little medal.

—Tell me I’m the only one who fucks you like this —he demanded, never stopping.

—The only one —I panted—. There isn’t another. I don’t want another.

And it was true, even if he didn’t know how much.

***

I came before he did, face against the pillow and his hand clamped on my neck, in a long shudder that emptied me out. He held on a little longer, just enough to see me come apart, and when he finished he did it with a low grunt, collapsing across my back with all his weight, panting into my hair.

We stayed like that for a while, fitted together, not talking, our breathing slowly settling. Then he did what he always does, what no one else has ever done for me unless I asked: he turned me carefully, kissed my belly, and went down to take me in his mouth with calm devotion, unhurried, until he drew out one last tremor that left me weak and nearly in tears. Not because I asked him to. Just because he wanted me to finish the night all the way through too.

—You didn’t have to… —I started to say.

—Shut up —he cut me off, climbing up to lie beside me—. I like it.

***

And now here we are, in this thick, warm silence after, with the yellowish light of the bedside lamp and the ceiling fan spinning lazily. I stroke his hairy chest, trace the line of an old scar he has on his side, comb his hair with a gesture that looks far too much like tenderness. And I think about her, his wife, whom I don’t know and don’t want to know.

I think about everything that gets lost. This way he has of kissing, as if every kiss were a question and also its answer. The infinite patience of his tongue, the honest strength of his hands, that look with which he pins a man to the bed without having to touch him. The fact that, after wrecking you, he gathers you back up.

The whole man gets lost, not just the stud. Because there are studs all over this world, I’ve known almost all of them in rooms like this, and most of them get up, pull their pants on, and leave without looking back. Damián doesn’t. Damián stays. He lets himself be loved for a while. And in that while I am, for one hour stolen from the week, the luckiest person on this road.

—What are you thinking about? —he asks me, his eyes already half closed.

—Nothing —I lie, because there are things I don’t tell him. If I keep them to myself, it’s because I’m afraid that if I let them out, he’ll get scared and won’t come back, and then I wouldn’t know what to do with everything he’s awakened inside me.

***

I know what I am and I know what this is. I don’t fool myself about being a girlfriend, even if sometimes, in the dark, I let myself do it for a minute. I know that in a little while he’ll get up, shower quickly to wash off my smell, put on his work clothes, and go back home, to his bed, to his side of a mattress where nothing has happened for almost two years. And I’ll be left picking up the torn stockings from the floor, wiping off my makeup in front of the mirror, becoming once again the soft accounts clerk from the parts warehouse.

But I know this too, and it’s the only thing that truly matters to me: next Thursday he’ll park behind the sign again. He’ll knock on the door again. He’ll look me up and down again and let out that breath through his nose. Because at home there’s a man starving to death, and here, in this transient room that smells of bleach and desire, there’s someone willing to feed him every week of the world.

I curl up against him, kiss his shoulder, and say it to him again very softly, almost to myself, with that sly satisfaction of someone who knows he’s won a war the other one doesn’t even know she’s losing.

—Your wife is missing out, my love…

And yes. She is missing out. The silly woman. Let her keep playing cards with her husband on some other night. Thursdays are mine.