My virtual muse wanted a threesome, and I only wanted her

Six years ago, I met Iara through a reading app. The same app I’d mentioned before, where you could comment on chapters and end up talking to strangers from anywhere in the world. She was twenty-three and I was twenty. Black-haired, tall —she told me proudly that first night she was one meter seventy-two— with a body that looked like it had come straight out of a magazine. She studied something related to administration or marketing; I never quite figured out exactly what, because when she talked about university she did so with disdain, as if everything about it bored her.

I had never imagined dating a girl like that, not even virtually. I’m aware that I’m not physically attractive, at least not in the conventional way people reward. I was used to looking from a distance. And then suddenly Iara started replying to my messages so quickly it left me breathless.

***

We lived in different countries. The time difference was three hours, which meant that when she finished dinner I was already lying in the dark in my room, my phone pressed against my face and the volume turned off so my mother wouldn’t come in asking who I was talking to.

My mother. That’s another story. I still hadn’t come out of the closet and I doubt I will for a long time. My parents are strict evangelicals, the kind who quote Leviticus when someone mentions marriage equality on the news. For those of us who also belong to the LGBTQ+ community and grew up in a house like that, I don’t need to explain any more. You know what I’m talking about. The double life isn’t drama, it’s routine. You get used to deleting messages, using fake names, smiling at the family table while inside you’ve got a volcano.

—What’s your real name? —Iara asked me one night, after a month of talking.

—I already told you my name.

—You didn’t tell me the real one.

I gave her the real one. She laughed. Said she liked the fake name better, and from then on she called me that. As if she were the one who had invented me.

***

Before Iara, I’d had two other virtual relationships. Neither of them came close to what we had. They were lukewarm conversations, photos of landscapes, calls that cut off after twenty minutes. Iara was different from the start. She had a way of asking things that felt like an exam. She wanted to know what books I read, what music I listened to, what I thought about control, about obedience, about trust. She repeated the word trust a lot.

Two months in, she suggested I become her submissive.

It wasn’t a joke. She sent me a multi-page document, with rules, hierarchies, hard and soft limits. I read it all that same night, hidden under the sheets, cheeks burning and my right hand inside the waistband of my pajama pants without even noticing, rubbing my cunt over my panties while I read the part about punishments. I’d never heard so many terms all together. I barely knew what BDSM was from some old post and from a show I watched in secret at a hotel when I traveled with my aunt.

—You don’t have to say yes now —she wrote—. I want you to think about it.

I thought about it for three days. I masturbated every one of those three nights thinking about her, with two fingers buried to the knuckles, biting the pillow so I wouldn’t moan. Then I said yes.

***

Maybe if I’d had more experience I would have seen the signs. But at twenty, you don’t see signs, you see opportunities. And Iara was a huge opportunity, bright, dangerous.

The first few weeks were better than I’d imagined. She sent me long voice notes telling me exactly what she wanted me to do and what time. I had to send her a photo every morning as soon as I woke up. Another at noon. Another before bed. If I was more than ten minutes late without warning her, I was punished.

The punishments were tasks. Writing a sentence a hundred times. Staying on my knees on the floor for an hour while I told her some intimate memory. Once she had me slide an ice cube up my thigh and describe the cold to her, second by second, until it melted against my skin. When the ice reached the crease of my groin it was already half-melted and the icy water ran straight onto my cunt lips. A cry escaped me that I tried to swallow into the pillow. Iara, on the other end of the audio, laughed softly and told me to keep going, to run it over my clit until it was gone.

—Now open yourself up —she ordered—. I want to hear your fingers, splashing. Nice and wet.

I obeyed. I spread my lips with two fingers of my left hand and with my right I started pushing them in, one first, then two, while the cold water and my own hot slick mixed together and ran down my perineum to my ass. The sound was obscene, wet, impossible to hide. She didn’t say anything for several minutes, just listened. Then she asked me to pull them out, take my drenched fingers to my mouth, and tell her what I tasted like. I told her. My voice was shaking. She made me repeat the word cunt ten times, out loud, as loud as I dared with my mother three doors away. That night I barely slept. I came three times in a row, the last one with my mouth open against the mattress so I wouldn’t wake anyone.

—You’re very obedient —she’d say—. More than I expected.

I took it like a trophy.

***

Four months went by like that. I knew her schedule better than mine. I knew when she worked, when she went to the gym, when she saw her friends. I had arranged my life around hers, and for the first time in a long while I felt chosen. Not just desired. Chosen.

The video calls had become a ceremony. I had to show up naked or nearly naked. She would look at me for a long time before saying anything, silent, evaluating. Once she kept me with my legs open in front of the camera for ten minutes without speaking, just staring at my cunt, until I started trembling with shame and need. Then she told me, very calmly, to spit on two fingers and put them in my ass while I rubbed my clit with the other hand. Not to come until she allowed it. I held out as best I could, cheeks red and my tits rising and falling in front of the lens, until she said, “Now,” and I came with such a violent spasm I almost fell out of the chair. On the screen, Iara was smiling. She never stripped. Never. That was the pact.

Then the fights started.

I don’t remember what the first one was about. Maybe a comment I left on another girl’s profile on the app. Maybe an old photo that showed up in my gallery and she found when I handed her my phone during a video call. What I do remember is the voice she used. That same calm voice from the first nights, but now hollowed out from the inside, as if she were dictating a sentence.

—I don’t like feeling like I have to watch you.

—Iara, nothing happened.

—That’s for me to decide.

The arguments became weekly. Then daily. I cried in secret, in the bathroom, with the shower running to cover the noise. I apologized for things I hadn’t done. I invented guilt so she would calm down.

***

Her solution, when jealousy no longer let her sleep, was strange. So strange that the first time she told me, I thought it was a test.

—I want to open the relationship.

—How?

—That each of us can be with whoever we want. No hiding. No lying.

I didn’t understand. I didn’t want to be with anyone else. I had never wanted to be with anyone else. If I had, I wouldn’t have been under the sheets every night with my hot phone in my hands, waiting for her to talk to me first.

—I don’t agree.

—You will.

And she disappeared.

***

When I say disappeared, I’m not exaggerating. She vanished from the app, stopped reading my messages, didn’t answer my calls. One of the strictest rules she’d imposed on me was that I couldn’t look for her through other means. No social media, no emails, no messages to her friends. So the rule, now that she was gone, still held. I sat on the bed waiting like an obedient bitch.

It took her eleven days to come back. Eleven. I counted them.

—I thought about it —she said—. I don’t want an open relationship.

I breathed.

—I want a threesome.

I stopped breathing.

***

A virtual threesome. That was the idea. A third person joining the video calls, the chats, the dynamics. It was, according to Iara, one of her oldest fantasies. She wanted to see me with someone else while she gave the orders. She wanted to share me. She wanted —and she said this with a voice-note smile I still remember— to see how far my obedience would go when I showed it to another person.

I didn’t share that fantasy. I’m monogamous to a ridiculous degree. My idea of pleasure did not include a third person, virtual or real. But I was a hair’s breadth away from losing her again, and the thought of another eleven days was so unbearable that I said yes.

I said yes out of fear. Not desire.

***

The first candidates were chosen by her. First a girl, Camila, a tattooed blonde who lived near her and appeared in a joint call just once. I actually found Camila charming. She asked me things, laughed at my jokes, didn’t seem eager to rush forward. At one point, obeying Iara, she took off her T-shirt and showed me her tits, two small tits with pink nipples pierced through with little silver rings that gleamed when she moved her torso. I, also on Iara’s orders, spread my legs in front of the camera and ran one finger over my cunt from top to bottom, slowly, so Camila could see. She bit her lip, said “you’re so pretty” in a slightly hoarse voice, and instead of getting turned on, I felt something strange in the pit of my stomach, like when you’re about to vomit. I kept going anyway. I slid in two fingers, pulled them out shiny, sucked them while looking at the camera. Iara clapped over audio. Camila laughed awkwardly. Two days later, Iara told me Camila wasn’t working. She gave no details. She discarded her like someone tossing aside a garment in a fitting room.

Then two guys showed up, brothers according to her, though I suspect they weren’t brothers but friends she’d grouped together to make the proposal more appealing. One was named Mauro and the other Damián. Neither of them made it to the first video call. Iara intimidated them. That’s what they said before backing out: that she was too intense, that they didn’t feel comfortable. Iara insulted them in private with me. She said they were cowards, useless, that men were always the same, that they wouldn’t even know where to put their dick if they were guided by a map. I nodded in silence. In part, she was right. Iara was intimidating. That was why I had agreed to everything, too.

***

Then she disappeared again. Longer than the first time. Almost a month.

During that month I finished my final exams, went out with a friend from work, cut my hair. Small things happened, and all of them felt like relief. Without her audios, without the mandatory photos, without the rules, I could sleep late on a Saturday. I could go to the movies without telling her. I could exist without keeping an eye on my phone. And the truth is, existing without keeping an eye on my phone was the most erotic thing that had happened to me in months.

It’s not that I no longer desired her. I did. One night I masturbated thinking about her, my hand moving slowly between my legs, imagining her giving me orders in my ear; I came quickly, no drama, and fell asleep on my side. Before, that same orgasm would have kept me awake until dawn, checking the chat every five minutes. Not now. My body had gotten used to something else: being calm.

***

When she came back, she brought a new guy. Mateo. Twenty-one years old, nice, a little awkward on camera. He wanted to please her, that was obvious. And he wanted to please me too, which was confusing for all three of us.

We did one video call. Then another. Then one where I was supposed to touch myself while he gave me instructions and she supervised. I undressed down to the waist. Iara was on one screen, Mateo on another. Me in the middle, sitting on the edge of my bed, with the lamp angled just right so my mother wouldn’t hear from the hallway.

—Suck your fingers first —Mateo told me, shyly, glancing sideways at Iara to check that what he was asking was okay—. All three. Nice and slobbery.

I sucked them. All three.

—Now grab one tit with your other hand and pinch the nipple. Hard.

I obeyed. I pinched until the nipple went hard and red, the color of a ripe strawberry.

—Lower your hand —Iara cut in, taking back control—. Put three fingers in. Not little by little. All at once.

I put them in all at once. It hurt for a second and then it didn’t. On Mateo’s screen you could see he’d pulled down his shorts and was jerking off with his dick pointed at the camera, thick and veiny, his hand moving up and down fast. On Iara’s, you could only see her face, still, evaluating.

—Fuck yourself —she ordered—. Like it’s a dick. Fast.

I fucked myself with three fingers, fast, making noise on purpose because I knew that was what she wanted to hear. With the thumb of my other hand I rubbed my clit in circles. Mateo moaned on the other side, faster and faster, saying things like “you’re so hot,” “you do it so well,” automatic phrases that sounded scripted. Iara asked him to cum on camera. He did it a few seconds later, with a spasm that shook his whole torso, and the semen shot in streams against the lens and the desk.

—Now you —Iara said to me.

I came. My body responded because my body always responded to Iara, even when my head was somewhere else. I arched, clenched my teeth, felt the whole contraction of my cunt around my own fingers. But there was nothing inside. No real arousal, no shame, no curiosity. Just fatigue. A mechanical orgasm, obedient, empty. Like signing a paper.

When we finished, Iara told me I’d done well. Mateo said I’d been incredible. I closed the call, wiped my fingers with a tissue, covered myself to the neck with the duvet, and stared at the ceiling for an hour with my thighs still sticky.

***

A few days later I told her I didn’t want to continue.

She disappeared a third time. This time for two months. I didn’t count them in days. I didn’t count them in anything.

When she contacted me again, I had already gone back to reading books without thinking about her comments, had gone back to chatting with other girls on the app without feeling like I was committing a crime, had gone back to sleeping on my back instead of curled around my phone.

She sent me a long, conciliatory voice note. She said she had been wrong, that the threesome hadn’t really been her idea but rather a fantasy that had gotten into her head and that she didn’t know how to get out of, that she missed the version of me who sent obedient photos at seven in the morning. At the end of the audio, her voice a little broken, she asked me to touch myself for her one last time. To send her even a short audio, a moan, something. That she needed to hear me come thinking about her.

I listened to the whole thing, twice. And I didn’t answer. That night I touched myself, yes, but not thinking about her. Thinking about nothing. I finished quickly, with two fingers, my free hand stroking my belly as if I were comforting myself. And I fell asleep.

***

Sometimes, when I reread our conversations —I keep them, don’t ask me why— I’m amazed by how much desire can fit inside a screen. How many hours can be lived inside a chat. Iara was my first important relationship, even though we never touched outside Wi-Fi. She taught me things about the body and about myself I never would have learned alone. She taught me how to open a cunt with two fingers in front of a camera, how to hold a gaze while licking what you just pulled out of yourself, how to say certain words out loud without dying of embarrassment. But she also taught me something I didn’t understand at that age: that obedience is not love, and that when someone disappears and comes back without consequences, what follows is no longer desire, it’s training.

Today I’m still in the closet. My family is still the same. I’m still deleting messages and using fake names. But something changed. I don’t wait around for someone who leaves without warning anymore.

That, it seems to me now, was the real ending.