The Night My Lover and My Boyfriend Met

My name is Mariana, and I’ve been with Diego for eight years. I was twenty-two when we moved in together; he was thirty-eight. The age difference that frightened my friends at first ended up being the best thing about us. Diego never wanted to lock me up, and I never wanted to lock him up.

Starting in our second year, we began talking about what we felt when we looked at other people. We didn’t promise to lie to each other. We didn’t promise not to desire anyone else. We only promised to talk about it when it came up, without drama. He knew I’d been seeing Camila for months, a twenty-six-year-old woman I’d met at the gym. He never asked me for details. Once, he asked me whether she was affectionate with me, and nothing more.

Diego had been with someone too. A coworker at the publishing house where he worked. He hadn’t hidden it from me either, but I didn’t want to know names or schedules. To each their own share of silence.

The Saturday that changed everything hadn’t been planned. We went out for drinks at a small bar in the San Telmo neighborhood, one of those places with candles on the tables and far too much noise. We ordered whisky on the rocks and started talking about a trip we wanted to take in the summer. Then the door opened, and Camila walked in.

I stared at her as though she had come to the wrong bar. We hadn’t seen each other in fifteen days. Her hair was tied back, and she wore a black shirt open to the third button. When she recognized me, she stopped dead three yards from the table.

“Diego,” I said without looking at him yet, “I’d like you to meet Camila.”

I said it plainly, because any attempt to ease into it would have been worse. Diego stood up, kissed her on both cheeks as if he’d known her forever, and pulled up a chair for her. Camila sat very straight, her hands folded on the table, and looked at the empty glass the waiter had just placed in front of her.

“Order whatever you want,” Diego said. “It’s on me.”

Ten awkward minutes passed, and then, suddenly, they weren’t awkward anymore. Diego asked her about her work, her sisters, a movie she’d seen. Camila laughed with that low laugh I knew so well, the one that came out when she started to feel comfortable. I drank two whiskies in a row without saying much.

When Camila got up to go to the bathroom, Diego put his hand on my knee.

“Do you want us to come home with you?”

“Do you want that?” I asked him. “To be with both of us?”

“I don’t know if I want to be involved. But I want to watch you with her. If Camila agrees, we’ll go.”

I looked at him, trying to decipher him. I’d slept beside him for eight years, and he still surprised me. Camila came back from the bathroom and stood beside the table, waiting.

“Will you come home with us?” I asked her.

“All three of us?” she asked, her voice trembling slightly.

“All three,” Diego replied.

Camila sat down again, drained the rest of her drink in one gulp, and nodded.

***

The taxi ride was silent. Camila sat in the middle, her hip pressed against mine and her knee brushing Diego’s. Nobody spoke. Every bump in the avenue brought us a little closer together. I felt around for her hand beneath her coat and found it, cold.

At home, Diego locked the door and went over to the living-room cabinet.

“Go upstairs,” he said without looking at us. “I’ll pour myself a whisky and come up in a while. Start without me.”

Camila went up first. I followed her up the stairs, watching her shoulders, that line at the nape of her neck that I had kissed so many times in her apartment, in the dark, with the feeling that I was stealing something. Now we weren’t stealing anything.

In the bedroom, we took off our clothes unhurriedly, as if we had the whole night ahead of us. We kissed standing beside the bed, and I loosened her bra clasp with one hand while holding her face with the other. Camila’s skin is very pale, and my fingers leave marks when I squeeze hard. That night, I squeezed hard.

We lay down. It began like so many other times: me on top, her beneath me, my hips working against hers, her tongue on my neck. But this time I knew the door would open at some point, and that added something new, a current that hadn’t been there before.

I moved down her body and opened her legs. Camila bit her hand when my tongue found her. I knew her. I knew exactly where and how. I made her come twice in a row, my face buried between her thighs and my fingers digging into her hips. Then I moved up, straddled her mouth, and let her do the same to me.

At some point Diego came in. I didn’t hear him open the door. When I lifted my head, he was already sitting in the chair in the corner, still dressed, a glass of whisky in his hand. I wanted to get down and go to him, but he stopped me with a gesture.

“Mariana, relax. Keep going.”

I looked at him, confused. Camila looked at him too, without moving. Diego stood up, set his glass on the dresser, and opened the bedside-table drawer.

“I have something for both of you.”

He took out a flat black cardboard box and set it on the bed. I sat up and opened it. Inside was a jar of amber liquid and a coiled USB cable.

“It’s a warming oil. You plug it in, and when that little light comes on, it’s ready. The texture changes with the heat. It’s good for the whole body. You can kiss each other’s skin with it, no problem—it doesn’t taste bad.”

I stared at him with my mouth open. Camila giggled softly.

“When did you buy this?” I asked.

“Last Tuesday.”

“Tuesday?” I did the math. The previous Tuesday, I had been with Camila in the afternoon.

“I’ve known for a while that you were going to bring someone home. I didn’t imagine it would be today, but I knew it would happen eventually.”

I didn’t know what to say. I kissed him deeply on the mouth, and he let me. When I pulled away, his eyes were shining.

“Try it,” he said. “I want to watch.”

I plugged in the oil. We waited through the long two minutes until the light came on. In the meantime, Camila pushed me back onto the bed and bit my left nipple until I screamed.

The oil smelled like something between wood and orange. I poured a little into my palm and spread it over her shoulders, her neck, between her breasts. It was barely warm, pleasant, not hot. When my fingers moved down her belly and slipped inside her, she arched as if I had touched her for the first time. I masturbated her slowly, my other hand closed over one of her breasts, while I kissed her mouth and bit her lower lip. Camila wouldn’t let me move; she had trapped my hand between her legs and pressed her head against my collarbone.

“Mariana, this is something else,” she said through clenched teeth. “I never want you to stop.”

I went down with my tongue. The mixture of the oil and her was strange at first, then addictive. I slipped two fingers inside her, slowly, and began moving them against the spot I knew drove her wild. She came hard and long, making a sound I had never heard from her before. While she was still trembling, I brought my free hand to my own crotch and masturbated myself to the rhythm of her breathing.

Diego remained in the chair. His pants were open, and he was stroking himself. He didn’t come to the bed. Every time I looked at him, he smiled and gestured with his head for me to turn back to Camila.

***

After a long while, Diego stood up and came back with something else. A black harness, with a dildo about the same size as his. I laughed.

“You planned the whole night.”

“I planned for the possibility,” he said.

He helped me put it on. The straps tightened over my hips with a metallic click that sent a shiver through my skin. Camila was on her back, legs spread and eyes closed, waiting for me. I put oil on the dildo and a little more between her thighs, then slowly penetrated her. Camila dug her nails into my shoulders and let out a moan that was almost a sob. I began to move. She lifted her hips to meet me. We kissed without stopping, saliva and oil mingling on our chins.

“Harder,” she asked.

I obeyed. The bed began making that noise against the wall that any neighbor recognizes. Camila had two orgasms in a row, one long and one short, without ever taking her eyes off mine. When she finished, she gently pushed me away so I would pull out, then sat up.

“Now me,” she said.

She carefully removed the harness. She lay me on my back and climbed astride me, but without penetrating me. She dipped her hands in the oil and began moving them over me. Shoulders, breasts, belly, thighs. My first orgasms came that way, without her touching me between the legs, just with her firm hands on my skin and her closed mouth on my nipples.

“Diego, this oil is witchcraft,” I said, my voice broken.

“I’m glad, love.”

Then Camila moved down. Her tongue made patterns I couldn’t follow. She held my thighs open with both hands and stopped from time to time to blow on me. I came several times. I lost count. When I thought I couldn’t take any more, she asked Diego to help her put on the harness.

I thought she was going to enter me from the front. I was wrong.

She turned me onto my stomach and sat on my legs. I felt the dildo rest between my buttocks, without pressure. She poured oil over my back and spread it with both hands until my entire body gleamed. Then she leaned forward and pressed her breasts against my back. The oil made her slide up and down while she kissed the nape of my neck.

“Open your legs,” she whispered in my ear.

I opened them. Her tongue moved down and found a place I had never let her find. I had told her and Diego a thousand times no, that it was the one place I preferred to leave alone. That night, I said nothing. Her tongue played slowly, without asking permission, and I arched against the pillow.

She ran her oiled fingers over the same spot. Then she pressed the tip of the dildo there and stayed still, without pushing. She moved back up, kissed my neck, and bit my earlobe. The dildo remained pressed there, without entering.

“Camila,” I said with my face against the pillow, “do it.”

“No.”

“Please.”

“I’m not the one who has to take that virginity from you.” She said it softly, almost in a whisper, and those words made me explode. I came so hard my eyes filled with tears.

When I lifted my head, I saw Camila get off the bed, go over to Diego, give him a short kiss on the mouth, and leave the harness in his lap. Then she came back, lay down beside me, and wrapped her arms around me from behind.

I lay still for a long moment, wishing Diego would stand up. He didn’t. He stayed in the chair, the harness in his hands, watching us. Then he placed the harness on the dresser, came to the bed, and lay down on the other side. He kissed my forehead.

“Not tonight,” he said.

I closed my eyes between them. I didn’t quite understand what had happened, or why he had chosen to watch instead of touch. But I understood that something between the three of us had just changed shape. Not for the worse.