Strangers

Two months pregnant, I opened my phone and saw my husband with a coworker. I didn’t cry as much as I expected: I started counting how many fucks he owed me.

I only got two photos that morning: her naked facing the sea, and an hour later, an opened condom wrapper. She told me the rest in bed.

There was a week left before my wedding when I sat in the middle of the room and let a stranger convince me to go into that bedroom.

Take down the photos, hide my clothes, conceal the webcam, and hide in the ironing room: that night my wife would bring home a stranger and I’d be the only witness.

He came to inspect the boiler and, between sips of coffee, made a proposition neither of them had dared say aloud.

My wife noticed the waiter watching her as he served the tea, and I came up with the most forbidden idea of the entire trip: inviting him upstairs.

We went looking for a new dildo far from home, where no one knew us. What happened in that booth left the toy forgotten on the floor.

At the wedding everyone was looking at her in a way I never had. That night she came up to get me and I passed out drunk. What happened after that I only found out at dawn.

At three in the morning, the first message arrived. A woman tied to an unfamiliar bed and a sentence that chilled my blood: “this beauty is your wife.”

He held my gaze at the counter for ten seconds, and I knew I would follow him to the restrooms. That morning, I stopped being the perfect wife.

She treated the workers like trash. They decided to teach her, against the sink in her immaculate kitchen, exactly where she belonged that afternoon.

I've been faking it in bed for years. That night, while he ordered another drink, I exchanged glances with the man at the bar and knew I wouldn't return from the bathroom alone.

I never dared tell her. But that afternoon, while she was having coffee with her friends, I typed the two words that set everything in motion: “but accept.”

—I need you to sleep with my fiancée —he told me, as calmly as if he were asking the time. And I still didn’t know the trip would change me more than it changed them.

I had promised Daniel I would never look at another man. And yet, when he closed the door to that room, I was the one who took the first step.

We just wanted a free ride to the city. What happened in that hot cab changed me forever, and her even more.

I opened the door half-dressed, my hair a mess and the bed still warm. He looked at the basket of my lingerie before he looked at me, and I didn’t bother to cover myself up.

Each email brought a new photo and a crueller line. I drank whiskey in front of the screen, not knowing whether the woman tied up was truly my wife.

When she crossed the workshop threshold that night, she knew she would leave as a different woman. She wasn’t going to resist. She was going to surrender, because her husband’s life depended on it.

I never imagined I’d be the one pushing my wife toward another man, but there I was, reading every email with a racing pulse and a dry mouth.