My Friend’s Boyfriend Chose Me at the Swinger Party

Damián and I were introduced by the person I would have least expected: Carolina, his then girlfriend and one of my best friends. I’d already had a couple of experiences with my ex in swinging encounters, so when she told me about a party where desire had no rules, it didn’t take much for me to say yes.

The house was in one of those expensive neighborhoods where the gates are high and the gardens are silent. Inside, though, there was nothing silent about it. I walked through the hallways with a glass I barely tasted, watching a dozen people scattered through the rooms. Some were tangled up in the living room, on the leather sofas. Others, in the kitchen. Others behind doors no one bothered to close all the way.

I knew the theory of these places. I knew couples looked for each other, offered themselves, exchanged partners. But it’s one thing to know that and another entirely to be standing there, my heart pounding in my chest and an uncomfortable wetness growing between my legs without permission.

No one pressured me. That was the golden rule Carolina had repeated to me in the car, while we did our makeup in the rearview mirror: no one touches anyone without a yes. I could look at everything I wanted, I could leave whenever I wanted, I could stay and just watch. And yet even watching was already costing me my sanity. Every moan bouncing off the walls tightened a knot lower in my stomach.

I set my glass down on a shelf beside an outrageously expensive painting no one seemed to notice, and went upstairs.

My feet found the stairs almost by instinct, as if my body knew where to go before I did. At the end of the upstairs hallway, a half-open door let out a warm light and some moans I recognized immediately.

It was Carolina.

I didn’t dare go in. I stayed in the doorway, peeking through the crack like someone looking at something that didn’t belong to her. My friend was in the middle of the bed with a guy and another woman I didn’t know, the three of them tangled in a slow, shameless threesome. They had taken off her black dress, that one so short she had tried on three times before leaving, and now four hands were moving over her at once.

Seeing her like that undid me. Carolina had her head thrown back, biting her lip, one hand slipping between her legs over her underwear while she begged for more in a broken voice. I had never seen her so loose, so in command of her own pleasure.

I felt my body responding to what I was seeing and hearing. It was a reaction I didn’t choose: it just happened, as if those stimuli were for me.

Without realizing it, I brought my right hand to my chest. I stroked over the fabric, found my nipple, pulled it just a little. My breathing was breaking into short pieces. I was so focused on what was happening on the other side of the door that I didn’t hear the footsteps behind me.

A hand took me by the waist and turned me gently.

It was Damián.

I had seen him a couple of times in photos and at some dinners, but there in the low light he seemed like someone else. Medium height, lean, with curly hair falling over his forehead. He looked at me, glanced for a second toward the half-open door where his girlfriend was losing herself in ecstasy with two strangers, and looked back at me. There was no reproach in his eyes. There was something else.

He smiled at me and, without saying a word, took my hand and brought it to his crotch. I felt how hard he was through his pants, tense, urgent.

I lowered my gaze to see what my fingers already knew. He put a finger to my lips, asking for silence.

—This is going to be our secret —he murmured.

I didn’t answer. There was no need.

I knelt in the hallway, right there, with the music rising from downstairs and Carolina’s moans slipping through the crack. I unbuckled his belt, pulled the fabric down, and took him with both hands before bringing him to my mouth. He was big, bigger than I had expected, and I had to go slowly.

Damián tangled his fingers in my hair. Not to force me, but to set the rhythm, to decide how much went in and how much he let me breathe. I could hear him hold his breath every time I reached the back of my throat. With my other hand I stroked the rest of him, never taking my eyes off him from below, savoring the way his jaw tightened.

***

After a few minutes he lifted me by the shoulders. Without letting me go, he led me into the next room, a smaller one, with a narrow bed and a floor lamp that left half the room in shadow.

He laid me down carefully. He lifted my skirt, moved my underwear aside with his thumb, and stood looking at me for a moment, as if he wanted to burn the image into memory before going on. I was already soaked, I could feel it, and the waiting was almost unbearable.

When he finally entered me, he did it slowly, centimeter by centimeter, watching me the whole time.

—So good —he said in a very low voice, sliding inside me.

I felt him filling me completely, reaching a place few others had touched. I was so wet there was no pain, only that dense pressure that forced me to breathe through my mouth. He started slowly and then began to speed up, each thrust deeper than the last.

The pleasure was almost noisy, but I swallowed it down. Carolina was in the next room, separated from us by a thin wall, and the mere idea of her walking in and finding us like this tightened my throat. I bit the pillow to keep from crying out while he held me by the hips.

At some point I felt a different pressure, an urgency I couldn’t name. I asked him to stop, frightened, but Damián didn’t stop.

—Let go —he said in a hoarse voice—. I know what it is. Let yourself go, trust me.

And I let myself go.

My whole body contracted in a way I had never felt before. The orgasm hit me all at once, wild, and with it something else: a wave that shook me from the inside and soaked the sheets, his thighs, everything. An ejaculation I had never thought possible in me. I couldn’t keep quiet. I screamed into the pillow while he kept moving, pushing the pleasure even farther.

When he pulled out of me, another spasm ran through my whole body. And before I could catch my breath, I felt his tongue. He came down between my legs and started sweeping over my clit from top to bottom, fast, while I kept trembling and leaking uncontrollably.

I didn’t want him to stop. I grabbed his hair and pressed him against me, forcing him to drink it all. He did it without complaining, until the trembling eased.

Then he sat up. He wiped his chin with the back of his hand, gave me one last smile, and left the room without a word, as if none of it would have any consequences.

***

I stayed alone in the room a while longer, putting myself back together. I fixed my hair, got dressed as best I could, still shaky-legged. When I finally went downstairs, I found Carolina in the foyer, dressed and furious, waiting for Damián with her arms crossed.

I didn’t understand anything at that moment. I said goodbye with an awkward hug she barely returned, convinced that everything between us was still fine.

I was wrong.

I found out much later, and from Damián’s own mouth. When he came out of the room, Carolina had just finished her threesome and, passing through the hallway, stopped beside the thin wall that separated us. She heard everything. And, worse for her, she caught the exact moment through the crack when I came apart in that squirt she had never managed to have, no matter how hard she tried.

That was what broke her. Not so much her boyfriend’s betrayal, but seeing me reach something that had always been denied to her. The fact that he later went down to drink my fluids and returned to find her mouth with his own was the last straw.

For weeks I felt guilty. I wrote to her, tried to explain myself, swore to her that none of it had been planned, that the hand that turned me in the hallway wasn’t something I’d sought out. I never got a reply. Sometimes I still wonder whether what she really couldn’t forgive me for was sleeping with Damián or orgasming in a way she had been chasing for years.

Carolina and Damián’s relationship, two years together, ended a few weeks after that party. She blocked me on every social network and I never heard from my friend again.

As for Damián, I never parted ways with him. What began as a secret in a hallway turned into a strange complicity, without labels and without promises. We kept going to parties like that together, presenting ourselves as a couple even though we weren’t, sharing encounters and collecting anecdotes that would take us hours to tell.

We trust each other in a way few lovers ever do, I sometimes think, while I watch him looking for someone on the dance floor. And then he turns his head, finds me among the crowd, and smiles at me just like that first night, as if we were still keeping the same secret.