My Husband Shares Me, and That Night Everything Came Out

Damián and I never pretended to be a conventional couple. From our second year of marriage on, I understood that what would crush other men’s pride only turned him on: knowing another man desired me, imagining me in someone else’s hands, then hearing every detail afterward with my head resting on his chest. It wasn’t resignation or weakness. It was his way of loving me, and over time it became mine too.

—You only live once —he’d say whenever he noticed something on my mind—. If you feel like it, try it. And then tell me everything, without leaving anything out.

That phrase, repeated for years like a standing permission, was what pushed me toward Bruno.

I met him at the gym, a huge place in a chain whose owner, Esteban Vidal, was Damián’s friend from university. Bruno was the new trainer, Argentine, with a back so broad it blocked the light when he stood in front of me, and a smile that knew perfectly well the effect it had. For weeks he’d been correcting my posture with his hands lingering longer than necessary, and for weeks I’d been letting him correct me.

—You need to open your hips more —he murmured one afternoon, almost pressed to my ear, with the gym already half empty—. Like this. See how everything changes?

Everything changed, yes, though not exactly in the way he meant to teach me.

That night I told Damián over dinner. I told him about the hands, the breath at my nape, how my stomach had trembled when I felt Bruno’s chest against my back. Damián set down his cutlery and looked at me with that calm of his that I always mistake for coldness until I see his pupils dilate.

—And do you want him?

—I’m curious —I admitted—. I’ve never been with someone like that. So… big.

—Then you already know what I think —he said, and his hand slid up my thigh beneath the tablecloth—. But be discreet. The gym is Esteban’s, and gossip flies.

Discreet. That word would end up haunting me.

***

The first time was in my own house, on a winter afternoon when Damián was away. Bruno came under the pretext of a private session and within ten minutes the weights were forgotten on the living room floor. He kissed me like he wanted to swallow me whole, one entire hand cupping the back of my neck, and I felt the size of a doll in his arms.

I undressed him slowly, savoring every muscle the gym had carved over years. When I knelt in front of him and took him into my mouth, I heard him suck in a breath through clenched teeth and grip the back of the sofa. I looked up to see his face, that expression of a man used to things going his way and who still couldn’t believe what was happening.

—Wait —he gasped after a while—, wait or this will be over before it even starts.

He lifted me off the floor with no effort, as if he were picking up a towel, and sat me astride him. He entered me slowly, forcing his way in, and I sank down on him to the hilt with a slowness that tore a long moan from me. There was no hurry. There were months of calculated brushing against each other finally giving way to something concrete, hot, real.

The best came afterward, when he stood up with me still impaled on him and started walking through the living room carrying me aloft. I wrapped my legs around his waist, my arms around his neck, and with every step I felt myself being speared a little deeper. He carried me like that across the whole floor of the house, a weightless doll pinned through by his body, until the orgasm shook me in a way I don’t remember ever having felt before. I bit into his shoulder to keep from screaming.

That night, when Damián came back, I told him while lying next to him in the dark. Every detail. The carrying, feeling weightless, the bite. He ended up making love to me with a different intensity, fed by the images I drew for him with words. That was ours. That had always worked.

***

What neither of us calculated was Bruno’s mouth.

The first sign that something was wrong came from Damián himself, one night he came home from dinner with old colleagues with a strained look on his face. Esteban Vidal had been there.

—He asked me about you —Damián said, pouring himself a drink he didn’t need—. And about Bruno.

I felt the floor shift a little under me.

—What did you tell him?

—The truth. That I knew, that I encouraged you. This isn’t a cheating scandal and I made that clear. —He drank—. But there’s more, Renata. Your trainer’s out there bragging. He says he’s sleeping with the most spectacular woman in the whole city, one who’s crazy about him, that all he has to do is show her his pecs and she falls at his feet, eager to stroke him like she’s snorting cocaine off his body.

—That’s impossible —I murmured, though inside I recognized every word, the tone, the cockiness.

—It’s not. Esteban has a recording. He played it for me. It was you, without a name but it was you, described in every detail. —Damián set down the glass—. And he’s put the decision in my hands. If he wants, Bruno won’t work in a gym anywhere in the province again.

Anger and shame rose up my neck at the same time, hot, tangled together in a way I couldn’t untangle. Part of me wanted to disappear. Another part, the one I’d rather not examine too closely, throbbed with a dark excitement at the idea of having been recorded, photographed, desired to that extreme.

—It’s not your decision, or Esteban’s —I said at last—. I’m as guilty as he is. I want to speak to Esteban myself.

***

We met two days later in a café by the harbor, at the end of the workday. Esteban stood when he saw me arrive, the obligatory two kisses, that air of his, like a man who knows too many things about too many people and dispenses them like money.

—First of all, I want to apologize —he began—. I know you didn’t like how I handled it.

—The sensible thing would have been to call me, not Damián —I cut in—. Making him decide Bruno’s future feels humiliating to me. What does that make me?

—I didn’t think it through. It seemed like an awkward matter and I wanted to handle it discreetly.

That word again.

—I want to hear everything. The recording. And whatever else you have.

Esteban let out a defeated breath. From a leather folder he took out an envelope the size of a sheet of paper and placed it on the table, between my tonic water and his coffee.

—To get someone fired or force a settlement, you need proof —he said, almost apologetically—. I hired someone. I didn’t know it was you until I saw the photos.

I took them out with a steady hand and a pulse betraying me from within. There were about twenty. Bruno and me leaving the gym. Sitting in a café, his hand on my arm in a gesture that revealed more than it admitted. And then the others, the nighttime ones, taken from a distance with a telephoto lens through the curtains we never quite close: Bruno and me standing in the living room, face to face; kissing; me in a bra; the two of us naked, my back arched, his hands covering me completely.

And then I found it. The image of the carry. Me hanging from his body in the middle of the living room, legs locked around his waist, head thrown back, impaled on him like a mantis clinging to its prey. I recognized the exact instant, the feeling of weighing nothing, the orgasm that split me in two. The wetness burst out of me uncontrollably just from looking at it, sitting there in a café, across from a man watching my face for exactly that.

I put them down on the table before it showed too much.

—How could they…?

—They’re professionals. Getting into any building is easy for them. —He pushed the envelope toward me—. Keep them. There are no copies, you have my word. And the recording. —He slid a small memory stick next to the envelope—. It’s all there. I warn you, it’s not pleasant. He talks about you in a very ugly way.

—Play me a piece. Here.

He hesitated, looked around, and in the end brought the phone close with the volume turned all the way down. Over the background noise of some bar I recognized Bruno’s voice, that Argentine cadence that had whispered very different things into my ear so many times:

“She’s a machine, never gets tired, la reputa. All I have to do is show her my pecs and she eats out of my hand. The hottest girl in the whole city, boludos, and I’ve got her eating out of my palm whenever I feel like it.”

Esteban cut it off.

—There’s more. Worse. I don’t think you want to hear it.

I stayed looking at the reflection of the water in the glass frontage, not knowing what hurt more, whether the betrayal of his mouth or how perfectly it matched everything I had let him do.

—What do you want me to do? —Esteban asked—. Bruno is one of the best trainers I’ve got. If you were anyone else, I’d give him a dressing-down and he’d learn. But with you it’s different. He doesn’t come back. Unless you tell me otherwise.

—Are you implying I might want to keep going after this?

—In the audios you both sound very in tune —he said, and there was no malice in it, just the cold calculation of someone who reads people for a living.

I put the envelope and the memory stick in my bag.

—Let me think about it. And Esteban… thank you for stopping it. Even if you handled it terribly.

***

I got home still trembling, the images stuck to my retinas. Damián was waiting for me with a drink ready, ice and a slice of lemon, because he’s known me since before I knew who I was.

—How did it go? —he asked.

I set the envelope on the table. I set down the memory stick. And I let him see my face, which is what he was really after.

—Look at them —I said.

He went through them one by one, unhurried, and I watched his neck, the way he swallowed, the pupils widening just like when he listens to me in the dark. When he got to the carry, he stopped for a long time.

—Here you’re flying —he murmured.

—Here I’m finishing —I corrected him.

I took the envelope from his hands and sat astride his legs, as I had done with another man, but this time with the only man who truly holds me. I spoke in his ear while unbuttoning his shirt. I told him about the absent weight, the sensation of being pinned, the orgasm the camera had stolen through the glass. I told him what Bruno’s voice had said about me and how much my face had burned listening to it in that café.

Damián lifted me by the hips with a growl and carried me to the bedroom, and although his arms don’t have the same reach as the other man’s, he made me feel exactly what I needed to feel: that I was his, that all of it—the gym, the photos, the voice, the carry aloft—belonged to him just as much as my body did. He took possession of me slowly at first and then without restraint, and I let myself be carried by the tide with the same surrender with which I’d let myself be carried days before.

—What are you going to tell Esteban? —he asked afterward, with my head on his chest, where these stories always end.

—To keep him away. That I don’t want him to ruin Bruno’s life, but that he must never cross my path again. —I kissed him over his heart—. Bruno bragged about having me eating out of his hand. And it turns out the only hand I eat from is yours.

Damián smiled in the dark. I closed my eyes and, before falling asleep, decided I wasn’t going to destroy the photos. Some nights, when he wanted to, we’d look at them together again. After all, each one of them belonged to him. Just like I did.