My Wife and My Friend Meet Every Thursday at the Hotel

I knew it long before either of them dared to say it out loud. I knew they were lying to me, knew they had crossed a line the four of us had carefully drawn. Darío, my best friend, and Lucía, my wife, had started our exchange as a controlled game, and at some point the game had slipped out of their hands.

At first it was just flirtation. A look that lasted a second too long, a brush in the kitchen when they thought no one was watching, messages deleted before saving the phone. Carolina, Darío’s wife, and I would end each session and go home as if nothing had happened. But the two of them hadn’t stopped. They had started something separate, parallel, something that no longer included us.

Every Thursday, without fail, they met at the same hotel. They did it brazenly, knowing they had no permission, knowing they were breaking the rules we had negotiated so carefully, and precisely because of that, they kept doing it. Forbidden things had a taste allowed things never had.

Their first dates had been almost accidental. A coffee that ran long, a work excuse, desire held in check for weeks that one day simply couldn’t be contained any longer. They sorted it out in a hurry, in a discreet downtown hotel, with Darío yanking off her panties before he even closed the door and Lucía dropping to her knees to suck him without giving him time to undress completely. She took him into her mouth to the throat, swallowing and drooling, with the urgency of someone who had spent weeks imagining the taste of a cock she wasn’t supposed to try. He lifted her up, bent her over the desk, and drove into her in one thrust, without preamble, tearing a scream from her that the pillow swallowed. What was supposed to be a one-time thing ended with Lucía coming three times in a row and Darío emptying himself inside her. By the following week they already had a schedule.

When that first hotel became too small for what they wanted to do, they changed venues. They looked for one of those places designed for couples who don’t want to be seen, with a car entrance and check-in without getting out of the vehicle. An explicit refuge for cheats where no one asks and no one remembers. They needed space for that other life they had started behind our backs, room to spread out, to play at being real lovers, to let loose that dark side we all keep hidden.

Lucía prepared for Thursday with an anticipation she couldn’t hide. Every week she invented a new excuse, always clumsy, always easy to tear apart: a colleague who needed her, a task that had dragged on, a coffee that turned into dinner. I nodded. I took part in that game with my silence and my complicity, and to my own surprise, it turned me on. Maybe that’s why I looked the other way. Maybe that’s why I never asked too much.

What was curious was that the sex between us hadn’t dropped off. Quite the opposite. Lucía was happy, hot, nervous like a teenager counting the days to a date. She felt desired by two men at once, and that certainty made her generous with me. She knew I knew, and that ignoring my requests could break the fragile balance holding everything together, so she never denied me anything. I asked her to suck me off before bed and she knelt without protest, with that hungry mouth that sometimes swallowed my load without taking her eyes off me. I asked her to spread her legs in the middle of the night and found her already wet, as if she’d dreamed of fucking. And my requests, I must confess, became more and more perverse as I learned about her double life.

***

I started noticing the details. She was renewing her lingerie at a frequency she never used to. New sets appeared in the drawer: tiny thongs, lace bras, a black bodysuit I’d never seen on her, garter stockings, sky-high heels that she could barely stand in for ten minutes. One afternoon, snooping where I shouldn’t, I found things we didn’t share: nipple covers, a blindfold, a couple of toys we had never used together. A medium anal plug, a thick textured dildo, an almost empty bottle of lube. I pictured Darío coating her ass with that lube, opening her slowly with his fingers, and I got hard right there and then, with my wife’s lingerie in my hand.

She prepared the night before or that same morning. She shaved meticulously, left her cunt completely smooth, shoved two fingers into herself in the shower to make sure she was ready. She devoted time to the ritual in a way she had stopped doing with me. Thursday mornings I saw her differently, expectant, as if the whole day were the prelude to something else. And even so, if I came near her, she never turned me down. She knew that was her insurance, her way of keeping the balance level.

One of those mornings, while she was dressing in front of the mirror, I watched her from the bed.

—Another meeting today? —I asked, without sarcasm, almost tenderly.

—Yes —she answered, holding my gaze in the reflection—. I might be late.

I know exactly where you’re going.

—Don’t worry —I said—. Take your time.

She smiled. It wasn’t a guilty smile. It was the smile of someone who knows the other person knows everything and still opens the door for them. She pulled up her garter belt in front of me, adjusted her stockings, fastened the black lace bra she knew wasn’t for my eyes. Before leaving, she came over to the bed, slipped her hand under the sheets, and grabbed my cock.

—You’re hard —she whispered—. Think of me all afternoon.

She jerked me off slowly, for two, three minutes, until I was on the edge. Then she pulled her hand back, licked her fingers as if it were a promise, and went off to fuck my best friend with my taste still in her mouth.

***

Over time I found out how those encounters went, because she ended up telling me herself. She did it with a level of detail that lit her up all over again as she recalled it, and hearing her lit me up too. More than once she narrated them to me in bed, with my cock inside her, describing how Darío had fucked her hours earlier while I drove into her, imitating every position she dictated to me.

They arrived separately, each in their own car. Darío booked ahead and parked right under the room so he could go up without crossing paths with anyone. Lucía liked to arrive first. It gave her time to get ready, to put on the lingerie she had chosen for that week, to set up the stage for whatever was about to happen. She wanted Darío to find her ready from the doorway, with her tits almost falling out of her bra and her thong shifted to one side so he could see how wet she was before he even said hello.

And from the doorway it all began. Three, sometimes four hours of nonstop sex, with no real pauses, no long conversations. The rule between them was clear and she repeated it shamelessly: just fuck, nothing else. In that room Lucía became someone who never quite surfaced with me. She demanded things she only half-asked for at home or kept quiet about entirely. She tried new positions, anal sex almost every week, double penetration with toys, spit, hair pulling, slaps on the ass until it went red. She called him dirty names in a tone she never used with me: cunt, whore, slut, ask me, swallow it all.

Every Thursday she asked Darío for two specific things. First, that he devour her cunt for long stretches, unhurried, until she was trembling. She wanted to feel his whole tongue licking her lips, her clit sucked hungrily, two fingers buried to the hilt while he bit the inside of her thighs. Second, that he come on her: between her breasts, on her face, often in her mouth. She wanted to feel used and desired at the same time, filthy and adored. She swallowed it, smeared it over her nipples, let it drip down her chin and collected it with her finger to suck it off in front of him. With me that didn’t always happen. With him it was the rule.

Darío, for his part, asked her for just one thing: that she not take off her shoes. It was his signature, his way of reminding himself all of it was forbidden territory, a temporary suspension that shouldn’t exist. He liked finding her like that, barely dressed, still in heels, and starting by kissing her against the wall. He slid his hand under her skirt, moved her thong aside, and shoved two fingers into her in one go while kissing her with tongue. Lucía melted. She unfastened his pants right there, pulled out his cock, and grabbed it hard, jerking him off against the wall while he spread her legs with her back against the wallpaper.

***

Then she pushed him, pinned him, palmed his body through his clothes and dragged him to the huge bed that dominated the room. There she fulfilled her first request. He laid her on her back, spread her legs with both hands, and went down with no way out, his whole tongue pressed flat against her cunt, while she held his head with both hands so he wouldn’t pull away. He sucked her clit with his lips tight, let it go, sucked it again. He pushed his tongue in as far as he could, pulled it back out shining with her wetness, and went back up to the clit. Lucía lifted her hips against his mouth, rode his face, begged for more, begged for fingers, begged him not to stop. She moaned in a way that, she later confessed to me, even she didn’t recognize. A long, sustained pleasure, two and even three orgasms in a row that left her soaked and open before he even entered her.

And then he entered. He knelt between her legs, took his cock in his hand, and ran the head over the lips of her cunt again and again, getting himself completely wet before pushing in. Slowly at first, with a week’s worth of restrained desire, sinking in centimeter by centimeter so she could feel every vein, and then harder and harder, until the slap of his hips against her ass could be heard all over the room. They changed positions without pause: her on top setting the rhythm, riding him with her tits out and him sucking them with hunger; then on her knees at the edge of the bed, him behind her holding her by the hips and fucking her with his hands marking her waist; the two of them on their sides looking into each other’s eyes, one of her legs lifted and him going in and out slowly, kissing her on the mouth while he drove into her to the hilt.

When she asked him to, and she asked almost every time, he spat on her asshole and worked it open with his thumb. He put his cock in her ass patiently and then without any patience at all, until Lucía ended up with her face smashed into the mattress, biting the pillow, begging louder, screaming at him to split her open. She came with Darío’s cock in her ass and two of his fingers rubbing her clit, amid moans that she later imitated for me on our bed, her voice trembling again.

Lucía always asked him for the same thing at the final moment: to warn her before he finished. She wanted to watch it, wanted to receive it, wanted to hold his gaze while he emptied himself over her skin. When Darío growled that he couldn’t hold out any longer, she would drop to her knees at the foot of the bed, open her mouth, and stick out her tongue. He jerked off in front of her face for the last few seconds and came in spurts: on her tongue, on her lips, on her cheeks, on the breasts she held up with both hands to offer them to him. He spread it over her nipples with the tip of his cock still dripping, and then he put it back in her mouth so she could clean off the very last drop.

After the first assault came the calm. They would tangle together like lovers stealing time, caressing each other, speaking in low voices about what they wanted to do next. Twenty minutes later, half an hour, when he was hard again, they’d start over, slower, dirtier, trying some new filthy thing she had come up with during the week. They never named us. Not Carolina and not me. It was as if during those hours the rest of the world shut off and only the room, the bed, and the desire existed. They knew the window would close soon, that they would return to their cars, their homes, to us, and that they would have to wait seven whole days for the next Thursday.

That countdown was part of the fuel. The fleeting nature of it made them ravenous. There was no time for boredom or habit. Every encounter had the urgency of a first meeting and the confidence of an old love, and that mix was exactly what kept them trapped.

***

The day I decided to talk to Darío, I found him nervous, ready to defend himself against a reproach that never came.

—I know about Lucía —I told him, bluntly—. I’ve known for months.

He fell silent, looking for words. I saved him the trouble.

—I’m not here to ask you to stop. I’m here to tell you I don’t object.

He looked at me without fully understanding. And then he was honest, more honest than I expected. He told me what I already knew and a few things I didn’t. That he fucked her in the ass almost every week. That she swallowed his load without blinking. That they spent hours eating each other’s mouths between fucks. He didn’t try to dress it up or apologize. He admitted it had gotten out of hand, that what they did on Thursdays had become necessary, that he thought about my wife, her cunt, and her mouth more than he should.

I made it clear to him that all of that came at a price he was going to pay without knowing it yet. Because if they could play outside the rules, so could I. The freedom I was giving them opened the same door for me, to do whatever I wanted, wherever I wanted, and with whoever I wanted, without asking anyone’s permission.

I told Carolina that same week. At first she got angry, of course. It hurt to learn her husband had a steady lover, and that lover was my wife. But the anger didn’t last long. As soon as I explained what I was proposing, I saw her resentment turn into something else, into a slow, dangerous smile.

—Then we’re not going to ask permission either —she said, and it wasn’t a question.

—Exactly. An eye for an eye.

Carolina stepped closer until she was a handspan from me. She smelled sweet, and for the first time I looked at her in a way I had never allowed myself to look at her during all those years of negotiated exchanges. My eyes ran over her neckline, her large tits pressed under her blouse, her wide hips, that lush mouth that was going to suck my cock before the afternoon was over. I reached out and grabbed one breast over her clothes. She didn’t pull away. On the contrary, she guided my hand under her bra and let me pinch her nipple until it went hard.

—So when do we start? —she asked, her voice rough, pressing the bulge in my pants with her open palm.

Lucía and Darío had their Thursday. Carolina and I were about to invent ours, a sweet revenge they still knew nothing about. But that, perhaps, is a story for another time.