The Game I Proposed and Could No Longer Control

Carla was still trembling in my arms when I heard her whisper against my neck that she’d come. I waited for the last shudder to run through her back and, almost drawing out her moans, I asked her in her ear how things had gone with Diego.

I thought she’d tense up. That she’d change the subject, that she’d toss the question back at me with that half smile she used when she didn’t want to answer. But she did the opposite. She pressed her hips against my thigh, stretched the pleasure for another second, and answered with a calm that left me unarmed.

—Very well —she said—. I’m having a lot of fun.

It wasn’t the answer I’d imagined, and precisely because of that it turned me on. We stayed stretched out there, legs tangled, her hair stuck to my chest with sweat. And then I started questioning her, one question after another, and she answered without sparing a single detail.

She reminded me how it had all begun. One ordinary night, just enough drinks, the four of us talking about things you normally don’t say out loud. I had confessed that the idea of seeing her with someone else aroused me. She, instead of laughing, had looked at me straight on and asked: “With whom?” Just like that. And Diego was sitting across from us.

—At first there were rules —she told me, drawing circles on my chest with one finger—. Nobody touched anyone without saying so. We decided everything together, the four of us. It was a game.

—And now?

She took her time answering. I could feel her choosing her words.

—Now there are no rules. And I think that’s what you like most about all this.

I stayed silent, because it was true and because hearing it in her voice made it more real. At first, when we’d talked about the subject in the abstract, I imagined myself in control. I decided when, with whom, how far. It was a comfortable fantasy because it was still mine. What I hadn’t foreseen was the exact moment it stopped being mine, that instant when she and Diego started wanting each other on their own terms and I became the spectator of something I had set in motion but no longer directed.

She was right. I liked having opened a door I no longer knew how to close. And I liked even more that she knew it. Hearing her talk like that was so arousing that I went back over her body, parted her thighs with my knee, and we did it again, this time more slowly, looking into her eyes while she told me things a man shouldn’t want to hear.

***

Two days later they arranged to meet again. This time we didn’t even pretend it was a thing for the four of us. Diego texted me in the afternoon, almost asking for permission, though we both knew there was no permission left to give. The idea of the four of us, the ritual, the rules it had taken us so much effort to agree on, all of that had evaporated. What remained was their raw desire to have each other, and my sick pleasure in staying out of it, watching from a distance.

They met at a hotel downtown. She asked to get there first, said she wanted to prepare his welcome. She told me later, lying on her side, in a low voice, like someone revealing a secret.

She had waited for him wearing a burgundy bodysuit I didn’t know, matched with high heels in the same color. She had dressed for him as she had for me on very few occasions, and as she confessed it she dropped her gaze a little, measuring my reaction. My reaction was to tense up completely and ask her to keep going.

When Diego knocked on the door, she didn’t wait. She opened it and threw herself at him before he crossed the threshold, finding his mouth with a hunger that left him stunned. He held her by the waist, feeling that body with something like disbelief, as if he still couldn’t quite believe she was there. He bit her neck right where she liked it, at that exact spot below her ear.

And there I stopped to think, as she told me, about the trap I had set myself. I had taught Diego where to touch her. I had handed him the maps. In that game, he was playing with an advantage I’d given him on a platter, and that idea, far from bothering me, drove a heat into my lower belly that I didn’t know how to name.

There was no time for any more preamble. Fueled by all the desire they’d built up, he turned her against the wall, beside the window that opened onto the balcony. He yanked down the top of the bodysuit, fumbled to undo his own pants, and drove into her right there, standing up, while he pinched her nipples and kept biting her neck again and again. They had invented new scenarios, new roles, positions that never happened with me. Not because I lacked anything with her, she clarified, stroking my face, but because the itch for play had gotten under her skin and it wouldn’t go away.

She told me she pulled the balcony curtain aside with one hand. It was almost impossible for anyone to see her from the street, but she wanted to take the risk. She wanted to feel the vertigo of being exposed, her breasts bare against the cold glass, exaggerating every moan to drive Diego insane, knowing that every sound pushed him closer to the edge.

—And him? —I asked, my voice hoarse.

—He couldn’t hold out —Carla said, smiling—. I could tell he was right on the edge.

Then she did something she had never done with me. She suddenly turned, knelt on the carpet, and took him into her mouth just when he was about to break. Diego tried to warn her, told her between gasps that he was coming, that she should stop. But she didn’t want to let go of her prize. She clung to him with both hands and let him blow in her mouth without moving a single inch away, looking up at him as she did it.

She confessed that last part to me with special care, because she knew what it meant. It was something I had asked her for many times and she had never wanted to give me. And she had given it to Diego on the floor of a hotel, without him even asking. The stab of jealousy I felt mixed with such brutal arousal that I had to close my eyes for a moment.

—Go on —I told her—. Tell me everything.

Diego, almost collapsing, let himself sink down until he was at her height. He went to embrace her, to look for some tenderness after the release. But she gave him a long kiss with her mouth still full, sharing with him what she had just received. She told me he went crazy at that instant, that it was too much all at once, and that right there, on the carpet, he laid her on her back to go down between her legs.

He licked her pussy slowly while she stroked her clit with her fingers, setting the rhythm, telling him without words how she wanted it. It didn’t take long. She told me the second orgasm came in quick waves, shaking her whole body, with her legs closing around his head.

***

After that, she said, came the part that was hardest for me to hear and the one I liked most. Not the sex, but what came after.

They lay down on the bed, exhausted, in no hurry to get dressed. Diego laid his hand on her sex, no longer urgently, and played with her for a long while, not looking for anything, just for the pleasure of touching her. They spoke in whispers so as not to break the strange calm that had settled over the room. She, in turn, ran her fingers over his body, which still hadn’t quite recovered.

—He put a finger in me —Carla told me, watching me to see what I’d do with that information—. And I asked him not to stop.

They kissed while he caressed her from inside, with no rush at all, and she reached a third orgasm, softer, longer, almost without moving. She described that part to me with a tenderness that hurt more than any of the other details. The sexual part I understood. That intimacy afterward was something else.

They ended up showering together, she said, because they hadn’t gotten dressed and because neither of them wanted to leave yet. Under the water they kissed again, with no intention of starting anything, just because they felt like it. And then each of them got dressed, left separately, and went back to their lives as if nothing had happened.

***

Diego also recounted it to me on his own, in a long message he sent me that same night. I read it all the way through, twice, comparing his version with hers, looking for the cracks, the details one told and the other left out. They matched on almost everything. Where they didn’t, it was even more arousing to imagine why.

When I asked Carla about those differences, she didn’t get uncomfortable. She confirmed them one by one, so turned on by telling it again that we ended up tangled together once more, fucking with an intensity that only appeared when we talked about this. I was aroused by knowing what had happened. She, I realized that night, was even more aroused by knowing how to tell me.

Later, with my breathing calm and the room dark, I found myself wondering whether what I felt had a name. It wasn’t exactly jealousy, though there was some of that. It wasn’t exactly generosity, though that too. It was an uncomfortable and addictive blend of both, a new place you could only reach by giving up something I had until then thought untouchable. And the truth, the only truth that mattered that night, was that I didn’t want to go back.

I had proposed a game. And the game, long ago, had started playing on its own.