The Game That Ended in the Next Room
It was the autumn of 1987, and the whole country seemed to be breathing differently. There was a clumsy kind of joy in the air, like people who still couldn’t quite believe that no one was going to demand an account of what they did behind closed doors anymore. In my neighborhood, there were still women who crossed themselves at the sight of a short skirt, but the rest of us walked as though someone had finally loosened a leash we’d been wearing for far too long.
We had been married a little over two years, and I considered myself a lucky man. A steady job at a distribution company, a small but cozy rented apartment, and Lucia beside me, who at the time was the only possible woman in my eyes. Everyone marries the woman of his life, of course. The difficult part is continuing to look at her that way once life shows you what else she is capable of.
Lucia had met Rosa on a trip to Amsterdam, a cheap getaway we’d won in a workplace raffle. They hit it off immediately, the kind of friendship that forms over a café table and continues by phone for months. One Thursday she told me that Rosa was inviting us to dinner on Saturday. She lived with her husband, so there would be four of us.
I liked the idea. Lucia spent too many hours shut up at home with the girls, and when money is tight, outings are scarce too. I always had something on my mind because of work; she, on the other hand, was slowly fading into the routine. A different sort of dinner would do her good.
On Saturday we showed up at Rosa and Quique’s place with a bottle of Rioja under my arm. They were waiting for us with the table set, some appetizers, and a couple of candles they lit just as we arrived. After the introductions—for only the women knew each other—we were served drinks and sat down. The apartment was cozy and tiny: a living room, two toy-sized bedrooms, a narrow kitchen, and a bathroom. What caught my attention most was a living-room cabinet packed with vinyl records.
“I see music is taken seriously here,” I said, pointing at the collection.
Quique laughed. He had recently started working for a record company, after a string of odd jobs, and it was obvious that this was what he was meant for. Rosa, by contrast, was an administrator at a small real-estate agency downtown. Dinner was simple and good: Spanish omelet, croquettes, little pastries, and, for dessert, a homemade cheesecake Rosa announced as “her specialty.”
They cleared the table while Quique prepared the drinks. Whisky for us, gin and tonics for them. Conversation flowed effortlessly. We talked about music, naturally: Mecano, Los Secretos, Nacha Pop, and some Pink Floyd too. We had similar tastes. I was the odd one, more into the protest singer-songwriters from the previous decade, the records I played alone once Lucia was asleep.
As the night wore on, the drinks kept adding up. More or less, all four of us were already caught between easy laughter and silences that lasted a little too long.
At one point, Quique suggested a game of Parcheesi. Lucia wrinkled her nose and said Parcheesi was a game for old women. Quique smiled crookedly.
“Not this version,” he said.
“And what’s special about it?” I asked, more to keep the joke going than anything else.
“Every time one of your pieces gets captured, you take off a piece of clothing. What do you say?”
Lucia was the first to answer, and that should have warned me about something.
“It could be fun. I’m game.”
Rosa didn’t look too pleased. After what my wife had said, I couldn’t refuse without seeming like the spoilsport of the evening. So Quique brought out the board, the pieces, and the dice, and explained the rules with the solemnity of someone who had used them before.
“It’s simple. Every time one of your pieces gets captured, off comes a garment. And when someone gets a piece to the finish, they choose what they want to do and with whom. If anyone feels uncomfortable at any point, we stop, no problem.”
The three of us nodded like children who had just been taught a new game. I took a quick look at everyone’s clothes and immediately understood that the women were at a disadvantage: they were both wearing dresses, and after the first piece was captured they would be down to their underwear. Two pieces would have to be captured from us to leave us in the same state.
The first few turns went nowhere. The pieces moved around the board, far apart from one another. But then they began to bunch up, and the danger became real, almost audible in the silence with which we watched the dice.
The first piece to fall was Quique’s. He took off his shirt without any drama, revealing a broad, hairless chest. Lucia looked at him for a second longer than necessary.
The next was my wife’s. Quique and I watched expectantly, though for different reasons: me, to see whether she would really dare; him, because the desire to see her was written all over his face. Lucia smiled at us, stood up, and pulled her dress over her head. Underneath she wore an ordinary black bra and matching panties. She looked at all three of us, then turned around once so we could see her properly. She was gorgeous, I’m not going to lie. What I failed to read at the time was whom she was looking at as she turned.
***
The game continued, and it was Quique’s turn again. He stood up and took off his trousers. All he had left were his underpants and the bulge they barely concealed. In a little over half an hour, between dice, laughter, and drinks, the four of us were naked. I think I was the only one who felt any embarrassment. Quique strutted around like a rooster, displaying his thick, already half-hard cock without the slightest shame, his balls hanging heavily between his thighs. Rosa, more modest, covered one breast with her arm and her pussy with her other hand. And Lucia couldn’t keep her eyes on the board: every time I looked at her, they were fixed on his cock, her mouth slightly open, a smile on her face that I had never seen before.
All that remained was for someone to start getting pieces to the finish. Quique was the first. And yes, you can guess what he asked for.
“Friend, may I have permission to kiss this beauty?”
“You have to ask me for permission,” Lucia answered before I could open my mouth. “And yes, you have it.”
Quique stood, held out his hands to help her up, and they melted into a long, hungry kiss, the kind people don’t give in front of anyone unless the consequences have already stopped mattering. He pushed his tongue deep into her mouth, and she sucked it as if she had been waiting months for that mouth. Out of the corner of my eye I saw his hand slide down her back, squeeze one of her buttocks, and pull her against his cock, and I saw Lucia part her legs so his bulge could fit between her thighs. I stayed seated, an empty glass in my hand, watching my wife rub her pussy against another man’s cock in front of me.
Rosa was the next to reach the finish.
“Now I’m the one asking your permission, Marcos,” she said, with a calmness that disarmed me.
I told her yes, of course. I moved closer, intending to give her barely a brush of a kiss, but she held the back of my neck and whispered in my ear:
“Let’s give them a taste of their own medicine.”
And she slipped her tongue into my mouth without further preamble. We searched each other’s mouths for quite a while, and at one point I slid a hand down to her tits and squeezed them one by one, feeling her nipples stiffen beneath my palm. She didn’t hold back either: she grabbed my cock, still soft from nerves, and began massaging it slowly, her hand firm, until I felt it filling and thickening in her fist. I thought perhaps it would make them jealous, that they would stop, that we would go back to being two couples who had dinner and said goodbye at the door. How naive I was.
When we parted and looked at them again, what we saw left us speechless. They were kissing again, but now Lucia’s legs were spread wide enough to accommodate the fingers Quique was slowly moving inside her pussy, sliding in and out with a wet sound that carried from the sofa. She had one hand around his cock and was stroking it smoothly up and down, squeezing the head each time she reached the tip, her thumb collecting the thick drop of fluid shining in the slit. This was not the gesture of a woman discovering something new. It was the gesture of a woman who knew exactly what she wanted. There was no surprise on her face. There was permission. There was the kind of desire that isn’t improvised.
Rosa and I stood still, not knowing what to do or say. We only watched, trapped between discomfort and a heat that kept rising in spite of everything. My cock had grown hard as a stone inside Rosa’s hand, betraying me without permission.
After a while, they separated just enough to breathe, and Quique spoke without letting her go, two fingers still buried in my wife’s pussy.
“We’re going to the bedroom. We’ll be more comfortable there. You two, to the other one.”
And they disappeared down the hallway just like that, as though they had been doing it for years. Before the door closed, I heard Lucia let out a husky little laugh and Quique say something in her ear that drew a short moan from her.
***
Rosa took my hand and led me to the other room. We lay down and began caressing each other. She pushed me onto my back, climbed on top of me, and began licking my chest, moving down my stomach until she found my cock hard again. She gripped it at the base, looked up at me from below, and took the whole thing into her mouth in one motion, all the way to the root. I felt it lodge in her throat and felt her swallow eagerly, gagging a little, before slowly coming back up, leaving a strand of saliva hanging. She sucked me well, her tongue working the head, one hand matching the rhythm while the other rolled my balls as if she knew by heart how it was done. She was turned on—I could tell from her heavy breathing and the way she searched for my thighs with her nails—but I wasn’t. No matter how hard I tried, I could think only of Lucia, the ease with which she had surrendered, the thin wall separating us from them. And the wall was very thin, because we could hear everything: the rhythmic thudding of a bed against the partition, the wet sloshing of a pussy being penetrated, and above all my wife’s voice, Lucia’s voice saying, “That’s it, that’s it, harder, put that whole cock inside me.” There was no way I could concentrate. My whole body was in the next room, even though the woman in mine was greedily swallowing my cock.
“Don’t worry,” Rosa said at last, pulling me from her mouth with a smack and wiping the corner of her lips, more resigned than offended. “Let’s go join them.”
We went back into the hallway and pushed the door open. What I saw hit me somewhere I hadn’t known I had. Quique was fucking her on all fours, gripping her hips with both hands, pounding her with such force that it made her breasts tremble as they hung beneath her chest. I could see his entire cock sliding in and out of my wife’s pussy, glossy with her juices, and every time he drove it deep, Lucia let out a guttural growl and arched her ass, asking for more. Her face was pressed against the pillow, her mouth open, her hair stuck to her forehead with sweat. It was the face she made when she really liked something, a face I had believed she saved only for me, and now she was showing it to me in profile, without looking at me, lost in the man fucking her to the hilt.
And then, right then, the desire I hadn’t felt all night came over me. A murky, furious desire fed by what I was seeing. I grabbed Rosa, laid her down on the free edge of the bed, shoved her legs apart with one hand, and buried myself in her pussy in a single thrust, right up to my balls. She was soaked; my cock slid in like butter, and she let out a sharp cry that mingled with Lucia’s moans. I fucked her hard, gripping her tits, pinching her nipples, pulling almost all the way out before driving back in with all the strength I had. But I wasn’t looking at her. My eyes were fixed on my wife, on the way she moved beneath another man, on how her pussy opened to swallow that unfamiliar cock, on the wet, obscene sound it made, a sound I knew by heart. At one point Lucia turned her head, saw me fucking Rosa beside her, and instead of looking away, held my gaze. She smiled at me with her mouth open, panting, and said to Quique without taking her eyes off me:
“Harder, give it to me harder, I’m going to come.”
That finished me. Rosa came beneath me, squeezing my cock with her pussy in spasms, scratching my back, and Quique made some animal sound and spilled inside my wife with a final thrust that made her howl. I held out for two more strokes and emptied myself into Rosa, every last drop, my eyes still fixed on the semen beginning to run down Lucia’s thighs. The four of us came almost at once, in a tangle of bodies and rumpled sheets that none of us dared mention afterward. We lay there for a while, listening to our breathing settle, the thick smell of sex soaked into the walls of that little room. We dressed in silence. At the door there were kisses on the cheek, an “we should do this again sometime” that nobody believed, and a smile from Quique that took me years to forgive.
That night, something broke between us, though it took me a long time to understand what. I continued loving Lucia for a long time, even after that. But something in her had changed and never returned to its place. Sometimes I think that game of Parcheesi didn’t inaugurate anything; it merely turned on the light and revealed something she already knew about herself, something I preferred not to see.