The Game That Started with a Photo and Ended in a Threesome

To begin with, I should make one thing clear: it wasn’t an innocent question.

—Have you ever thought about seeing me with several men at the same time?

The best part of that moment was the look on Marcos’s face: the look of someone who thinks he’s misheard, but who knows, somewhere in a corner of his brain, that he hasn’t. We were in bed on a Friday night, watching a movie neither of us was really paying attention to anymore. He had his phone on his chest. I had my feet crossed over his legs, and I’d spent exactly twenty-two minutes calculating when and how to ask that question.

—What? —he said.

It wasn’t a question. It was time bought to pull himself together.

Marcos has something he mentioned only once, almost in passing, during a conversation that had started out completely different. He has a certain fixation with the idea of seeing me covered. Not in any one specific place; what draws him is the whole image, the amount, the simultaneity of several people at once. I filed it away in that mental drawer where I keep the details that matter even if nobody says them out loud very often.

—I was thinking out loud —I said, with the calm of someone who’s been planning something for weeks—. Forget it if you want.

—No —he answered at once—. I’m not forgetting it. You just caught me off guard.

—I know —I said back.

I got out of bed under the pretext of fetching the laptop, which I’d left strategically between the nightstand and the sofa bed. I used the movement to discreetly activate what I’d been wearing for almost forty minutes: a remote-controlled vibrator Marcos had given me months earlier. I felt it switch on, put a hand on the edge of the bed to keep from losing my balance, and came back to his side with the laptop in my arms.

—Come here —I said.

I opened the email client.

—Do you remember the charity calendar we put together at the company at the end of last year?

Marcos shifted his gaze from the screen to me.

—The one with the photos. Of course.

How could he forget? We’d put together a charity calendar in which a dozen employees posed with very little clothing to raise money for a local association. The result had been elegant, almost artistic: the photographer, Daniela, knew exactly how to use cardboard letters, flowers, and props so that nothing felt explicit and, at the same time, everything felt suggestive. More than eight hundred copies sold in less than two weeks. I appeared in December, the most coveted month of all.

—Well —I began, and out of the corner of my eye I noticed Marcos had set his phone face down on the bed without realizing he was doing it—. I was the last one to go through the studio. I closed out the calendar. And while Daniela was packing up the equipment, an idea came to me.

—What kind of idea?

—Daniela has a very good sense of humor. And she’s extremely discreet. So I suggested it to her.

—What did you suggest?

—Doing some slightly different photos.

I opened a folder on the desktop called “Dartboard Game,” and inside there was a very high-resolution image: me, front and back, completely naked.

Marcos didn’t say anything for several seconds.

—Daniela did an incredible job with the lighting —I explained—. After printing the photo, I added grids with Photoshop, like a dartboard, with numerical values assigned to different areas of the body.

The front version showed two hundred points on the mouth, fifty on the right breast, one hundred on the pubis. The other side had its own point distribution, with the highest values in the lower back.

—I wrote the accompanying text in English —I went on— because I sent it from a new email account I created specifically for that. I have access to the company’s international employee directory. I selected the recipients by hand.

—How many recipients?

—Enough to make the game interesting.

—And the message?

—Something along the lines of: “Here’s something special. Take your time, choose your target, and shoot. The winner will receive an extraordinary prize.”

Marcos took a while to answer.

—You’ve had this set up for weeks —he said at last.

—I wanted to read the replies with you.

In reality, I’d spent weeks waiting for the exact right moment to tell him. The question at the beginning had been the hook; this was the rest of the trap.

The vibrator pulsed twice in a row. I put a hand on his chest to keep my balance.

—Take off your boxers —I told him—. We’re going to read them together.

***

The emails were all kinds of things.

Some messages were terse: a direct choice, no beating around the bush, almost technical. Others were long and almost justificatory, as if the sender felt the need to argue for their decision with a certain degree of precision. There were people who took the game with a seriousness I found unexpectedly charming. There were people who replied with a single line and a stated confidence percentage.

We read them out loud, taking turns. Marcos pulled the emails up from the folder and I commented on them: that guy in Legal had always seemed pretty reserved to me, the head of the Buenos Aires branch had taken almost three weeks to answer, the logistics manager had sent two different emails, changing his choice from the first to the second.

Every time I mentioned someone Marcos knew even just by sight, from some annual meeting or company dinner, I noticed him tense slightly. Not from discomfort. From something completely different.

—This one —he said, pointing to an email on the screen— was at the March convention.

—Yes. He said hello to me at breakfast on the second day.

—And he chose...?

—Read it.

He read it. He didn’t comment, but his hand found mine under the sheets.

The vibrator increased in intensity at that moment. I had to bite the pillow for a second and breathe slowly before I could keep going.

—Are you okay? —Marcos asked, even though he knew perfectly well what the answer was.

—Keep going.

We went through dozens of responses. The spread of choices turned out to be more even than I’d expected, which felt to me like a sign that the photo had done its job. Toward the end of the folder, the messages began to thin out. When we got to the last one, Marcos closed the laptop carefully and looked at me.

—Who won?

—Three people chose exactly the same thing, with the highest stated confidence level. So I decided all three of them won.

—And the prize?

I propped myself up a little against the pillow.

—That’s the interesting part. Daniela’s been asking me for weeks when we’re doing it. She says the event deserves proper photographic documentation.

It took Marcos a moment to fully process what he’d just heard.

—Daniela is going to be there?

—Daniela is going to be part of the event.

Nothing else needed to be said. I could see him understand everything: the three winners, the photographer, me, and that fantasy he’d mentioned only once as if it carried no real weight and which had actually been living somewhere in his head for years.

—You weren’t serious when I asked you —he said. It wasn’t an accusation. It was a question.

—I wasn’t kidding either —I replied.

***

What happened that night between the two of us doesn’t need much description. Marcos turned off the laptop and set it on the floor. I switched off the vibrator, which was no longer necessary. We didn’t talk much. The movie was still waiting somewhere in the TV’s memory, frozen on a frame neither of us would remember the next day.

What is worth telling is what happened three weeks later.

The three winners received a second email from the same address. The instructions were precise: an address, a time, a single behavioral requirement. All three replies came back in less than forty minutes. Each contained just one word.

Daniela arrived on time, camera over her shoulder and that expression of concentration I already knew from the studio: the look of someone about to work on something she genuinely finds interesting. Marcos opened the door and she came in as if she knew the apartment, which in fact she did, though never under those circumstances.

I’d put on a dress Marcos had chosen weeks earlier, not yet knowing what occasion he was choosing it for. When he saw himself standing in the living room, with Daniela adjusting the framing off to one side and the three guests arriving ten minutes apart from one another, I understood that combination of anticipation and strangeness was exactly what made everything so intense.

The first to arrive was someone I knew from coordination meetings. We’d greeted each other dozens of times in a completely professional manner, exchanging emails about projects and deadlines. When he saw me in that dress, in that living room, with Daniela in the background and Marcos standing by the window, it took him a second to compose his expression.

—Welcome —I said.

Daniela lifted the camera.

—Whenever you’re ready —she said.

***

What followed lasted almost three hours.

Daniela moved through the space with that skill of hers for documenting without interfering, for being present without disrupting the rhythm of what was happening. Marcos didn’t leave my side at any point; it was exactly the role I had implicitly assigned him and which he had accepted without anyone needing to say so out loud.

There are moments from that afternoon I still remember with almost uncomfortable clarity. The texture of the sofa under my knees. The weight of three pairs of hands in different places at the same time. Daniela’s voice giving a technical lighting instruction while my mouth was occupied and I could only listen to her. The look on Marcos’s face when it was all over: that mix of exhaustion and something that has no exact name in any language but that I recognized immediately.

The second guest arrived ten minutes after the first. He was someone I knew only by name, from a department I almost never had direct contact with. His reply to the email had been the longest of all, nearly three paragraphs justifying his choice with a logic that at the time had seemed funny to me and that now, while Daniela adjusted the framing, had a completely different meaning.

The third arrived right on the minute. He came in without saying anything, looked at me for a second, then looked at Marcos, who was leaning against the back wall with his arms crossed. Marcos was the one who nodded first.

After that, the order of events became less linear. Time worked differently.

Daniela said almost nothing during the three hours. Only now and then she gave a technical instruction, a positional adjustment, a request for someone to shift slightly to the left. Her voice was completely professional, exactly the same as in the calendar shoot. That was the strangest and most arousing thing at the same time: that everything still had the feel of work well done.

Marcos came closer at one point. He didn’t say anything to me; he simply rested a hand on my back for a few seconds and took it away. It was enough.

Later, when the three guests left and Daniela put the camera back in its case, the two of us were alone in the living room. The apartment smelled different. Everything had that slightly altered quality of things after an event that can’t be undone.

Marcos brought me a blanket from the bedroom and sat down beside me on the sofa.

—How are you? —he asked.

—Good —I said. And it was completely true.

Daniela sent us the photos three days later. They’re very good. They have that quality of images that tell a story without explaining everything, that leave just enough room for the viewer’s imagination.

I saved them in a new folder on the desktop.

I still haven’t told Marcos what the folder is called.