The Orgy My Friends Hid from Me for Years
It had been eight years since she had divorced. Eight years since the last time a man had touched her. Eight years cut off from anything having to do with desire, and all of it, Inés thought now, for sheer stupidity.
For following convention. For listening to her friends. For heeding a bunch of women who, behind her back, did exactly the opposite of what they preached. For not listening to the only person who had truly loved her: Daniel, her ex.
It was mid-afternoon, late spring, and she was alone at home. Forty-five years old, an age she experienced like a sentence. She felt ugly, unappealing, betrayed by everyone. For weeks she had been unable to get out of her head the surprises life had suddenly spit at her, and no matter how many days went by, she couldn’t get over it.
The strange thing was that Daniel, the man she had separated from, was still her most loyal confidant. It was crystal clear when the time came to put an end to the marriage, and even so he had never shut the door on her. He had rebuilt his life, had a beautiful partner and a newborn son, and in spite of everything he continued to be her refuge whenever she would not stop crying.
Forty-five years gave you plenty of material. Especially to describe a woman who had spent the last three decades studying and working as if the world were going to end tomorrow. She had met Daniel at the Faculty of Mathematics in Seville, her hometown, and they married soon after graduating. But for her, being the best at everything she touched always came first, and when she finally realized it, she had lost the only thing that truly mattered to her.
They had no children. Inés kept putting everything off: when she wasn’t training, she was buried in work. The years went by like that until one day Daniel hit bottom, fed up with being married to a woman who was only married to her calendar.
***
The end came during a vacation in the Maldives. They had spent a few days diving, and after a spectacular day among reefs, Daniel returned to the hotel burning with the sight of her going under. Inés was the only woman in the group, eight men counting the instructor, and she drove them all crazy when they came out of the water with the wetsuit clinging to their bodies. Her small but firm breasts, her ass, the way she moved around not noticing a thing.
They arrived exhausted at the room. They showered, ordered something for dinner, and Daniel wasted no time: he wanted to be the one to collect the prize everyone had wanted all day. He picked her up, carried her to the bed, and kissed and stroked her for a long while. Inés had always loved caresses; more than once she had come just from his hands sliding over her slowly.
But the phone rang. Once. And again. And she got up both times to answer, leaving him stranded on the bed with a look of disbelief.
“Honey, the one who pays for all these pleasures never sleeps,” she told him, panting as she apologized to whoever was calling her.
Daniel tried until the end. He wanted to finish at least in her mouth. And when he finally came, Inés shoved herself upright, with his semen still running down her chest, to turn on the laptop because the Asian markets were about to open.
“Fuck, now wasn’t the time,” she snapped at him. “Do you know how much money I can lose if they ask me for a video call and I don’t show up?”
Daniel got dressed in silence, shaking his head, and went out to walk along the beach. When he came back, he asked for a divorce.
***
In time, Daniel calmed down and they ended up becoming great friends. In fact, he got tired of telling her to stay away from her friends, that they gave him a bad feeling, that they weren’t to be trusted. But she was blinded by them, locked into the friendship they offered her as if it were a life raft.
Inés worked for an investment management firm. She was the golden goose for her boss, Ricardo, a man in his sixties who looked more like a finance shark than a paternal businessman. He respected her to the utmost; not even when she divorced did he come over to comfort her, as he did with so many others who drifted through his office hungry for promotion and ready to swallow whatever was required.
At forty-five she still had an enviable body. A natural redhead, dyed blonde for years, with freckles that speckled all the way down to her neckline. In the height of her self-contempt she had gotten rid of the dye and let her natural color grow out. Five-foot-seven, one hundred and twenty-one pounds, a silhouette left untouched by not having had children. If she went on a trip like the Maldives again, she would leave everyone who went diving with her speechless again, even though almost nine years had passed.
Ricardo was thinking of retiring, but he wasn’t entirely convinced about Inés. Too prudish, he had told his wife, Helena, who had always seen her as a little nun. What Inés didn’t know was that Helena had been one of the best escorts in London before meeting Ricardo, and that now, retired, she secretly organized the most exclusive encounters for City clients. The fund manager was far more than she appeared, and Helena knew that better than anyone.
***
Everything turned upside down a few weeks ago. It was like a slap across the face, without warning, when her friends Carla and Patricia showed up at her house out of the blue.
The two arrived in a wreck, with red eyes and smeared makeup. To Inés, those women were everything: her support, the ones who had guided her along the straight and narrow for eight years so she wouldn’t stray into any sort of damnation. The only people she spent her scarce free time with.
Carla was crying inconsolably while Patricia held her by the shoulders. She had just broken up with a man she had been seeing for a few weeks, some Hugo, deputy manager at a city bank whom Inés knew from university. Cultured, polite, exactly what she thought her friend needed.
“What an asshole,” Patricia spat, and Inés went cold, because she had never heard her insult anyone before. “After everything you did for him and his friends. Those hypocrites would have loved another night like the one we gave them.”
Inés froze. “Night? Hypocrites? We gave them?” None of it made sense.
“But… did they do something to you? Should we call the police?” she stammered.
“Fuck, Inés, wake up,” Patricia shouted, beside herself. “What police, what are you talking about? They invited us to one of their houses for dinner before the bachelor party. The girls they had hired for the show got fed up with all the haggling and never showed up. They asked us to stay, and one thing led to another. The worst part is that that idiot you introduced Carla to ditched her after the whole party we threw at his place, and she was crazy about him.”
“But then… all that stuff about not going out partying, about not going topless on the beach, everything you’ve preached at me for eight years…”
“You’ve got your friend in pieces and you’re going on about your stories. You’re unbelievable.”
They got up and slammed the door so hard it echoed through the whole development, that one with the detached houses by the golf course where Inés lived on the outskirts of the city she adored so much.
***
She spent a long time not knowing what to do. She wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt; maybe the upset had made them talk like that. The first thing she did was call Hugo to reproach him for what they had done to her friends.
“Abuse? What the hell did they tell you?” he shouted from the other end.
“Not exactly that, but leaving my friend hanging after taking advantage of her isn’t right, Hugo.”
“Take advantage of her? Inés, please. They were the ones who showed up at my house. There were seven of us, a quiet dinner and then a few drinks, nothing more. But they had another plan. I don’t know how they did it, but they managed to take over the catering, and when we finished dinner, they went straight for it. A few laughs, a few caresses, and in the end all seven of us were hotter than soup. Carla barely took any time getting undressed. She went around all of us, stretched out on the table, and we enjoyed her there in turns. All among adults, all consensual. In fact, my friend, the one who was getting married, didn’t trust them and left the house security cameras recording.”
“And Patricia didn’t say anything?”
“Patricia? She’s worse. She didn’t care that they were fucking Carla all over the place, but a single drop on her, no way. That one was there for daily mass. You can’t imagine how much she controlled everything, how she took care that nothing was wasted. A real professional.”
“And why did you dump Carla, if you all had such a good time?”
“I didn’t dump anyone. It was Marcos, the only married guy in the group, who didn’t want anything more to do with them afterward. They only wanted a night of fun and they knew we had the bachelor party arranged. It’s not the first time they’ve done it, Inés. They have a reputation. You really didn’t know? I’m telling you seriously: stay away from them. I have to go, I’m in a meeting.”
Inés hung up and stood staring at the bedroom mirror as tears began to well up, first slowly, then without restraint, like a summer storm. She ended up running to the bathroom to vomit, she didn’t know how many times, and spent two days crying in bed.
Her mind couldn’t process everything she had missed because of them. The result was devastating.
***
For weeks she wandered around like a ghost. She even considered asking for a leave of absence, but both Daniel and Helena told her absolutely not, that what she had to do was start living for real, at last.
One afternoon, while walking through the center, she went into an original-language screening room where they were showing an art film. She didn’t care what; she just wanted to forget the world. There were three people in the cinema: a man, another woman, and her, all three in the last row, with more than enough space between each of them.
It wasn’t an erotic film, but it might as well have been. Suddenly, the man unzipped his fly and started masturbating. When Inés realized it, she froze. She felt her face flush and looked everywhere, mortified. The guy must have been around thirty, not bad-looking in body or otherwise, but of course it had been more than eight years since she had had a man that close.
Seeing that Inés wasn’t moving, the other woman stood up and went over to him. She took his cock gently and began to stroke it slowly, setting a rhythm that gradually increased. After tormenting him for a few minutes, she leaned down and took him into her mouth, from the glans down, making him writhe in the seat. Inés didn’t know how to react; all that self-imposed confinement was far too fresh.
The woman must have been around sixty, but in tight jeans she looked much younger. The young man grabbed her by the hair, whispered something to her, and she straightened up, bracing herself on the seats in front. He pulled her pants down to her knees, moistened his fingers, and entered her at a much rougher pace than what she had received. After a few moments he turned her around to finish on her face, and she didn’t let a single drop escape. Then they both got dressed and walked out of the cinema passing right in front of Inés, while the woman looked her in the eye and licked her lips.
Inés went home in pieces.
***
Now she didn’t know how to get out of the hole. Her refusal of sex was so deeply ingrained inside her that it would be hard to tear out. The psychologist Daniel had recommended told her about a drastic change, starting with the physical. She had to start somewhere.
Daniel suggested dating apps, even one that organized dinners, but it all ended in failure: for her, sex was still synonymous with degradation. She even considered paying for male company — her income level could more than afford it — but when it came down to it, her mind wouldn’t let her.
The last thing Daniel mentioned was a London entertainment company. His partner had given him a few days with them, and according to him, they had changed his life during a time when he had also gone through a terrible spell, something he had never told Inés about.
For her birthday, Daniel handed her a card from that English company. It had nothing on it but a logo. No address, no phone number, no name. All of it wrapped in a mystery that unsettled her.
“Don’t worry,” he told her, staring her straight in the eye while they ate at one of those exclusive restaurants in the center. “They’ll come to you. And I promise you, when the game is over, you’ll be someone else. Please, I don’t want to lose you.”
When the game is over. Inés put the card in her bag, not knowing that those words were only the beginning.
