The Third Man Who Broke Up Our Open Relationship

My name is Marcos. I’m the one writing these lines, though not very gladly. For months we’d been promising each other we’d close this series of stories in a different way, calmly, with everything neatly wrapped up. That wasn’t possible. What I’m going to tell you today is what really happened, and why this is the last text you’ll read from us.

When Laura and I first started exploring our open relationship, we were aware that the road had its curves. What we didn’t calculate was that one of those curves would throw us completely off the road. I’m not going to romanticize anything. I’m going to tell it as it was: with its exciting parts, its awkward parts, and, in the end, its shitty part.

***

Everything started to go wrong, or to change direction for good, when Raúl appeared on the scene. We’d been seeing different people for a while, always by mutual agreement, always with the rules clear between us. Raúl was different from the start. Cultured, financially well off, with a way of moving through the world that gave off a kind of natural gravity. He invited us to dinner at a restaurant in Barcelona where reservations had to be made months in advance. I remember that when we arrived, the maître d’ already knew our names, which gave me a strange feeling I couldn’t quite identify until much later.

The dinner was extraordinary. The wine, impeccable. The conversation, flowing as if we’d known each other for years. And when we arrived at his apartment in the Gràcia neighborhood, things turned hot from the very first minute.

Raúl didn’t waste time. As soon as he shut the door, he shoved his tongue down Laura’s throat and yanked her dress up to her waist. She let him, eyes closed and hands spread against the wall. I stood still in the hall, whisky in hand, watching as that man I barely knew tore my wife’s panties off and threw them onto the hallway floor like he was tossing away a used napkin.

—Come here, Marcos —he said without turning around, one hand already between Laura’s thighs—. She’s soaked. Touch her.

I stepped closer. I ran my fingers through her pussy and she was really dripping, with that thick consistency Laura only gets when she’s been hot for hours. Raúl pushed her onto the living room sofa, spread her legs wide, and knelt between them. He ate her pussy with a technique I recognized right away: he knew exactly where Laura’s clit was and how much pressure it needed, as if he’d been doing it for years. She started moaning, arching her back, gripping his hair with both hands.

—Marcos, take it out —Raúl ordered between licks—. Let her suck you while I eat her.

I obeyed without thinking. I pulled down my pants, took out my cock already hard, and put it in front of Laura’s mouth. She opened her lips and swallowed me whole, all the way down, with that desperate way of sucking she gets when she’s about to come. She fucked my cock with her mouth at the pace Raúl was setting on her pussy. I heard her moaning with my cock filling her mouth, and I felt the vibrations of those moans all along the length of it.

She came like that, sucking me. I felt her orgasm by the way she gently clenched her teeth around my glans and by the shudder that ran through her legs while Raúl kept licking her clit mercilessly. When she finally let go, her whole face was shining with her juices.

—Get on all fours —he told her, now naked, with a thick, very straight cock he held in his right hand.

Laura got on all fours on the sofa without letting go of me. She kept sucking me while Raúl drove his cock into her from behind in one single thrust. I heard her moan, muffled, with my cock filling her throat. And then he started really fucking her, with long, loud thrusts, holding her by the hips while spanking her now and then, each slap echoing through the room.

—Look at her, Marcos —he panted—. Look at your wife eating it. Look how she tightens when I shove my cock all the way in.

I watched her. I watched Raúl’s cock going in and out between her ass cheeks, watched Laura’s pussy stretch with every thrust, watched her juices running down her thighs. And I kept fucking her mouth at the same rhythm, gripping her hair with both hands, without any care at all.

We took turns with her for hours. On the sofa, on the rug, against the dining room wall, bent over the table. We fucked her from both sides at once, with Raúl underneath and me on top, speared between the two of us until she came screaming. We filled her mouth with semen, both of us almost one after the other, and she swallowed it all without letting a drop fall, her eyes shining and her mascara smudged.

When we finally collapsed, exhausted and sweaty, the three of us went out naked onto the terrace to smoke. And that was where, with Laura wrapped in a sheet between us and Barcelona’s lights below, Raúl made his proposal while pouring us the last whisky.

—I want to be something more consistent in your lives —he said—. Not a one-off encounter. Something more like a relationship, if you’re open to that.

It caught me by surprise. It wasn’t what I’d imagined might come out of that evening. Laura, however, listened with shining eyes and a smile I recognized immediately: it was the smile she wore when she liked something very much and didn’t want to say it out loud yet. We talked that night for quite a while. We agreed to try it. And so began a phase that lasted almost a year.

***

The next dates had a structure Raúl organized in advance with almost military precision. We’d receive an email with instructions: time, place, dress code. On the second outing, he told us to go to the Verdi cinema. Laura had to go in a dress and without underwear. Screen three, center seats.

We sat down. The lights went down. Twenty minutes in, a man I didn’t know settled into the seat beside Laura. There were no introductions. There were no words. The guy put his hand directly on her thigh and started moving it up under her dress with a slowness that sent blood rushing to my temples. Laura spread her legs without looking at him, her gaze fixed on the screen.

I heard him put his fingers in her. You could hear it perfectly in the silence of the theater, the wet sound of two or three fingers going in and out of my wife’s soaked pussy. She bit her lip and gripped the armrests. After a while, the man pulled his cock out of his fly, took her hand, and placed it on top of it. Laura started stroking him, her head turned toward him and her mouth slightly open.

She leaned in. She bent over his lap and took him into her mouth right there, in the middle of the cinema, while the film kept playing. I watched the back of her neck moving up and down in the dim light for several minutes. My cock was hard as a rock inside my pants and I didn’t dare touch it. Then the guy grabbed her hair, shoved her head down to the base, and came into her mouth. Laura swallowed, wiped her lips with the back of her hand, and sat back up straight as if nothing had happened. The man vanished into the shadows of the aisle without saying a single word.

Laura took my hand in the dark. She squeezed it hard, and I don’t know if she did it to include me or to make sure I was still there.

On another occasion, Raúl and she sat together several seats in front of where I was. I stayed three rows behind. I watched them the entire time: Laura’s silhouette against the screen bent over Raúl’s lap and never came back up. She sucked his cock for almost half an hour, her head hidden under his jacket, while Raúl kept his left hand resting calmly on the armrest as if he were just watching the film. In the end I saw him throw his head back and heard a muffled gasp. Laura sat up, ran her tongue over her lips, and leaned against his shoulder. That outside perspective had something about it that stirred a mix of excitement and unease in me, something I still didn’t know how to separate clearly back then.

Weeks went by like that. We went to the theater, out to dinner, for drinks. Sometimes the three of us went away for the weekend. We met almost every Friday, sometimes Saturdays too. In spring we decided to take a trip together to a spa resort in the comarca of Osona, one of those rural hotels with a spa and heated pool where people go to disconnect. And it was on that trip that something started to become strange for me in a way I could no longer ignore or rationalize.

***

The role-play Raúl proposed for that weekend was simple on the surface: he and Laura would be a married couple. I would simply be a friend of the couple traveling with them. Nothing more. That was the setup, and the three of us had agreed to it before leaving Barcelona.

During Saturday and Sunday I saw them holding hands in the hotel hallways. I saw them kissing on the spa terrace while steam rose off the water. I saw them sharing dishes in the restaurant, laughing at something I didn’t hear, choosing the wine together from the menu. I was in the adjoining room, like the friend. Like the guest. Like what I was, in that carefully constructed context, supposed to be.

The first night, with the thin walls those hotels have, I heard them fucking for hours. I heard Raúl saying dirty things to my wife through the wall, I heard Laura moaning in a way I hadn’t heard her moan at home in a long time, I heard the headboard hitting the wall with a slow rhythm and then faster and faster. I heard her begging him to put it in her ass. I heard her scream when she came. I jerked my cock in that empty double bed until I came in my hand, and then I lay there staring at the ceiling with a feeling in my chest I couldn’t name.

The next day, in the pool, she came out of the water in a black bikini and approached me without taking off her sunglasses.

—Raúl says if you behave tonight you can come watch —she told me softly, with a half-smile.

And that night I went. I sat in their room’s armchair like a theater spectator, and Raúl fucked her in front of me for almost two hours. He put her in every position. He licked her ass while I watched, spread her cheeks apart with both hands and ran his tongue between them until Laura was begging him to do it with his cock instead. He did. He sodomized her slowly, bracing her against the headboard, while he looked me in the eyes over my wife’s shoulder.

—Take it out, Marcos —he told me—. But don’t come near. Jack off from there.

I obeyed. I jerked off watching another man tear Laura’s ass apart, and I came into a handkerchief without having touched her all night. When it was over, she stayed to sleep with him. I went back to my guest room.

There were moments when I laughed at the situation, because there was something of absurd theater in all of it that was almost comical from the outside. There were other moments when I didn’t laugh at all. The line between erotic play and something that was beginning to uncomfortably resemble reality wasn’t always easy to see when you were inside the game and not outside it.

With time, I started noticing that Laura talked more about Raúl than about anything else. That when she came home after seeing him, she had an energy I didn’t remember seeing in years. That I was gradually ceasing to be the protagonist of our shared story and becoming a secondary character with good intentions and less and less relevance.

I stopped going out with them. First by spacing out the dates with reasonable excuses, then by directly telling them I preferred to stay home. They kept meeting alone. Laura told me about it afterward, with an enthusiasm in her voice she no longer tried to hide. One night, almost in passing, she mentioned that Raúl had taken her to a private party with a group of his friends.

—It was me and another girl —she told me, sitting on the sofa with a glass of wine in her hand and her legs crossed—. They had us spread open all night. I lost count of how many came inside. Raúl left my pussy full of cum from five different guys and then ate me out himself.

She said it with shining eyes, as if she were telling me about a lovely trip. That they’d shared her among several men. That she’d enjoyed it immensely.

She said it delightedly. Raúl was her owner, even if neither of them used that word. She did what he asked. And I began to understand with an uncomfortable clarity that in that arrangement there wasn’t much real room left for me.

***

In that distancing, in that kind of silent crisis that settled between Laura and me, I got close to Carmen again. Carmen and her husband Andrés had been in the liberal scene for years, but their dynamic was unlike anything I’d known before: Andrés liked staying on the outside. He liked serving, cleaning, preparing dinner while Carmen and I were in another room. He liked humiliating himself, even though he didn’t call it that. He simply called it his way of enjoying himself, and he said it with a calm that I initially found disconcerting and eventually learned to respect.

I started seeing them almost every weekend. I’d go to their flat in the Eixample, and as soon as I closed the door Carmen was already unbuckling my belt in the hallway. She was a woman in her mid-forties, with big firm tits, a round ass, and a mouth that knew exactly what it was doing. She’d drag me to the bedroom and suck my cock on her knees at the foot of the bed while Andrés, in his underwear, brought us two glasses of wine and set them on the bedside table without saying a word.

—Thank you, darling —Carmen would say with my cock resting on her lip—. Now go make dinner, because we’ll be at this for a while.

And Andrés would go to the kitchen. And I’d fuck his wife for hours, in his own bed, while he peeled potatoes on the other side of the hallway. I’d put her on all fours and fuck her pussy hard, holding her by the hair, until she came screaming with her face smashed into the pillow. I’d eat her pussy until she trembled. She’d ride me with her tits bouncing in my face and order me to come inside her. I’d fill her pussy with semen and then pull away, and she’d stay lying on her back with her legs open.

—Andrés —she would call, without raising her voice.

Andrés would appear in the doorway, drying his hands on a dish towel.

—Come clean her up —Carmen would say, pointing at her dripping cunt—. Marcos filled me up.

And Andrés would kneel between his wife’s legs and eat her pussy full of my cum, eyes closed and with an almost religious calm, while I drank wine sitting on the edge of the bed watching him do it. When he finished, she’d stroke his head the way you stroke a dog and tell him he could go back to the kitchen now. It was an arrangement that worked for all three of us with a naturalness that contrasted sharply with the tension I felt in my own home.

Carmen was also, during those months, the person I truly talked to about what I was going through with Laura. She didn’t judge me. She listened carefully and asked questions that forced me to think about things I preferred not to think about.

—What do you want, Marcos? Not what Laura wants, not what Raúl wants. You. What do you want? —she asked one night while Andrés was clearing the kitchen on the other side of the wall.

I didn’t have a clear answer. But I knew pretty surely what I didn’t want: to keep feeling like an extra in my own marriage.

***

In September I had a heart problem. It wasn’t a heart attack, but it was close enough to scare everyone, including me. Angina that landed me in the hospital and kept me there under observation for several days. It was an unpleasant experience and, at certain nighttime moments, quite terrifying.

Laura was with me every day. She didn’t go anywhere. She set everything else aside and stayed by my side without asking questions. And in those hospital days, with the machines beeping and the white ceiling always the same, we talked like we hadn’t really talked in a long time.

I told her I didn’t want to keep living like that. That I didn’t want to be the add-on in my own marriage. That I was tired of that life, that I needed calm and normality, that if Raúl stayed present in our story I no longer knew exactly what place I occupied in it or whether that place was worth it.

She listened. She broke things off with Raúl. He didn’t take it well at first, but eventually he accepted it.

We ended the liberal life completely. We closed that door. And as a way of processing everything we’d lived through, we decided to start writing it down. We published stories on this page. The response was better than we expected: comments, emails, people asking us questions, thanking us for our honesty, telling us about their own doubts. A lot of people wanted to meet us, but that was no longer something we were even remotely considering.

***

Until Álvaro’s email arrived.

Álvaro was twenty-six years old. He had been Laura’s student at university some years earlier. From the geographical clues and the details we’d dropped in the stories without really thinking about the consequences, he recognized us. He wrote to us in a friendly tone, with genuine curiosity, telling us that he was bisexual and that he’d followed pages like this for a long time. We liked him for the way he wrote. Laura had good memories of him as a student.

We met up. The evening was pleasant and tension-free: good conversation, some wine, and then the three of us went up to our place without saying it outright but knowing perfectly well where we were headed.

Álvaro was a tall, thin kid, with a cock longer than I expected and a very direct way of asking for what he wanted. On the sofa he started kissing Laura while I undid his shirt from behind. She opened his pants, pulled out his dick, and started sucking him right there, mouth open and tongue working the glans, while she looked at me to see how I reacted.

—Come here —Álvaro said, tugging my hand.

I knelt beside Laura. The two of us sucked his cock at the same time, our tongues clashing around the glans, taking turns swallowing him whole. Álvaro grabbed my head and shoved it down to my throat. I let him do it. I’d never sucked a cock before and I was surprised by how much I liked it, the way he moaned when I tightened my lips in just the right place.

Laura stripped completely naked and spread her legs on the sofa. Álvaro dove in to eat her pussy hungrily, slurping, and I got behind him and ate his ass while he did it to her. After that I fucked him while Laura held my cock to help ease it in slowly. Álvaro kept eating Laura’s pussy while I speared him from behind, and she came into his mouth while he moaned, choking on pleasure with my cock inside him. The three of us ended up tangled on the sofa, semen everywhere, laughing like children at what we’d just done.

We thought, perhaps with too much optimism, that it could be the start of something like what we’d had with Raúl, but more balanced, more in line with what we wanted now. We were excited in a way that, looking back, wasn’t entirely justified.

Álvaro disappeared. He wrote us a few days later to say that he had a partner, that he felt terrible about what had happened, that he couldn’t repeat it. We understood without resentment. We didn’t have any more contact with him.

And that should have been the end of it. But it wasn’t.

***

Just over a month ago, Laura told me that Raúl had written to her. That he wanted to have coffee, talk for a minute, nothing important. She told me in a natural way I couldn’t quite read at the time. Days later she told me she’d met him. That they’d ended up in bed.

—He fucked me in the same bed where he fucked both of us two years ago —she blurted out, looking at me with a mix of guilt and defiance—. He put me on all fours as soon as I walked into the apartment. He didn’t even take all my clothes off. He lifted my skirt, pulled my panties aside, and shoved his cock into me from behind in one thrust. I came twice before he did. He filled my pussy again, Marcos. And this time there was nobody else in the room.

There was a long argument, longer than any we’ve had in all these years. Then silence. Then more conversation that led nowhere. We made up in the formal sense of the word, but something no longer fit as before, and the two of us knew it. We decided to separate.

I’m not going to drag this out any more than necessary because, as you’ll understand, it’s not easy to write and I have no interest in drama for drama’s sake. Laura moved out a few weeks ago. As far as I know, she’s living with Raúl, back in the liberal scene, apparently fine. I’m still seeing Carmen regularly. Andrés is still Andrés. We’ve built something that works for the three of us, though I don’t have an exact name for what it is.

***

I’ve felt indebted to the people who followed us during this time, who wrote to us often, who shared some of their own lives and doubts with us. That’s why I wanted to tell this, even though it isn’t pleasant to write and even though the ending isn’t the one either of us would have chosen if we’d had a choice.

From the outside, this kind of life can seem very exciting. And it is, in many moments. There are experiences I wouldn’t trade for anything. There are nights I remember with a mix of desire and nostalgia that I still don’t quite know how to handle. But there are also things no one tells you when you start: that agreements can be broken without anyone planning it, that boundaries shift on their own over time, that there are dynamics that begin as play and end up being something much harder to undo than it was to build them.

If someone writes to me asking whether they should live this kind of life, the first thing I’d tell them is to ask themselves an honest question before taking a single step: am I prepared for everything it entails, not just for what I find exciting to imagine? Because the good is very good, that’s true. But the bad can be very bad too. And sometimes the two things arrive together, and you don’t always know which one is happening at that moment.

Thank you to everyone who was there reading, commenting, writing. I won’t be publishing here again because it would no longer make any sense to do so.

Marcos. Without Laura.