What My Wife Asked Me for After the Threesome

Several weeks had passed since Lorenzo returned to Turin and the house began breathing again. After the storm came the calm, and with it the conversation we had so desperately needed. I promised Daniela I would never hide anything from her again; she asked me never to act behind her back again. We sealed it where we always sealed the important things—in bed—first setting aside the fears I carried.

Because something had changed in me during the Italian’s visit, and I didn’t know how to name it. The night Lorenzo took her from behind while she and I were in sixty-nine, I felt myself go soft inside her mouth. What I saw on her face wasn’t humiliation. It was curiosity. And that scared me more than anything else.

Daniela sensed the tension before I could explain it. She knew how to switch me off: kisses, caresses, words in my ear, the image of what we’d lived through repeated in a low voice. The strategy worked that first time. Desire flared again and I entered her with all my force, driving away the ghost that had been circling me. But the ghost hadn’t gone. It was only waiting.

***

From then on we started bringing Lorenzo into our bed without him being there. She would try to position herself on top of me, in the inverted position, a sign she was thinking of that afternoon. I went along delighted, because it turned me on to remember him penetrating her right above my face.

One night, without thinking, I slid to the floor and ate her cunt on my knees. She sighed, held my head, and put one foot on the mattress to open herself up. I had the Italian’s image vivid in that same posture, and she did too, because all at once she said in a broken voice:

—You’d like to have him in your mouth, wouldn’t you?

I pulled back for a second and answered, certain of myself:

—And you’d like to watch us.

I buried my face between her legs again without taking my eyes off her. She was looking down at me and didn’t stop spouting filthy things, and every word exploded in my head like a spark. She came, spilling into my mouth, I slapped her down and drove into her without mercy, until she screamed, until all the tension built up over weeks emptied out.

***

Truth is, the idea of sharing her wasn’t new to us. The first time was at Lorenzo’s place, months earlier, when she got obsessed with him and I agreed to watch. It started as a threesome and ended up being something else. I remember the big bed, the low light, the three of us tangled together, no longer knowing whose hand belonged to whom. He was the one who opened her from behind for the first time, slowly, while I held her gaze from the other side of the pillow.

What happened that afternoon pulled us apart for a while. Because of her, or because of me, we stopped speaking the same language. But the Italian’s return, instead of sinking us, taught us the opposite: that we could play at the edge without losing each other, as long as we always came back to one another. That was the silent pact holding everything else together.

***

Once I’d lost the fear of failing, Daniela dared to put something on the table I hadn’t expected.

—You can’t imagine how much it turned me on seeing you go soft —she said one dawn, smoking as she reclined against the headboard—. When it went limp in my mouth, soft, tiny. It was the most intense thing of the whole night.

I looked at her, not knowing what to say. She fixed her eyes on my crotch, still only half-awake.

—Did you really like it? —I asked.

—A lot. The feeling on my tongue, so surrendered, so mine. —She smiled crookedly—. I’ve tried to repeat it after making love, but you react right away. It’s not the same.

It’s not the same. The phrase kept turning over in my head for days, until I made a decision anyone would consider madness.

***

Hugo is my partner and, besides that, a psychiatrist. That morning I stopped the meeting we had and asked him to talk about a delicate matter. I told him about Lorenzo’s visit, the threesome, the lost erection. He listened without blinking, with that professional calm I envy so much.

—Carmen, sorry, Daniela —he corrected himself—, does she know?

—She asked me to, Hugo. It turns her on seeing me like that, weak, surrendered beside her. She wants to do it again, but my body won’t let her: as soon as she touches me, I react.

—And what exactly do you want me to do?

—We both know about inhibitors. Prescribe me something. Just for one occasion.

Hugo set the pen down on the table and looked at me as if I’d lost my mind.

—Your wife sleeps with half the world, me included, and the only thing you can think of asking me for is help losing your virility? This conversation is over.

I didn’t back down. After lunch I went into his office again.

—Call her. Ask her. If she confirms it, then we’ll talk.

He protested, but in the end he picked up the phone. He put it on speakerphone reluctantly.

***

I heard my wife’s voice on the other end, sweet, professional. And then I witnessed something that left me breathless. Daniela told Hugo everything with a bluntness I had never heard from her before. She described how I knelt in front of Lorenzo, how I took him in my mouth, how afterward I cleaned his cock with my tongue without leaving a single corner untouched. She sounded like a different woman, loose, shameless, enjoying every detail.

—And the best part —she said— was when it started to go limp in my mouth, until it was nothing. I kept it there, playing with my tongue. An absolutely new sensation.

Hugo shot me astonished looks. I pretended to study the ceiling.

—Whenever you want to finish him off —she told him— and after that a sixty-nine. By the way, when are we seeing each other?

—Tomorrow? —he replied, hoarse.

—At home. Kisses, Hugo. —And before hanging up she added—: Tell Mario you’re the one telling him.

She hung up. I was still stunned. My wife, my Daniela, was turning into someone else with startling ease.

—She calls herself Dalia —Hugo explained, still dazed—. The first time I was with her I felt awkward, I couldn’t stop thinking she was your wife. Then she told me: “Don’t call me Daniela, call me Dalia. That way, when we run into each other at a professional event, you won’t see the whore, you’ll see your partner’s wife. It’s another dimension, it doesn’t affect what we are.” And it works. She’s another person.

“Another person.” Hugo had no idea how right he was.

***

It took me a while to convince her to try the experiment. “You two are both crazy!” was the first thing she blurted out. But after I reminded her how much she’d enjoyed tasting something so small and surrendered, she finally granted me one chance. Just one. She called Hugo, gave him a hell of a dressing-down for giving in, wrote down the recommendations, and passed them on to me as nonnegotiable conditions: no alcohol, no driving. “At your orders!” I replied, snapping to attention before her.

I started taking it on a Saturday. The first sensation was, paradoxically, frustration: I didn’t notice any effect. On Sunday, when I urinated, I felt a strange tingling, a dull numbness. I didn’t have my usual morning erection. I went out for a run and used the solitude to test myself: nothing, no matter how hard I tried, it wouldn’t respond. An absurd joy took hold of me. I was castrated, and I would keep the good news for nightfall.

But Daniela knows every gesture I make. The moment she saw me come in, she smiled.

—Have you been playing with it or is it still as limp as an old bouquet?

I laughed, pulled down my trousers, and showed her a tiny version of what she was used to seeing. She came closer and wrapped her hand around it like a wounded little bird.

—Let’s see if it passes the test —she murmured.

We kissed furiously. She fondled me gently, squeezed me, searched among the skin for a glans she couldn’t find to wake it up. All useless. I barely felt the groping; the thing was asleep, anesthetized. And yet I was burning with desire for her. The drug shut the body down, not the want.

—Come —she ordered.

***

I followed her down the hall, watching her toss clothes aside as she went. When she reached the bedroom she finished taking off her underwear and lay down. I stretched out beside her, ready for whatever she wanted to do with me.

—Eat me —she said, opening herself—and don’t stop until I’m dripping down my face.

I buried myself between her swollen lips and drank until I was satisfied. She moved, searching for the angle, arched when I brushed her ass, moaned, said atrocious things. And all the while, that little surrendered thing hanging from me competed with her tongue, beaten against the palate, sucked, bitten gently. She flooded over me in tremors and still I didn’t stop. I couldn’t stop. I turned my attention to her soaked sphincter and traced it in time with her hips until she came apart again.

—Do you need to come? —she asked afterward, exhausted.

—No need —I answered—. I’m complete.

And it was true. I had never felt so given over as I did that night, with nothing to offer but my mouth and my surrender.

***

Days later I tried on a thong in front of the wardrobe mirror. It was her idea. She claimed that, without an erection, my sex would melt into the rest of me until it became invisible. She was right. I chose a burgundy one, she adjusted the garment herself, and when I looked at myself, hardly anything could be made out: an almost smooth pubis, alien, if not for the fact that the rest of my body was still that of a man. Daniela, naked beside me, caressed my chest with burning eyes.

—You could shave —she whispered.

—Not a chance.

—Imagine it, you and me, not a single hair.

—You’re not going to convince me.

—Are you sure? —she insisted, turning affectionate.

I rejected the idea before it could take root, though something inside me was already beginning to give way. The mirror drew me in a way I couldn’t explain. Her, naked; me, in a burgundy thong with no trace of my attributes. It didn’t look bad on me. It didn’t look bad at all.

***

Later, once things had calmed down, Hugo asked me why I was doing it, why a man like me would choose to surrender his virility.

—I wouldn’t know how to explain it to you —I told him—. Seeing myself reduced to nothing, beside the force of her lover, is the perfect way of giving her over completely. I give myself one hundred percent, even renouncing what makes me a man. And she knows it without us having to say a word.

—Fuck —he muttered—. You leave me speechless.

—You still don’t get it. You think we’re ruining our marriage, and it’s exactly the opposite. She and I, Hugo, she and I above everything and everyone. I’d do anything for her. If losing myself gives her pleasure, I’ll do it with your help or without it.

Hugo fell silent. I don’t blame him. There are desires that can only be understood from inside another man’s bed, and ours was one of them. That autumn, beyond the fogged-up glass, it rained without stopping, and I had finally found a kind of calm I never thought possible.