What I Discovered Watching My Wife Through the Camera

My name is Tomás, I’m forty years old, and I’ve always been curious. Not the kind of curiosity that stays in your head, but the kind that pushes you to act. Sixteen years ago I married Lucía and, although I love her more than anything in this world, there was something in our bed that took a very long time to loosen up. She came from a family where no one talked about sex, where touching yourself was a sin, and where pleasure was a word only used to talk about desserts.

Lucía is thirty-four years old. Four pregnancies haven’t erased what nature gave her: a waist that’s still defined, generous breasts with large dark nipples that harden with the slightest draft, and hips that turn heads in the street even though she swears she doesn’t notice. What I love most about her is that she doesn’t know it. She walks around the house with her hair tied up and her glasses crooked and has no idea what effect she has on anyone who passes by her.

For years I tried to gently push her toward the ground I wanted us to share. I gave her books. First romantic novels with tame scenes, then more explicit stories, and finally erotic anthologies that she accepted with a mix of embarrassment and curiosity. She read them in secret, as if a nun might appear at any moment in the kitchen doorway and catch her doing something wrong.

One winter afternoon I found her asleep with the iPad resting on her chest. The screen was still lit on a page full of long paragraphs. I took the device carefully so I wouldn’t wake her and looked at the last line she’d read. It was a scene of a woman alone in her house, no husband, no children, in front of the mirror. I watched her breathe and thought something had broken, inside her, in silence. Something good.

Months passed. One night after making love, I asked her if she had ever touched herself alone. She looked at me as if I’d spoken to her in another language.

—Never —she said—. And I don’t know if I could.

—Why not?

—Because I wouldn’t know what to do —she whispered, and covered her face with the pillow.

That answer haunted me for weeks.

I wanted to see her discover herself. I wanted to see what no man, not even me, had ever seen: my own wife understanding her body for the first time. I know it was a mean fantasy. But it was mine, and I couldn’t get it out of my head.

***

The house is big. Too big, my in-laws say every time they come over. Three floors, four bedrooms, two patios. The old alarm had been acting up for a while, and the security company had sent me a quote to replace the whole system. New cameras, motion sensors, siren, an app on the phone to see everything in real time from wherever you were. The perfect excuse.

I told Lucía I was going to order the installation that week. She nodded without looking up from the notebook where she wrote down the kids’ schedules. I showed her the plan the technician had left me: cameras in the living room, the patio, the garage, the first-floor hallway, the entrance. She approved every point with a gesture. I didn’t show her the last one. The one that would be concealed inside a smoke detector, in the bedroom ceiling, aimed right at the bed.

—Isn’t that too much? —she asked when the technician left, after six hours of work.

—Just enough —I answered, and kissed her forehead.

That night, once she was asleep, I locked myself in the bathroom and opened the app. The phone screen showed the bedroom in black and white, with such clarity that you could make out the embroidery on the sheet. My wife was breathing, lying on her side, one leg out from under the covers. The camera was good. Too good.

***

I had to wait almost three weeks. The rhythm of the house gave no respite: kids, lunches, doctors, school meetings, other people’s birthdays. But the day came. On a Tuesday in June, the four kids left early and Lucía stayed home alone. I got to the office at nine, locked the door, and asked my assistant not to put through any calls for two hours. I told her I had a video meeting with a difficult client. I wasn’t exactly lying.

I opened the app. The screen showed the empty bedroom. The bed was unmade, the curtains half drawn, a shaft of sunlight falling diagonally across the pillows. I waited. Ten minutes went by. Then fifteen. I started to think nothing was going to happen, that she would go into the kitchen or head out to shop like any other day. And then she appeared.

She came in with the iPad in one hand and a steaming mug in the other. She was wearing the cream-colored cotton pajamas I had given her for her birthday, two-piece, loose and soft. She closed the door behind her, even though no one else was in the house. That detail made me clench my teeth against my knuckles. She was preparing for something. I knew it.

She turned on the heat, set the mug on the nightstand, settled against the pillows, and opened the iPad. She propped the device against a cushion in a vertical position, to keep her hands free. I already knew what she was about to read. That same morning, while she was showering, I had checked the browsing history: a long anonymous story about a woman discovering her body in middle age. She had bookmarked the file two nights earlier.

She began to read. I, in my office fifteen kilometers away, held my breath as if any sound might betray me through the screen.

***

At first she didn’t do anything. She just read, gaze still and lips slightly parted. Every so often she bit her lower lip. After a long while, she brought one hand to her chest and stroked herself over the fabric, slowly, as if checking something. Then the other. Then both at once.

Her nipples pressed against the cotton. The camera, with its overhead lens, showed everything with a clarity that was almost unbearable. I rested my elbow on the desk and held my head with my hand. She didn’t know I was watching her. She believed the whole universe was ignoring her at that moment. And that is precisely why what she was about to do was going to be real.

She unbuttoned the top of the pajama shirt without taking it off completely. By the time I realized it, the fabric hung open at her sides, her breasts bare and the shirt tails falling along her flanks. She looked at them first, almost surprised, as if it were the first time she had really seen them. Then she began to touch them. Softly. Like someone learning an instrument.

I loosened my belt. I did it without thinking. The office was closed, the phone silent, and she, on the screen, was tracing her nipples with her fingertips. Every time she brushed a thumb over them, her shoulders would hunch for an instant, as if a current were running up her back to her neck.

***

Ten minutes passed. Or fifteen. I lost count. Lucía pushed the sheet away with her feet until it was bunched at the foot of the bed. Then she pulled down the pajama pants. She did it with a decisive movement, as if she had made a decision she had been putting off for far too long. She was naked from the waist down. She only kept the top of the pajamas, open, hanging from her shoulders.

She looked back at the iPad. She kept reading. This time, while she read, one hand slid down her belly, slowly, until it stopped between her legs. She didn’t plunge it in right away. She left it there, resting, as if she were gauging whether she had permission. And then, very slowly, she began to move.

It was the first time I had ever seen my wife touch herself. After so many years sharing a bed, after four children, after a thousand nights with the lights off and the same old ritual, there she was alone, discovering herself. Her hand moved in small circles over her clit. Her head tipped back now and then. Her feet tensed against the mattress.

She brought her fingers to her mouth and moistened them. Then her hand went back down. This time she stroked herself faster. The other hand climbed to one breast and pinched her nipple hard between two fingers. I heard her moan. It wasn’t a theatrical moan, the kind you make for someone else. It was a low sound, almost apologetic, as if she were afraid of waking a ghost that had been sleeping inside her for years.

***

I was right on the edge. My hand was on myself and my eyes were glued to the screen. I watched her, alone, discovering what I had spent years trying to give her without knowing how. A couple of fingers and a book were enough for her to reach a place that I, with my whole body on top of hers, couldn’t always take her to.

She sped up. The hand on her clit began to move with a different rhythm, faster, more insistent. Her legs opened wider. She arched her back. She let go of the iPad, which fell beside the bed without her noticing, and grabbed the pillow with her free hand. She closed her eyes. Pressed her lips together. And when I thought she couldn’t hold it any longer, she opened her mouth and let out a long moan, a cry that came from deep in her belly, and went still, trembling, with her hand still pressed between her thighs.

I came at the same time. Without theatrics, without thinking. I pressed my forehead to the desk and breathed as if I had just run a marathon. It took me a long while to lift my head.

***

When I looked at the screen again, she was lying on her side, cheek on the pillow and hand still between her legs, now motionless. Her eyes were open, staring at the ceiling. She wasn’t smiling. She wasn’t crying either. It was an expression I had never seen on her before, a mixture of discovery and a little sadness, as if she had just found out something important that had been kept from her for far too long.

She stayed like that a long while. Then she got up, got dressed, made the bed carefully, picked up the mug, and went downstairs to the kitchen like any other Tuesday.

That night, during dinner, she didn’t say a word. Neither did I. But when the kids went to bed and we were left alone at the kitchen table, she looked at me over the rim of her wine glass and said, almost in a whisper:

—I was alone all morning today.

—I know —I said.

She slowly raised an eyebrow. I didn’t explain anything else. Nor was it necessary.

I took her hand across the table and we went upstairs together to the bedroom. The camera in the ceiling was still there, hidden in the smoke detector, blinking silently over our heads. We both knew, without having said it aloud, that that night we were going to give it something new to record.

But I’ll tell that part another day.