THE BRIDE (Sinful Stories_#3)

(Complete Story)

Chapter One. Malasaña, November

(Eight years earlier)

It had been raining since Thursday, and by Saturday it was still raining.

Lunch at her parents’ place had been cocido stew and three hours sitting around the table afterward, and at five thirty we went out into the street with our clothes smelling of someone else’s cooking and of cigarette smoke from an apartment where nobody smoked anymore except her father, who smoked by the window with his hand outside, as though the place didn’t belong to him.

Her mother had asked the usual question halfway through the second course, as naturally as someone who had been rehearsing her tone for months:

“So when are you two going to get married?”

And we’d given our usual answer: we were twenty-two, there was plenty of time, we’d see. Marta, who was fifteen and had her phone under the table, looked up to announce that “we’ll see” was a place where people lived. Irene laughed, I laughed, her father said the girl had a point, and nobody paid him any attention.

She was soaked on the subway, her hair stuck to her face and her sneakers dripping. She was wearing a long coat and pulled up the collar, and there in the car, with everyone packed together and the windows fogged over, she rested her head on my shoulder without saying anything. She smelled of rain and fabric softener and cocido, and I thought it was a perfect combination.

We got off at Tribunal station. The apartment was on Calle del Espíritu Santo, third floor, no elevator, with a landing that smelled of frying grease and damp, and with Nacho, my roommate, who had gone to Soria on Friday until Sunday and left a note on the refrigerator door held up by a magnet from a bank: he was taking the deep fryer, we had the place to ourselves, and we’d better behave.

Irene knew Nacho well after all the afternoons and nights she’d spent in that apartment. She read the note over my shoulder and declared him a saint. I told her Nacho had taken the deep fryer. She repeated that he was a saint with a deep fryer, and that settled the debate.

She took off her soaked coat and hung it over a chair back, where it would drip all night. She went into the kitchen in her socks, switched on the hall light with her elbow, and from there, half turning, raised two fingers on her right hand. I asked what that meant. She said it was a greeting. I asked what kind, and she explained that it worked for everything: when you were far away and didn’t want to shout, when you were leaving somewhere and wanted to say goodbye without actually saying it, when you were at a wedding and couldn’t talk. It worked for everything. I told her it was a shitty greeting. She said it was a fantastic greeting, and she was giving it to me, too—the right to use it, like a song.

She came back with a bottle of wine and two glasses, one of which was actually a mug chipped along the rim. She opened the wine, filled both, handed me the mug, and sat cross-legged on the floor with her back against the radiator. I sat across from her on the couch, a secondhand thing with a two-year-old coffee stain that had become part of the furniture.

We drank. Rain rattled against the metal shutter, and the radiator made that old-radiator sound, a clack-clack every twenty seconds. I asked if she was upset about her mother’s question. She said her mother asked because she had to, it was her job, and what bothered her was that I always answered as if I were taking an exam. I told her that was because I was taking an exam. She said sure, but you could pass without studying. She laughed, looked at me over the rim of her glass, and the usual thing happened to me: I forgot what I’d been about to say.

“Come here.”

I got off the couch and sat on the floor beside her, by the radiator. She placed her open palm against my face and looked at my mouth without meeting my eyes, which is the way people look when they’ve already made up their minds. We kissed slowly, one of those kisses that lead nowhere and lead to everything. She climbed onto my lap still holding both glasses; we had to set them aside, some wine spilled onto the rug, and neither of us moved to clean it up.

Her sweater—my sweater, gray and three sizes too big—had slipped off one shoulder. I put my mouth there, against her collarbone, and she tipped her head back, her hair falling down her back, while the radiator kept clack-clacking as though nothing were happening.

“Let’s go to bed,” she said.

We never made it to the bed.

She grabbed the front of my T-shirt and shoved me against the hallway wall, kissing me with her mouth wide open and one hand already at the button of my pants. She was hungry for it. She’d had her hand on my knee under her parents’ table all afternoon, and now she was free to do what she wanted and wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.

She yanked my pants down to my knees. She gripped my cock through my underwear, squeezing, pulled it out, and looked at it the way you look at something that belongs to you. She knelt right there on the cold hallway tiles and took my whole cock into her mouth at once, without any buildup. I braced both hands against the wall because my legs nearly gave way. She sucked slowly and deeply, one hand around the base and the other gripping my thigh, looking up at me every few seconds. The hallway was lit by a cheap yellow bulb that picked out her cheekbones and left the rest of her face in shadow. I warned her I was going to come. She let my cock slip from her mouth, wiped her lip with her wrist, stood up, and said we’d finish in bed, slowly.

The bed was unmade, the winter comforter in a heap. The room had a radiator that didn’t work and a two-door wardrobe with an enormous mirror on one door, an old mirror with the silvering worn away at one corner. It had come with the apartment and, without either of us ever saying so, had become part of our nights.

I pulled her sweater over her head. She had nothing on underneath, and I already knew that because I’d seen when she bent down to pick up the bottle opener in the kitchen, but I still stopped to look at her for a moment. She told me she’d gone without panties all day; she’d taken them off at her mother’s place because they were too tight and put them in her purse. She’d removed her bra when we got home and left it on a chair. I put my hand on her stomach and moved it down. She was wet, and not from the rain. I ran my fingers over her pussy, top to bottom, twice, without going inside, and she clung to my shoulder with both hands and closed her eyes. I slipped in one finger. Then two. She pressed forward, searching for more, and I put my other hand on the back of her neck and kissed her as I spread her with my fingers, feeling the muscles in her neck tighten.

She pushed me onto the bed but didn’t let me stay there. She turned around and got on all fours at the edge of the mattress, facing the wardrobe mirror, and looked back at me in its reflection, her face turned sideways.

“Like this.”

There’s a trick to that position: if you do it wrong, it’s mechanical. You have to take it slowly at first. I moved behind her, my knees at the edge of the mattress, and ran my cock over her pussy a couple of times, up and down, getting it wet. She pushed back, searching for it, and on the third try I let her take me in herself.

I entered her very slowly. All the way in. And we looked at each other in the mirror, because that’s the thing about a mirror: it won’t let you lie. Her mouth open, her elbows sunk into the mattress; me still wearing my T-shirt, my hands on her hips.

I moved. Almost all the way out and back in, and for a while she watched the movement in the mirror before closing her eyes and resting her cheek on the sheet. I grabbed her hair in one fist at the nape of her neck, and she made a short sound. From then on I picked up the pace, and when I asked her if she wanted it harder, she was already beyond words. The bed began thudding against the wall, the glass left on the nightstand fell and shattered, and neither of us turned to look. I put my hand on her lower back and set the rhythm; she started thrusting backward with her whole body, seeking it out, with that mixture of surrender and command that she’d always had. The mirror reflected both at once: submission and control.

I let go of her hair, put both hands on her ass, spread her open, and sped up. That took her voice away. She started breathing in short bursts, a little sound with each thrust, until that sound turned into a repeated word that wasn’t a word at all.

“Stop, I’m going to come.”

I didn’t stop. Her whole body tightened at once, her arms buckled, and her face sank into the mattress. Her moan was muffled by the sheet and still filled the room. I held on long enough to watch her, to see her ass trembling, then let myself go inside her, thrusting all the way in, both hands dug into her hips and my teeth clenched.

We stayed like that, joined together, our legs shaking, while the hallway radiator kept clack-clacking. She said something about the broken glass, and about it being the chipped mug, and I said it didn’t matter. She laughed with her face still buried in the mattress. I slipped out slowly, lay down beside her, and she turned and curled against my chest, her head on my shoulder. She stayed there with one leg thrown over mine and an open hand resting on my stomach, and we lay like that for a long time, not talking, listening to the rain, the street, and a neighbor arguing with someone on the phone in the courtyard.

I stroked her back from top to bottom. I found the scar on her knee—she’d fallen off her bike at thirteen, one summer, and the scar was a little white map—and traced it with my thumb. Then I brushed the hair away from her ear, because behind it she had a mole, small as a lentil, right where hair met skin, which hardly anyone had ever seen and which I thought was the best part of her body. I kissed the mole and she protested that I was going to leave her without an ear, and laughed.

Then, in the dark, with the rain against the shutter and her breathing calm again, she said her mother was right, that “we’ll see” wasn’t a place. She shifted onto her back and looked at the ceiling. She explained that she wanted a house with a blue door and a courtyard, and she wanted it always to be the same one. I asked why it always had to be the same one, and she turned toward me and said:

“Because I want something that won’t go away.”

I was twenty-two, had a shitty scholarship and not a single idea what I wanted to do with my life, and at that moment, in that bed, with those words, I said nothing. I thought it was a pretty thing to say. I thought it was the kind of thing you said at twenty-two. It took me six years to understand that it was a political platform.

She asked what I wanted.

“You.”

She told me that was an exam answer. She laughed, turned over, put her back against me, snuggled up, and didn’t press the question.

“I’m going to the kitchen for a minute. I’ll be right back.”

I got up to make a couple of sandwiches. We were hungry and the refrigerator held half a tomato, a can of tuna, and yesterday’s bread. I went to the kitchen naked, leaving the door open and her in bed.

My phone was on the nightstand, plugged into its charger, when it rang. It wasn’t password-protected. She picked it up.

And from the kitchen I heard her say, in a voice that wasn’t the one she’d been using before:

“Who the fuck is this slut? Who the fuck is this slut? Can you tell me who this fucking whore is?”

I hurried back into the bedroom when I heard her shouting. She was sitting on the bed with the sheet around her waist and one of my T-shirts on. On the screen was a picture of a girl lying completely naked on a bed, her legs spread wide, shamelessly showing off her pussy. Beneath it was a message—had a great time yesterday, hope we can do it again tomorrow—and two emojis: a kiss and an eggplant.

Another alert sounded immediately. Irene opened the second message and read it aloud twice, without taking her eyes off the screen: “And that little dark spot you’ve got on your cock... It drives me crazy when I suck you.” She knew it perfectly well. It was a small birthmark on one side, a detail we’d never thought much about, yet at that moment it changed everything. I couldn’t understand how that woman knew about it either.

I took the phone from her hand and stared at it, stunned.

“How could she know about the spot?” Irene asked. She wasn’t shouting anymore, which scared me even more.

“I don’t know. I’ve never met her.”

“Then why is she sending you a picture with her whole pussy on display?”

“I don’t know, honey. There has to be an explanation. Calm down.”

“You absolute son of a bitch. Bastard. You’re fucking someone else while I’m talking to you about our future.”

“Calm down, I swear I don’t know her. There has to be an explanation.”

“On top of everything, you don’t even have the balls to face the truth. I hate you!”

She didn’t wait. She jumped up, grabbed her pants off the floor, and started dressing any old way, her jeans only halfway on. In her haste she forgot the bra she’d left on the chair. She kept my T-shirt on. She took her coat and purse and left in tears, slamming the front door hard behind her.

She never answered the phone again. Not that night, not the next, not during any of the three weeks I kept trying, day after day. Eventually she blocked me.

I never saw her again. Once I tried going to her house, but her father came downstairs and warned me he’d call the police if I tried again.

She kept my T-shirt and I kept her bra. Those were the only things we had left of each other. Those messages destroyed our lives.

The truth was that it had all been a cruel prank by Clara, a friend of mine, and another woman I’d never met, one afternoon when the two of them had drunk too much. Clara gave the other woman my number; she took the picture and sent it to me. The birthmark had an explanation too: her boyfriend, who played soccer with me, had seen it in the showers after a game and mentioned it to Clara in conversation. She used that detail to make the second message more convincing. They had a good laugh imagining my face when I opened WhatsApp. They never imagined who would read it first.

By the time I found out, a few weeks later, it was too late. Clara happened to ask me about the messages and whether I’d liked her friend’s little pussy. When I told her what had happened, she apologized, but by then Irene no longer answered my calls.

Later I heard she was seeing another guy.

I got a job offer that would take me to Berlin, and that’s where the story ended. Nacho had to find another apartment. On one of my trips to Madrid, we met for lunch and I told him what I’d found out by chance. He knew how badly I’d suffered over the whole thing.

It took me a long time to forget her, but as the months passed I met other women and the memory began to fade.

Chapter Two. La Alameda, September

(The Wedding Day)

The invitation had arrived in July at my apartment on Calle del Pez, two months before the wedding. Inside the envelope, alongside the printed card, was a folded note in Irene’s handwriting. I stuck it to the refrigerator with a magnet. It was still there on the day of the wedding.

“Come to my wedding. I know the truth about the photograph now, and I owe you a thousand apologies. It was the worst way to end what we had. I’d love it if you were there.”

I had to read the note several times. I hadn’t heard from her in eight years, and now she was asking me to watch her marry another man. Assuming Nacho had been invited too, I called him and told him how surprised I was by the whole thing. He said he’d run into her by chance in June, and after they’d talked for a while he’d told her the truth about the WhatsApp messages. Irene had asked where I lived, and he’d given her my address. He didn’t add much, and I didn’t ask for details.

My first decision was not to go. I put the invitation in a drawer and kept telling myself there was no point in seeing her again: she’d chosen her life and I’d spent years trying to live mine. It also bothered me that she’d needed eight years to believe me. But I kept going back to the note on the refrigerator. Sometimes I stared at the words “a thousand apologies” and remembered that night in Malasaña, the sound of the door as she left, and the weeks when I couldn’t get her to talk to me.

I spent almost all of August without replying. I thought about how I’d feel seeing her in a wedding dress, whether I’d be able to shake her future husband’s hand without giving myself away, even whether she’d invited me only to put her own mind at ease. More than once I almost tore up the card. In the end I confirmed I’d come. Not because I expected to recover what I’d lost, but because after eight years I wanted to look her in the eye and find out whether that story was truly over.

I left Madrid at four fifteen. Dark blue suit, white shirt, tie in my pants pocket because it was hot and because at five in the afternoon a tie is an act of surrender. First the highway, then forty minutes of winding mountain road lined with pines, and the whole way I listened to the radio without hearing it and thought thoughts I’d already thought.

I arrived at five thirty. The estate was called La Alameda, even though it didn’t have a single poplar grove: it had cypress trees, holm oaks, a gravel path bleached white by the sun, and two stone buildings joined by a courtyard with a dry fountain. Behind them, a swimming pool with wooden loungers. September in the mountains, eighty-eight degrees, a low, golden light that made everything look like a beautifully shot movie. There were pennants strung between the cypresses, an arch of white flowers on the lawn, and two girls in black T-shirts sticking candles into the cake table.

They gave me the key to room 12 in the west wing and a little welcome bag with two chocolates and a map of the grounds that I threw in the trash. The room was small, with a double bed, a ceiling fan, and a window overlooking the courtyard. I showered, put on the white shirt I’d brought for the occasion, looked in the hotel mirror—the worst kind of mirror in existence—and told myself under my breath that this was it. Then I went down to the courtyard, because if I stayed in the room I’d keep staring at myself like an asshole.

I saw her at six thirty.

She crossed the courtyard with her dress gathered in one fist and a cigarette in the other, barefoot, her heels dangling from two fingers, her hair held in a loose bun with a pencil. She was talking to her sister Marta and didn’t see me until she was about twelve feet away.

When she did, she raised two fingers in greeting. That was the worst thing. Or the best. Raising those two fingers was a gesture she used for everything. For a neighbor. For the priest. For the man she’d loved for five years, now standing in front of her in a white shirt with his tie in his pocket, just another guest.

And suddenly I saw a picture from eight years earlier: the stair landing on Calle del Espíritu Santo, a gray sweater that wasn’t hers and a pair of house slippers, and her raising those same two fingers before going downstairs to buy bread. It struck me that for eight years she’d been using the greeting born in our hallway, scattering it throughout her life, and the last place she would use it was at the wedding where she was marrying someone else.

“Hi, Tomás.”

“Hi, Irene.”

“You’ve lost weight,” she remarked.

“And you’re barefoot.”

“These shoes are killing me. And the ceremony’s in half an hour. Have you seen the flower arch?”

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

Marta kissed me on both cheeks and told me I looked incredibly handsome with a conviction she didn’t even believe herself. Then she went back to hanging things up, and we were left together in the courtyard with people setting up the wedding all around us, saying nothing for fifteen seconds—which, between two exes, is about an hour.

“How are you holding up?” she asked.

“Fine.”

“Actually fine, or ex-boyfriend fine?”

“Ex-boyfriend fine.”

She laughed and tossed her cigarette away.

“Sorry, I think I need to finish getting ready. We’ll talk later.”

They seated me in the sixth row on the right, beside the aisle. From there I could see the back of her neck, her back, and her hands, and nothing else; that was both a fucking curse and a relief. It was hot. People fanned themselves with the programs. Beside me sat a woman in an enormous hat and a bald man who kept falling asleep in stages.

At seven sharp, the quartet changed pieces and everyone turned around. She came down the gravel path on her father’s arm, and I forgot to breathe for three seconds. I realized I’d spent two months trying to prepare myself for this, and there was no preparing for it. The dress was ivory silk, with a V-neck and two straps over her shoulders. The fitted bodice, its seams clearly defined, hugged her waist; from there a full skirt fell in soft folds to the ground. She wore a long veil edged in floral lace, fastened to her low bun, with a few strands escaping beside her face. Small pearl earrings. She was smiling, but not at anyone in particular: she was smiling at the place, at the idea, at the arch. She passed three feet away from me without looking at me. She was very well trained, or maybe she felt exactly as I did.

Her father gave her away with a couple of sentences and sat down, his eyes shining. The priest was young, the joking kind, and told a story about a couple from Cáceres who’d been married fifty-two years, and people laughed enthusiastically. To keep from looking at her, I counted the flowers on the arch: forty-three white roses, eleven eucalyptus branches, and a bunch of little green things I couldn’t identify. Then I counted the lights in the cypress trees. Then the buttons on her father’s suit. Then the moment came and I ran out of things to count.

“I do.”

She said it facing forward, her voice steady and clear, without a tremor, the way you say things you’ve truly decided. And in those two seconds of silence before the yes, things flashed through my mind that had no right to be there: a student apartment with a broken refrigerator, a trip to Cádiz in a car without air conditioning, an argument in a doorway at four in the morning, her feet against mine in a narrow bed in January. And a sentence spoken in the dark of a room in Malasaña, with rain on the shutter, eight years earlier: that she wanted something that wouldn’t go away.

And now she had something that wasn’t going away. His name was Andrés and he was six feet away, wearing a blue suit with a flower in his lapel, and he had the face of a man who knew the best thing in his life was happening to him right then. I shook her hand as she passed back along the aisle on her husband’s arm, wearing the biggest smile I’d ever seen on her face. She looked for me for a second in the sixth row, found me, and winked. A fucking wink, on her husband’s arm, with her wedding ring already on.

Cocktails were served in the fountain courtyard, with high tables, cava, vermouth, two waiters, and trays of little things nobody ate because it was hot and everyone was genuinely hungry. I took a place at the bar, a good spot for an ex: your hands stay occupied and you don’t have to fake a conversation.

Andrés came over to say hello. He shook my hand with both of his.

“Tomás, finally. How was the drive?”

“Good. A lot of curves near the end, but good.”

“Irene’s told me a lot about you. I’ve really been looking forward to meeting you.”

“I hope it was all good.”

“All of it.”

He liked me. That was the worst part: he liked me. Marta intercepted me twice with a list in her hand and the expression of a drill sergeant who’d spent her whole life watching that couple and knew exactly what was going on.

Irene went around exchanging kisses, now without the veil. She moved from group to group, bent down to speak to her aunts, let her old school friends hug her, posed for the photographer with endless patience. In the third aisle between the tables, after forty minutes of pretending, she turned with a glass in her hand and blocked my way.

“There’s too much fabric in this dress.”

“It’s a silk camping tent. Come on.”

I didn’t ask where. That’s the thing about Irene: you never ask where.

The east wing was the part nobody used. There was the boiler room, a hallway with green carpeting from another decade, and at the end an office with a walnut desk, a lit floor lamp, an old leather couch, and a big window overlooking the courtyard. Outside, forty yards away, two hundred people were toasting her wedding.

She went in first, bolted the door, and stood with her back to me, her hand on the knob, staring at the wood.

“I’ve been married for an hour and twenty minutes,” she said.

“I know.”

“And I’ve been thinking about this all day.”

She turned around. There was a long zipper down the back of her dress with a crystal pull. She lifted her hair with both hands to show me the nape of her neck. And there it was again, in its old place behind her ear: the mole the size of a lentil that hardly anyone had ever seen and which I thought was the best part of her body.

“Down.”

The pull slid down with a long, toothy rasp, as though the dress were reluctant to let her go. I unzipped it all the way down her back, to the top of her ass, but I didn’t pull the dress off. I just put my mouth on the vertebra I’d exposed. Her skin tasted of perfume and body heat. She made a little noise, almost irritated, the noise of someone who’d been waiting for something for nine hours. I bit her shoulder, slid one strap down with a finger, and the dress fell the way well-sewn silk falls: suddenly, silently. Underneath she wore an ivory boned corset trimmed with lace, stockings and garters, and panties so thin you could see the color of her skin through the fabric.

I turned her around. I kissed her the way you kiss someone who already knows your rhythm: no exploring, straight to it. She grabbed my tie—I’d put it on after leaving the bathroom, good idea—and pulled me toward the walnut desk, where she sat and swept a stack of folders to the floor with her arm. Neither of us picked them up.

I spread her legs with my hands. I lifted the bottom of the corset to see the whole garter belt, the strap taut against her thigh, the lace of her panties stretching over her hip. I ran my thumb over them, top to bottom, without going inside, and she reminded me that we already knew each other, so I shouldn’t start acting slow.

“Let’s get down to business.”

I pulled her panties down to her ankles. She stepped out of them and left them there on the floor. I knelt in front of the desk and put my mouth where I’d been wanting to put it all day.

She tasted of salt and champagne. I held her thighs with both hands to keep them apart, and she leaned back on her elbows, her head hanging over the edge of the desk, her hair spilling across the folders. She began swearing softly, in a hoarse whisper, because we couldn’t make noise, because her husband was forty yards away raising a glass. I licked her slowly with the flat of my tongue, moving up and down her open pussy, and when her thighs started trembling I switched to short circles around her clit and she dug her heels into my back. I slid two fingers inside her and curled them upward, searching, and found the famous G-spot on the third try. I started working it and her breath caught—literally caught, leaving a gap—before she let it all out at once and pressed my head against her with both hands. She asked me to stop, said that if she came there it’d be no use to her, and I asked what she needed it to be useful for, and she said to get through the rest of the night.

I stood up. I unbuttoned my pants and she watched as though it were a ceremony all its own, with the expression of someone seeing something she’d waited a long time for finally arrive. She pushed my pants down to my knees with her feet, reached inside my underwear, took my whole cock in her hand, without rushing, squeezing it and stroking it up and down twice, and told me to fuck her.

I entered her looking straight at her face. My cock was rock-hard when I went in, and we both stayed still for a second, with that stupid habit of freezing when it’s been fucking ages since you’ve been inside someone, recognizing the shape, the temperature, the exact place. Then she began moving, pushing forward with her hips, searching for the rhythm, and I followed her and put a hand on her waist so she wouldn’t fall backward off the desk.

“Slowly.”

It was slow. One of the slowest things I’ve ever done: one long movement, almost all the way out and back in, then another, the desk creaking quietly and the folders on the floor shifting in the drafts. I put my mouth against her neck and told her things. I told her she’d married the wrong man. I told her I knew it, that she knew it, that everyone knew it except Andrés. She grabbed the back of my neck and made me look at her, and said Andrés was a good man, and I admitted it, and she said Andrés was a good man and she was there, and I said yes, she was there.

Then she stopped talking. She sped up, and I grabbed her hips and brought her to the edge of the desk, until she could hold on with both hands and I could really thrust, with my whole body. The corset rose and fell with every thrust, and her nipples peeked over its ivory edge, hard and dark, driving me crazy. I reached around her front again, laid my hand flat on her stomach, slipped two fingers lower and touched her as I fucked her, my thumb against her clit and my fingers feeling my own cock slide in and out.

After that there was no going back. She announced that she was coming and I told her to come, and she did, her mouth open and not a sound coming out, which was the most astonishing thing: all of it, long, in complete silence, her eyes open and fixed on mine, shaking, squeezing me from inside with her contractions. I held on just long enough to see her finish before pulling out, grabbing my cock, and coming over the lace of her corset, over the ivory, leaving a shiny white stain that would be there all night beneath her clothes.

She lay back on the desk for a moment, staring at the ceiling, one leg hanging off and a shoe halfway on.

“When are you leaving?”

“Tomorrow at ten.”

She said okay. And then, with my hand on the doorknob and my face half-lit by the lamp, I thought about the note again. I already knew from it that Irene had learned the truth about the picture. What I didn’t understand was why she’d needed me there on that particular day.

“Irene, why did you want me to come to your wedding?”

“I ran into Nacho in June,” she said. “By chance. He told me about the prank, how they’d found out about the spot, and what you’d tried to explain to me. I was ashamed when I realized I hadn’t let you speak. I owed you those apologies, Tomás.”

“Did you write the note just to apologize?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“I wanted to see you too. To find out whether I could marry Andrés without going on wondering what might have happened to us.”

“And you chose your wedding day to find that out?”

“If you’re getting married and you’re thinking about someone else on your wedding day, you have to find out.”

“And have you found out now?”

At that moment, before she could answer, there were two knocks at the door. Sharp, made with knuckles. And a younger sister’s voice on the other side, asking if she was in there.

Irene looked at me, bit her lip, and answered yes, it was her.

Chapter Three. The Door

Marta knocked twice more, sharply, with her knuckles.

“Irene? Are you in there?”

My cock was still out, half-soft and glistening, and I was three feet from the door. Irene stood still for a second, then without hesitating grabbed my shirt, pushed me against the wall beside the doorframe, and held up an open hand: quiet. She hurriedly pulled up her dress and adjusted it over the corset, leaving the zipper open, and answered with a calmness I hadn’t known she possessed.

“Yes, it’s me.”

Marta said she’d been looking for her for half an hour. Irene explained that she’d been taking a piss. Marta repeated, half an hour? Without missing a beat, Irene said she was wearing a corset and it was a process. There was silence on the other side of the door, the kind where you can hear someone thinking. Then Marta asked if Tomás wasn’t there with her.

Irene looked at me. She bit her lip.

She said Tomás must be around somewhere. Marta said it was really weird that we’d both disappeared together. Irene said it was a coincidence, and Marta repeated the word in the knowing tone of a younger sister who’d spent her whole life watching that couple and knew exactly what it meant.

Irene settled the matter by reminding her about the family picture at nine thirty, by the arch. We heard footsteps receding down the green carpet, and then nothing.

Irene stayed leaning against the door, her forehead resting on the wood, and started laughing soundlessly, her shoulders shaking. I laughed with her, and in the middle of it she turned toward me, looked at me, and stopped laughing.

“Again. But quick.”

“But I just came. I can’t.”

“Then you’re going to come a second time. Twice is hardly enough after eight years without fucking each other. I’ll get you hard again, don’t worry.”

She pushed me against the wall again, bent down in front of me with her dress bunched around her waist and the corset defining her back, and took my entire cock into her mouth in one sudden movement, no ceremony. She laughed with her mouth full, and the sensation was overwhelming.

She sucked me with both hands around the base, her tongue along the shaft, her head moving rapidly up and down, looking up at me with those dark eyes. And that image—a bride kneeling on the green carpet of an office, her dress up around her waist, sucking my cock barely two hours after saying “I do”—is one that stays with you forever.

I grabbed her hair with one hand and she sped up. She sucked like someone in a hurry who knew exactly what she was doing. At one point she took my cock out of her mouth, licked her palm and rubbed it over the head, then gave me a smile that wasn’t made with her mouth. She asked how long I could last. I said not long. She said then I’d have to stop her myself, and took me back into her mouth all the way, more slowly this time, and kept at it until I put my hand on her head to warn her. She didn’t move away: she stayed. I nearly came in her mouth; I could feel her throat working while her hand squeezed the base of my cock hard to stop the orgasm. She let go slowly and stood up.

I turned her around without warning, roughly. She was incredibly hot. I bent her over the desk, her chest against the wood, her face to one side and her ass toward me, and pulled her dress up to her waist with both hands. I ran my hand over her ass and along her inner thigh and felt how soaking wet she was. I fucked her with my cock hard again, without warning, and she let out a grunt that must have carried all the way to the courtyard.

I started hard. Both hands on her hips, pulling her toward me with every thrust, with the noise of the desk, the folders, and the sharp slap of our bodies. The corset wrinkled across her back. Her hair was falling out of its bun and over her face. She asked for harder, and I gave it to her harder, and she asked again, and the entire desk moved and one drawer slid open by itself. She gripped the far edge with her arms straight, rested her cheek on the wood, closed her eyes, and stopped asking for anything: all she did was breathe in short bursts, a rhythmic sound marking every thrust. At one point I put my hand over her mouth. She licked my palm and then bit my thumb, while with my other hand I reached under her to find her clit, pressing two fingers against it in circles, and felt her thighs tighten again.

“More.”

More. And in the middle of it, with her voice changed, she told me to come inside her this time. That threw me. During our five years together we’d never used a condom, and now there we were, at a wedding, deciding whether to finish inside or out.

“You’re sure? Inside?”

“Inside. I want your hot cum inside me. There’s no point trying to do the right thing anymore. I’m married.”

She came before I did. She came with her face pressed against the desk and a long moan that escaped her all at once. She squeezed me from the inside just as she had the first time, and I could feel her vagina closing around my cock. There was no choice: I came inside her, all of it, thrusting to the very bottom and staying there, my pelvis pressed against her ass, both of us trembling.

We stayed that way for a long while. A minute, maybe two. My cock still inside her, slowly softening, the sweat on her back sticking to my shirt. Finally she said she actually did have to go to the bathroom this time.

She stood up carefully. She ran a hand down her thigh, saw what was there, and decided once again it didn’t matter. She went to the bathroom at the end of the hallway and came back three minutes later with her hair tidied by hand, her lipstick touched up by biting her lips, and a wet paper napkin she’d used to wipe her cleavage. I zipped up the back of her dress with the same slowness I’d used to unzip it, from her ass to the nape of her neck, and kissed the last exposed inch of skin. She put on her heels, checked her reflection in the window, smoothed the dress with her hands and adjusted the corset underneath. Suddenly she was perfect. Suddenly she was a bride again. A bride who, ten minutes earlier, had been ass-up over the walnut desk in an office.

She told me to count to forty before leaving, and if anyone saw me come out, to say I’d been looking for the bathroom. Then she gave me a quick peck and left.

I counted to forty. I went into the hallway, closed the door, and returned to the courtyard by going around the back of the building, so it wouldn’t look as though I’d come from the east wing. By the time I reached the arch, everyone was lining up for the family picture. Marta saw me coming and raised one eyebrow with a surgeon’s precision. Irene stood in the center between her parents, her hands in front of her, smiling at the camera. The photographer took the shot. And in the gap between two pictures, while everyone shifted positions, she looked for me, found me at the edge of the group, and raised two fingers.

Dinner was long and good. Fish, meat, a sorbet between courses to look classy, two different wines, and a printed menu bearing the newlyweds’ names and the date. They put me at a side table with two of Andrés’s cousins, a friend from Irene’s university days, and an older couple who didn’t speak. The parents gave speeches, the best man gave a speech, and Andrés spoke too. He was good, funny without going on too long, and said Irene was the one person in his life who wasn’t up for negotiation. It’s a brilliant line, and when I heard it I felt a little annoyed I hadn’t thought of it myself. Then they cleared the tables and the open bar and DJ got going, and by eleven thirty the dance floor was full of people sweating in suits.

I danced with Marta, who questioned me with a judge’s elegance. I danced with Irene’s mother, who said she’d always liked me, always, with an emphasis that meant something. On the third or fourth slow song, when the DJ put on something from the eighties, I felt a hand on my shoulder: the bride, asking if I’d dance with her. I asked whether Andrés had given her permission, and she said Andrés was a terrible dancer and took my hand.

We danced to one song. Slow, the kind they play to get people close together. I put my hand around her waist, on the corset over her dress, and she put one hand on my shoulder and the other in mine. For three minutes we pretended to be any two guests. Her corset was stained and she knew it. She moved a little closer and spoke softly, her mouth at my ear, telling me the sort of things you can’t hear clearly on a dance floor and that are useful for exactly that reason: that she’d spent nine hours feeling she was doing something that didn’t entirely belong to her, and that these three minutes were what belonged to her. I asked what happened afterward. She said afterward we’d see. Then the song ended, the DJ put on a bachata, Marta came to claim her sister, and Andrés slapped me on the back and offered me a cigar, and the three of us laughed at something I can’t remember.

At one fifteen, Irene disappeared. At one twenty, a message arrived: room 12, and I should bring the map I’d thrown away, because she’d gotten lost in the west wing.

I’d thrown away the map. I didn’t need it.

The west wing was a hallway with the same green emergency lights and the same carpeting, with door 12 at the far end. I knocked twice, as Marta had done, and the door opened.

She’d changed clothes: a short, sleeveless black dress above the knee, and an oversized open cardigan. And underneath, the corset. The ivory corset, with the stain. I asked what that was all about. She said she’d kept it on, stain and all. I closed the door.

The third time was in a bed, the one thing we hadn’t done yet.

It started slowly, with the light from the bedside reading lamp and the ceiling fan spinning, a whole night ahead of us and no hurry. I began undressing her. I lifted the black dress over her head and undid the seven front hooks of the corset one by one, leaving the straps on her shoulders, putting my mouth against every inch of newly exposed skin. I left her stockings on. I left her heels on. I left her pearl earrings on, because I liked the idea of fucking someone wearing earrings.

I pressed my mouth to her collarbones, her breasts, her nipples, which were small and hard, and sucked one until the skin all along her arm broke out in goose bumps. I moved down her stomach. Down the inside of her thigh. And when I reached her pussy again, there was no more wedding-day hurry, no sister at the door, no forty yards, no forty seconds.

I ate her pussy for twenty minutes. That’s a long time, and you can tell. At first she paid attention to me, watching me, one hand in my hair, correcting me. Halfway through, her head was tipped back, one leg bent and the other straight, one hand gripping the sheet and the other the headboard, breathing hard. By the end she was trembling and telling me to stop and not to stop in the same sentence, and she came with a restrained cry that burst out of her chest, incredibly long, her body arched and her feet dug into the mattress.

Before she’d recovered, I climbed on top and entered her.

It was slow. Even slower than the first time that afternoon, because now we didn’t have anywhere to get to. I fucked her looking at her face, with my hands on either side of her head. She looked back, and at some point tears began to fill her eyes, the worst thing that can happen in a situation like that, and she said nothing, and neither did I.

We stayed like that for a long time. We changed positions three or four times without separating: her on top, sitting and moving with her hands on my chest and her pearl earrings dancing beside her face; then on our sides, one leg raised, unbearably slowly; then her underneath again, her feet on my shoulders, all the way in.

At some point, while she moved on top of me, she asked what I was doing tomorrow.

“Driving home at ten.”

I told her ten, that I’d be in Madrid by eleven and probably eating something by noon. She said that at noon she’d be on a plane, and I asked where, and she said Sicily, ten days. I said good. She said yes, good. Then, without stopping her movements, her tone changing, she asked whether I regretted leaving. I said no, and it was true: if I hadn’t left, I wouldn’t be there now; we’d have gone on another five years and maybe broken up anyway. She asked if I really believed that or was saying it to make it hurt less. I told her I really believed it. She said okay, that she did regret it, a little, not having tried. I told her she’d have lasted six months and come home a wreck. She laughed and said yes, but a wreck who’d been to Berlin, and besides, she wouldn’t have met Andrés. I said she wouldn’t have met Andrés, and we both went quiet for a while.

She kept moving, more slowly, then leaned forward with her hair falling over her face, kissed me with her mouth open, pushed me against the mattress with both hands on my shoulders, and sped up.

The last part was fast and a little dirty. Her on top, pushing backward with all her weight, her hands braced on my knees, and me looking up at her: watching her pussy opening and closing around my cock, watching her ass, watching her tits move, her stockings still on and her heels on the floor and the pearl earrings. And her staring into my eyes with an intensity you don’t often see. She warned me her corset was about to fall off, and I told her to let it fall. She said she was going to come again. Said she wanted me inside. And she came on top of me with her back arched and her mouth open without a sound, just like the first time in the office, squeezing me with everything she had, and I came inside her for the second time in one night and the first time in seven years without a single calculation.

She collapsed onto my chest. The corset hung from one shoulder. The fan kept turning.

She asked the time. I told her three twenty.

“I have to leave at four.”

She left at three forty-five after dressing on the edge of the bed, in the black dress and stockings, with her heels in her hand and the corset inside her cardigan, balled up, stain and all. I walked her to the door naked, the comforter wrapped around my waist. I told her we weren’t going to say goodbye in the morning, and I asked why, and she explained that if we said goodbye it would seem like this was ending, and she didn’t want that. I asked whether it wasn’t ending. She said it ended at ten, when I left, yes, but it didn’t end: it was different. I asked her what came next.

“We’re not saying goodbye.”

She paused to think, then said it all: nothing, or everything, she didn’t know. That on Saturday, in Sicily, she’d be sitting on a terrace with Andrés and thinking about me, and she couldn’t stop it and didn’t want to; then she’d come home and have a life, and he was a good man, and maybe all this had been just one strange day. I asked what if it wasn’t. She said then we’d see.

She placed her hand against my face. She looked into my eyes for three seconds, a long time when you’re saying goodbye. She thanked me for coming. I thanked her for the note. She laughed, turned, and went down the west-wing hallway barefoot, her heels in one hand, at three forty-five in the morning on the day after her wedding.

I stood in the doorway, naked, watching her disappear around the corner.

I ate breakfast at seven thirty. Showered at eight fifteen. Put my suit in the trunk at nine. Checked out at nine thirty.

At nine forty-five she appeared in the courtyard. She was with Andrés, wearing a white linen dress and sunglasses pushed up into her hair, her suitcase already packed for the trip. Andrés looked like a man who’d slept very little and was happy about it. He came over first, asked about my drive, shook my hand and gave me a sideways hug, and said it had been really great that I’d come, honestly, and he hoped we’d see more of each other, because Irene said we’d been very good friends once. I said yes, we’d been very good friends once.

Irene kissed me on both cheeks. Two clean, proper kisses, the sort a female guest gives a male guest, not a second longer than necessary. Andrés turned to greet another arriving car. And in that gap, without changing her expression, she lowered her left hand, put it on my forearm, squeezed for two seconds, and spoke quietly, looking straight ahead.

“The stain didn’t come out.”

She told me she’d hand-washed the corset that very morning and the stain was still there. She let go of my arm. We wished each other a good trip and I got into the car. I started the engine and lowered the window.

She stood on the entrance steps beside her husband, her suitcase at her feet and her sunglasses already on. She raised her hand.

Two fingers.

That greeting she used for everything.

Epilogue. Saturdays

I went back to Madrid and heard nothing for eleven days.

It was fine, actually. Work, routine, life, and at night a long mental replay of the four hours in the office and room 12, without distress, like looking through photographs. For the first few days I remembered everything with almost irritating precision: the mole, the stain, the sound of the bolt. By the sixth day I remembered only three things. By the ninth I began to think that maybe that was all it had been, one strange day, and that she might never write to me.

I didn’t write first for one very simple reason: she’d written the note in July, she’d proposed that afternoon in the courtyard, and if I made the next move too, it would start to look like this was all my doing. I wanted it to be hers. I wanted it to be her decision, with her husband, in her home, in her life.

On the twelfth day, a Thursday, at eleven twenty at night, I got a message from a number I hadn’t saved and recognized anyway.

A picture. Close-up: a table on a terrace in Sicily, a plate of pasta with something green on top, a glass of white wine beaded with condensation, and at the right edge, half out of frame, a man’s arm wearing a watch. Underneath, a message.

This is Sicily. It’s good. Really good. But on Saturday, when we get back, I have a free afternoon from five to eight. Say something.

And two minutes later, a second message:

And don’t tell me “we’ll see.”

I answered with a single word, the first one she’d written by hand on that paper back in July, the one I’d stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet. It took me four minutes to decide, which is a long time for one word, and I sent it at eleven thirty on a Thursday night.

Come.

She replied forty seconds later with just one thing: a time. Five o’clock.

On Saturday I cleaned my apartment like an idiot. I live on the third floor of a building with an elevator on Calle del Pez. There are two bedrooms, one of them empty except for two boxes and a bicycle, and in three years I’d never cleaned the bathroom with that kind of dedication. I changed the sheets. Bought wine, bread, tomatoes, fruit, and two unnecessary things, because buying food for someone who’s coming for three hours is a way of saying things without saying them. I took out the trash. Threw away the old newspaper. Opened the window and turned on the fan.

At four forty I sat on the couch to wait, my hands on my knees, as though I were in a doctor’s office.

She arrived at five oh five. Sandals, a light cotton dress, her hair down, a little cloth bag hanging from her shoulder. She stopped in the doorway with one hand on the frame and said:

“Hi.”

I said hi. She came inside. She took off her sandals at the entrance and set them neatly against the wall, side by side, and that small gesture—a married woman leaving her shoes neatly arranged in another man’s hallway—was one of the things that squeezed my chest hardest all month. Then she wandered around the living room without asking permission, looking at everything: the books, a poster for an exhibition that no longer existed, the desk with the closed computer, the bike leaning against the hallway wall. She opened the refrigerator out of curiosity and laughed that I’d bought fruit. And then she saw the mug. The one with the chipped rim, from Malasaña, which had come with me when I moved because there was simply no throwing it away. She picked it up and ran her thumb over the broken edge and said nothing, and neither did I, and in that silence everything was said.

We sat on the couch and didn’t touch for twenty minutes. That was the new part. In the office we’d hardly talked. In room 12 we’d talked in bed, in the middle of something else. But twenty minutes of conversation on a couch, with the afternoon light coming through the window and the sound of the street, was the first time in eight years we’d sat together, fully dressed, with nothing urgent to do.

She told me about Sicily. About the boat, the heat, a museum, a hungover day, the look on Andrés’s face when she insisted on climbing to a lookout. She told me she’d thought about me three times and specified when: on a boat, on a terrace at two in the afternoon, and one night when he’d fallen asleep before her and she’d lain awake looking at a hotel ceiling. She told me she’d bought a swimsuit she didn’t like and hadn’t returned because she couldn’t be bothered. She asked about my work, my father, whether I still didn’t smoke. I said yes. She said she’d noticed at the wedding, in the courtyard, when she saw my tie in my pocket.

And at some point, halfway through a sentence about her sister Marta, she stopped speaking and looked at me, and we both stayed still.

We kissed on the couch, slowly, without the urgency of the office. I put my hand behind her neck and she put hers against my chest, and we stayed like that a long while, just kissing, like two teenagers who’d only just started dating and didn’t have a bed of their own. I slid one strap of her dress down. She pulled the whole dress over her head without getting up from the couch and sat there in panties and a white cotton bra, and I told her it was the first time I’d seen her in something so completely unlike a wedding outfit. She said the good clothes were for guests.

I carried her toward the bed while walking backward, with her arms around my neck, and we had to stop twice because we were laughing.

The afternoon in bed was the best of the four times, and not for any technical reason. It was the best because there was no clock, no door, no husband on the other side, no dress that couldn’t be stained. I laid her down and undressed her slowly, without ceremony, with the window open, the fan moving the air, and the noise of the street coming in bursts. I took off her bra, slid her panties down her legs, and spent a while looking at her whole body in the six o’clock afternoon light, which is the worst light of day for almost everybody but suited her. I put my mouth on her stomach and she laughed because it tickled, and then she stopped laughing.

I ate her pussy without rushing, without chasing an ending. Both hands open on her hips, my tongue moving slowly up and down, stopping when she began to tense, beginning again. The first time she came during the first pause, telling me with her hand as she pushed my head down, and the second time, already exhausted, she came almost by surprise, with a short moan and both hands gripping the sheet.

Then I climbed on top and entered her slowly, while she was still trembling, and she wrapped both legs around my waist and dug her nails into my back. We fucked like that for a long time, very slowly, with the bed creaking softly, the fan turning, and neither of us speaking. At one point I stopped moving inside her, completely still, just breathing. She opened her eyes and asked what was wrong, and I said nothing, I just wanted to remember. She said she’d remember it for both of us and dug her heels in to make me keep going.

We changed positions. She was on top, sitting, with her hands on my chest and her hair falling across her face, moving slowly and then not so slowly, while I watched from below with both hands on her thighs. Then we lay on our sides, one leg raised and her head resting on my arm, all the way in, unbearably slowly. And finally she was underneath again, her feet on my shoulders, fast and careless, both of us sweating, the sheet in a heap and the fan no use at all.

“And now what?” she said, her eyes closed.

“Now we have three hours.”

She gave a hoarse laugh and said she knew that already. I asked if she was worried about the time.

“And at eight?”

“At eight, you’re going to dinner with your husband.”

She stayed quiet for a moment, my hand in her hair, looking up at the ceiling.

“And after that?”

“After that, we’ll see.”

She said “we’ll see, we’ll see,” and said that “we’ll see” was a place where people lived. My heart lurched because I’d heard her sister Marta say those very words eight years earlier over a table of cocido, when she was fifteen and had her phone under her plate. I told Irene. She turned to look at me and asked if I remembered that, and I said I remembered everything, and she looked at me for a long time without speaking. Then she curled against my side and her eyes filled a little with tears, and she didn’t say it, and neither did I.

We showered together, which is something not particularly erotic and very intimate. In the shower she washed my back with a sponge and told me she had two sponges at home and one belonged to Andrés. Afterward, with a towel around her hair, she came into the living room wearing one of my T-shirts and started rummaging in the kitchen, found the wine and took out two glasses, and poured without asking. In the middle of all that her eyes fell on the jacket, the jacket from the wedding, which was hanging over a chair in the living room because I hadn’t put it away in three weeks.

She went over, reached into the inside pocket, and took out the folded paper, not the envelope, just the paper, with its convent-school handwriting and overly large capital letters and two well-worn folds.

“Why were you carrying this around?”

“I don’t know.”

She read it quietly, her lips moving, then stood there for a while holding it, in the middle of my living room with wet hair and my T-shirt on. She folded it again along the same creases, carefully so as not to make different ones, and put it on the table. Then she opened the cloth bag she’d brought, took out a folded bundle, and unfolded it: the ivory corset. Hand-washed, with its lace edge and boning, and a pale, blurry stain in the middle of the chest that soap and water hadn’t been able to remove entirely.

She hung it in my wardrobe on a hanger between two of my shirts. She said it was so it wouldn’t get lost. And I thought, without saying it, that a bride’s corset hanging in another man’s wardrobe is one of the strangest and clearest things in the world.

At seven forty she started getting dressed. By seven fifty-five she was at the door, wearing her sandals and carrying the empty bag, because the corset was staying. She checked herself in the hallway mirror, ran a hand through her hair, and turned around.

“I’m free next Saturday, too.”

I told her okay. She opened the door, went out onto the landing, and called the elevator. When it arrived and the doors opened, with one hand on the frame and already halfway inside, without turning all the way around, she raised two fingers.

Again.

That greeting she used for everything.

I closed the door. The apartment smelled of her, her shampoo mixed with my soap, and in the kitchen were two glasses with an inch of wine left in them, and on the table a folded piece of paper, and in the wardrobe, between two shirts, an ivory corset with a stain that wouldn’t come out.

And so the Saturdays went on. At first it was five to eight, then it was four to eleven, then one Saturday she stayed at my place for dinner and another she stayed for breakfast, and in November we marked two months without either of us having said the word yet, the word you say to put things in order and which may be the very thing that turns everything upside down.

But that’s another story.