Anal

She was thirty-eight, had a predictable husband, and a body nobody had ever known how to read. That night, alone at home, she decided she wanted to feel something at last.

It was July, I was ruined and desperate. I crossed my sister’s garden looking for help; my nephew was waiting by the pool with a smile I didn’t know how to read in time.

I’d spent years fantasizing about it, but I was still a virgin in back. That December afternoon, in a motel room, I finally let him cross that last frontier.

I painted my lips against the trunk, convinced I was alone. Then I heard the crackle of leaves and knew someone had been watching me for a while.

When the most elegant woman in the room took my hand and whispered, “Come with me,” I knew that night would be unlike any other.

“Come at five. We need to talk about Saturday. Alone.” I wrote that to her in the morning, and since then I thought of nothing but hearing her come down the stairs.

I shut the storeroom door, change my clothes, and turn into someone else. No one on my street suspects what I’m about to do tonight, and that’s exactly what I like most.

I sat on the edge of the dock looking for nothing, but his gaze—like a man who knows what he wants—undid me before I said a single word.

I sat between them in the car and, when my friend got out at her house, I was left alone with her father and a tension neither of us dared name.

You begged me in whispers, holding your breath while I reached for the lubricant. And I never told you I looked forward to that dawn as much as you did.

He had only done his job as a doctor. She walked in unannounced, closed the door, and told him that tonight she hadn’t come to talk about her sick son.

I signed my resignation without looking back. That night would be the last fuck of my life as a man, and I meant to enjoy it before becoming who Carla had always wanted.

For years she told him no to one thing only. One betrayal and one night with the wrong man were enough to change her mind forever.

I was alone at the bar, bored and two drinks in, when he sat beside me and looked at me as if he already knew everything we'd do that night.

In the mirror, with my lips painted and my heels on, I saw no one in disguise: I saw the woman I always wanted to be when I let go.

I arrived at his door carrying a bag with my other skin inside it: corset, stockings, and heels. That night I stopped being Adrian and gave myself wholly as Selene.

She knocked on their door soaked by the rain, without pride and with nothing to offer but her body. They looked at her, looked at each other, and she knew it was all beginning again.

I knew he spied on me every afternoon from his balcony. What I didn’t know was how much I liked him doing it—or how far I was willing to go.

I knew Professor Aníbal watched my body every time I said goodbye. That afternoon I walked into his classroom ready to use that look to my advantage, whatever it took.

The divorce didn’t break me: it gave me back my breath. That night, with a button-front dress and a poured drink, I let a much younger stranger make me feel alive.