Anal

I just wanted to feel girly for a while under my guy clothes. I never imagined he’d notice, or that that night would end with me on my knees before him.

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 broke 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 ballroom took my hand and whispered “come with me,” I knew that night would be unlike any other in my life.

“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 close the storage-room door, change clothes, and turn into someone else. No one on my street suspects what I’m going to do tonight, and that’s exactly what I like most.

I sat on the edge of the dock not looking for anything, but his gaze, the gaze of 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 like he already knew everything we were going to do that night.

In front of the mirror, with my lips painted and my heels on, I didn’t see anyone in disguise: I saw the woman I’ve always wanted to be when I let myself go.

I arrived at his door with a bag hiding my other skin: corset, stockings, and heels. That night I stopped being Adrián and gave myself to him as Selene.

She came to their door soaked by the rain, with no pride and nothing to offer but her body. They looked at her, looked at one another, and she knew everything was 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.