Anal

My mouth was full of him when I heard the door. Then she appeared, with that half-smile that always knew how to say everything to me without opening her mouth.

At three in the morning, with the icy wind battering the tent, I slid under his blanket without asking. Mauri didn’t move, but I knew he wasn’t asleep.

I went down to the bathroom with my heels in my hand and still not understanding what it would feel like to spend an entire day going out as Luna on Bruno’s arm in that town.

When I lent Bruno the red brief that morning, I had no idea my neighbor would come looking for us and that the path to the river would end in something none of us had ever done before.

I took the elevator in heels and a wig, praying I wouldn’t run into anyone. He opened the door in a robe and called me a slut before I even said hello.

We’d rejected three couples. When we finally found the perfect one, they gave us a condition we never expected, not even in our wildest dreams.

When I came out of the bathroom in heels, stockings, and a red baby doll, his face said it all: I was no longer his best friend’s “daughter,” I was something else.

I got to the motel fifteen minutes early with sweaty hands. When I saw him cross the parking lot, I knew I wouldn’t leave that room the same man I’d been before.

Three months trading messages with a married stranger, until that afternoon at the mall when we knew we could no longer keep it online.

We’d spent years avoiding each other’s eyes at every family dinner. That New Year’s Eve, when everyone had fallen asleep, she set down the glasses and kissed me in the kitchen without saying a word.

He put velvet handcuffs on my wrists and the blindfold over my eyes. He told me to trust him, that I was going to like it. I didn’t know how to say yes.

Bruno was waiting at the door with a bouquet of roses and a smile that was not a brother’s. The apartment still smelled like paint, and we had the whole afternoon to break it in.

When I opened the bedroom door, the last thing I expected was to see my girlfriend under her friend, legs open and a look that told me not to come in yet.

Until that night, I thought I already knew all my limits. One look, one gesture from him, and everything I thought I knew about my desire silently came crashing down.

I’d been pretending for years. When she suggested a weekend at a nudist beach with her friends, I never imagined it was the perfect trap to draw me out without warning.

I’d been glancing at him for half an hour when he spoke to me. Behind the rocks, neither of us had any intention of getting dressed again for the rest of the afternoon.

Until that night I’d been completely heterosexual. It took one bad movie choice, an improvised pillow, and a stranger’s breathing on my neck.

When she came into the shower, she said nothing. She only pressed her nipples against my back and whispered for me to let her take control. My wife was thousands of miles away, with another man.

That afternoon I wasn’t looking for love or explanations; I wanted two different bodies in the same motel room and the certainty that no one would ever know.

When I saw him walk into the dark room behind me, I knew the night wasn’t going to end in my bed. He had the body of the kind of man you only see in magazines.