Andrés Villarreal

He’s twenty-two and asked me, staring down at the street, whether I really liked going down between a woman’s legs. That night, I told him everything I knew.

I went to the coast for two days of work and brought my friend along. I never imagined a dinner in red dresses would leave its mark on my body that way.

Her suitcases were in the car and her resignation was in hand. She only had one more door to cross before starting over—and that door changed everything.

I wrapped my legs around his waist just as he came. It wasn’t an accident: I knew exactly what I was doing, and I wanted it.

The first time it was just a reflection in the glass: a still silhouette on the other side of the courtyard, watching her eat breakfast in her robe. She didn’t pull the curtain. She didn’t close it either.

Every time she left that apartment, she swore it was the last time. And the next day she came back in the shortest skirt, ready to please him again.

When my friend opened the bag, there was no uniform at all: just wings, a garter belt, and fishnet stockings. And the trailer was already waiting to roll.

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 never told her what I imagined at night while she slept beside me. This is the confession I’ve kept silent since we arrived in that city.

For years I swallowed her provocations and played the patient friend. That August afternoon, on her balcony overlooking the sea, something inside me broke.

We booked the hotel to rest, but what I had in my backpack had other plans for that cold, rainy night.

I wasn’t wearing anything under my skirt when I knocked on that rusted railcar door. I only wanted one man. I had no idea the foreman would show up to lay down his rules.

For thirty years we’d kept crossing paths by chance. That rainy afternoon, in the pharmacy queue, she looked at me differently. And I did too.

I was trained to please and obey, but that half-open door awakened something else: a spark of defiance that even cold rings against my skin couldn’t extinguish.

I know I shouldn’t, but whenever I walk home alone after dark, I look for him: the stranger who will pin me against the wall without asking permission.

She expected a frail husband she could despise. When the king bent to kiss her hand, the tip of his tongue brushed her skin, and she knew she had been wrong.

He arrived at the den little more than a chained skeleton. The she-wolf promised to teach him what it meant to serve her... and he learned better than she expected.

I woke up unscarred in a bed that wasn’t mine, healed by a stranger of impossible beauty. What he didn’t tell me was what that cure had done to my body... and my desire.

I thought it was the receptionist coming back for something she’d forgotten. It was her, with that smile that never meant anything innocent, and the lock turning behind her.

I thought it was just an innocent game of glances at a traffic light. I never imagined that one Saturday morning I’d ring his doorbell with the most ridiculous excuse.