LaraMDQ

I waited for him with whiskey and very little clothing. He had no idea that night was only the beginning of a plan I’d been building in silence for weeks.

That morning the shower lasted nearly an hour. It began with soap and ended with something I had never quite dared to discover before.

I’d spent years hiding that side of myself, but with her it was different. When she told me she wanted to watch, I knew there was no way I could say no.

I spent forty-seven years being exactly who I was supposed to be. One night, holding my wife’s lingerie in my hands, changed that forever.

Natalia and I shared a room. That was all. But when we turned out the light and our bodies were inches apart, the plan changed.

When my son went upstairs to sleep, he got up from the sofa and looked at me as if he had spent the whole night waiting for us to be alone.

Helena arrived two hours before the flight. I had bought her perfume to thank her. She had another plan for saying goodbye.

I went in asking for a wax. I left with trembling legs and my body marked by hands that knew every inch of my skin better than I did.

Seven years of friendship pretending to feel nothing. That night, between two cars in an alley, we both stopped pretending.

She found the phone forgotten on the nightstand and entered the PIN without thinking. What she read was not what she expected, nor what she expected to feel.

It wasn’t that I lacked anything. It was that I never realized what I wanted until that boy looked at me like I was the only thing in the world.

When he closed the door with his suitcase, we were left alone. The sex was still there, intense and familiar, but something was missing. Something only he brought.

When I handed over the thong folded like a note, I knew there was no turning back. All that was left was to wait for Friday and open the envelope he would return to me in class.

I crossed my legs in his class and he couldn’t look away. I knew the game had begun, and this time I was the one with the advantage.

I crossed my legs, undid three buttons, and held his gaze in the rearview mirror. There was half an hour left, and I already knew we weren’t going to the hotel straight.

When he got off the plane and pulled me into his arms, I knew I wasn’t going to let anything — not even the calendar — stop us that night.

When the moans started on the other side of the wall, she was asleep beside me. What I saw in the mirror that night, I still don't know how to tell anyone.