LectoraSensual

We’d been writing to each other every morning and every night for a month and a half. When I finally saw her sitting at that table, I knew neither of us would sleep alone.

I felt a hand on my hip and a mouth in my ear: “You smell incredible.” When I turned around, it was her—the girl my friend had come to flirt with.

The rule was simple: when the elevator doors closed, I stopped being a person and became part of his furniture.

For weeks I’d been pretending not to notice his looks, his legs spread on the sofa, the bulges he made so obvious. That night I came home early and stopped pretending.

The first time I saw him without a shirt at the beach, I couldn’t breathe. He was my mother’s man, but I could no longer look at him like a son looks at a father.

At fifty-three, single and bored, Ramiro discovered that supply and demand also work at three in the afternoon, on the sofa in his living room.

That stone basement beneath his neighbor’s house became my secret school, where Tomás and his brother taught me everything I was afraid to name.

At thirty-three, with an athlete's body and a secret he'd been smothering half his life, one boy walks into his shop and looks at him without fear.

I came home at six in the morning with her perfume clinging to my body and my ass still red. My wife was waiting, smiling, suspecting nothing.

I was naked in bed, aching, and he offered to examine me. I had no idea how far he was willing to go to make it stop hurting.

I heard her in the shower that first morning and, for no reason I could name, I froze in the doorway. When she turned and looked at me, I didn’t look away.

I served her the four o’clock coffee as always. Only this time, I’d added something that wasn’t on any schedule.

I went in with the key he’d left in the planter. What I didn’t expect was to find her waiting for me, arms crossed and jaw clenched.

The theater was almost empty and the movie was just an excuse: what mattered to me was her hand moving up my thigh in the darkness of the back row.