Mariana_GDL

Every morning she watched her come out of the kitchen in a nightgown clinging to her body and settled for crumbs. Until the coffee grove left them alone all day.

She arrived on my friend’s arm, with that mouth and those full lips, and I knew right away that on my birthday she was going to be mine, even if she was another man’s girlfriend.

She caught me with my hand inside my pants, staring at her through the crack in the door. Instead of shouting, she smiled and told me she had a lot to teach me.

I had been away from her for a week and, the moment I stepped through her front door, I knew that lesson wasn’t going to be about any exam.

They shared the same class three days a week and secretly watched each other—until one of them grew tired of pretending nothing was happening.

I went up to the seventh floor looking to relax for an hour. I had no idea the masseuse, and then my lover, had other plans for me that night.

Eight years into my career, no patient had ever looked at me like that. That afternoon she put her feet up on my sofa, held my gaze, and everything I thought was solid began to tremble.

Carla couldn’t take her eyes off her while she worked out. Every drop of sweat on her back ignited something she’d never felt for another woman.

I opened the trunk not knowing that inside it waited another woman’s secret: her lingerie, her diary, and proof that she too loved someone forbidden.

When I offered her the job, she smiled and told me it was her turn to ask questions. The first was whether I’d take her to bed after dinner.

I was twenty-two and had never seen another woman naked until that afternoon in the shower, when she took off her underwear as if I weren’t watching.

I chose the spot closest to the water, dropped my bikini, and before lying down, searched for the one who hadn’t been able to take his eyes off me.

We’d been drinking for two hours when I half-jokingly blurted out what I’d been imagining for years. He laughed. I didn’t.

I followed a trail of blood to a clearing where something waited for me, hanging between the trees. I never imagined the forest creature would choose me as its prey.

I slipped barefoot to the chapel at midnight to ask forgiveness for my dreams. I never imagined something waited coiled in the shadows, ready to teach me what my body had kept silent.

He only had to come too close for the heat we had denied for months to give us both away. That night there was no way to keep pretending.

She entered uninvited, with a smile that promised pleasure and concealed hunger. That night, every body she touched stopped belonging to itself forever.

A stranger’s hand brushed my waist just before I left the bar. One question in my ear was enough to make me forget my friends and follow that couple home.

“I want you to give her what my mother never had,” she said with a smile. And when I saw that mature woman, I knew I wasn’t going to say no.