Martín Reyes

Every morning they left together for surf class and came back too close. I only watched, until one night on the porch I stopped wanting to look away.

Mariana adjusted the straps in front of the mirror while Esteban smiled from the sofa. That night he had invited someone else, and he wasn’t planning to tell her yet.

I came to that dinner expecting a glass of wine and an escape to the countryside afterward. I ended up kneeling in front of a stranger while my lover watched.

She’d been telling me for a month that her husband fantasized about seeing her with another man. That night I stopped listening and took her where anything could really happen.

“The decision is yours, you decide.” I couldn’t get that phrase out of my head all week, while my body had already decided for me.

I had just enough budget, and my boyfriend offered me his aunt’s house. What I didn’t know was that his cousin would turn that week into something I never told him about.

I had classified her as unattainable: the haughty director holding up my mortgage. Until I saw her enter a swingers’ club on her husband’s arm, ready for anything.

When she opened my study door, I knew she hadn’t come for the inheritance. She came for what we left unfinished ten years ago, and I’d been waiting for her ever since.

It started with a threat over a false rumor. It ended with her husband on his knees in the sand, begging me to fulfill the desire he never dared confess.

For fifteen years I’d greeted him on the beach without imagining what that man saw each night through the bathroom glass while I thought I was alone.

I thought I’d put her in her place. That afternoon, as I came out of the bathroom, I heard a zipper coming down behind the half-open office door.

I went upstairs to use the bathroom and he was waiting for me with his fly open. What I didn’t count on was someone opening the door just when we were on all fours.