Cheating

Two months pregnant, I opened my phone and saw my husband with a coworker. I didn’t cry as much as I expected: I started counting how many fucks he owed me.

He texted me at ten in the morning, and I knew that afternoon, with the house empty, I’d give him exactly what his girlfriend would never allow.

When Damián slid his fingers over her hips, Marina understood that her husband wasn’t watching her with jealousy, but with a desire she had never known from him.

When she entered that club hidden behind a theology bookstore, Marlene knew her husband’s freedom would be paid for with every garment she shed before the judge.

When the guard called her number, the laughter died at once and a hundred eyes fixed on her: the only untouched beauty in a yard of concrete, sweat, and barbed wire.

He climbed those five floors to confront his girlfriend’s mother. He had no idea her husband was home, or what proposal would come out of his mouth that afternoon.

My wife left for work and I was left alone with my reports. Then I heard the key in the lock and in she came, without warning, in that red miniskirt.

I accepted the bet with laughter and wine. Twenty minutes later, he was taking a satin apron and gloves from the drawer, and I was no longer in charge of the house.

She opened the door expecting the usual bottle. Instead, he handed her a lace apron and a smile that left no room for refusal.

We had been each other’s first love. Ten years later she returned to the village, and I still didn’t know that night I’d learn to hate my best friend’s easy smile.

I went out to clear my head with a bottle of tequila still in my hand. I had no idea that crossing paths with him in the hallway would change everything that night.

When he brushed her forearm as he left the restaurant, Marina knew it hadn’t ended at the table. He was her husband’s best friend.

She crosses the street, thighs clenched, careful not to lose a single drop of what he asked her to bring home. Her husband waits awake.

She came down from the empty stands in a red dress that left nothing to the imagination. The coach still had no idea that afternoon would change everything.

She put on the maid’s apron just to shut him up, never imagining it would awaken something she’d pretended for years not to feel.

Complaints about the noise ended in dinner. And dinner turned into something Daniel never imagined he would witness with his own eyes, in his own home.

When Diego left me the car and went home with the child, I never imagined I’d end the night against a bathroom wall with another man’s mouth on my neck.

I only got two photos that morning: her naked facing the sea, and an hour later, an opened condom wrapper. She told me the rest in bed.

The emergency door was locked and my wife was trapped on the other side with him. Only a plaster wall separated us. Then I started hearing.

There was a week left before my wedding when I sat in the middle of the room and let a stranger convince me to go into that bedroom.