Cheating

That afternoon she came home in black, painted her lips in the mirror, and left saying she was sleeping at a friend’s place. It took years to learn where she was really going.

When I went down to the lobby looking to escape the corporate party, I never expected the bartender who would look at me like he knew exactly what I needed that night.

While my husband was sucking on my breasts in front of the mirror, I was thinking about her and the body of the man we’d be having dinner with that night.

For years his wife called me “the mistress.” But I never was. I was his sex worker, and this is the truth she never wanted to hear.

I’d spent two months pretending to go to the office while really wandering aimlessly around Barcelona. That night I dialed the only number that could save me.

The shutter was half lowered and the key turned twice behind me. I came without my ring and with twelve years of silence on my tongue.

Twenty years married, and each hid a secret of their own: him in strangers’ bathrooms, me not yet knowing what the yoga woman was about to awaken in me.

I showed her the video and she collapsed on the living room floor. But when she got back up, she was no longer the woman her husband had humiliated for twenty years.

I dreamed of both of them when I felt the weight of a body climb onto the bed. A warm hand ran down my back, and before I opened my eyes I knew it wasn’t Mateo who had returned.

I’d been fantasizing about her in silence for months. That afternoon, during class, she looked up from the book and told me: you have to be more careful with the bathroom door.

I was seventeen and had a girlfriend who was crazy about another guy. It took me a year to realize that betrayal didn’t hurt me —it excited me.

“It’s only a handjob,” he promised her. But her husband was coming home that very night and the two of them were still tangled in the sheets, unable and unwilling to stop.

When Damián closed the door and left on a trip, Mariela already knew that a whole week alone with Rodrigo would change everything between them.

Every morning she handed me coffee with a smile that lasted a second too long. I knew she had a boyfriend. She knew I knew. And still, neither of us looked away.

I’m 55, with a calm husband and dreams that leave my body burning. That night, in a restaurant storeroom, I understood I could no longer keep pretending.

I put the proof back where I found it, washed my hands, and went down to the kitchen as if I knew nothing. That night our marriage’s dirtiest game began.

I got there at seven in the evening to look after her. At midnight I carried her to bed. At dawn I passed her half-open door and knew my life had just changed.

I’d never done it with anyone. And the first person who entered me wasn’t my boyfriend, but his father, one afternoon when the house was empty and I couldn’t say no.

I woke up not knowing how I would ever justify what they forced me to do that night, or how I could look the man I still loved in the eyes.

Everyone suspects what I am from the way I dress, but I never confirm it. It’s my secret, and telling it anonymously turns me on more than anything else.