Cheating

She came upstairs with two containers and a smile that was far too friendly. He was twenty-two, had the whole weekend free, and an idea he knew he shouldn’t have had.

From the darkness I watched them through the fence of plants. He was small and quiet, but what he was hiding under his pants took my breath away that night.

I never told her what I imagined at night while she slept beside me. This is the confession I’ve kept silent since we arrived in that city.

I promised him this time would be different. I kept it up for exactly three weeks, until the bar bouncer arrived an hour early.

I wore a white dress for a night with my boyfriend that never came. At 3 a.m., the only one who answered my call was my tenant.

I’d been watching her train for months without daring to do anything. That night she invited me to her house and I discovered the shy woman from the gym was hiding someone very different.

My husband looked at me and encouraged me to leave with that stranger. What neither of us knew was that he had no intention of leaving us in peace.

The first morning I found her in the kitchen almost naked, moving as if I didn’t exist. That’s when I understood her husband’s game had only just begun.

I told him he’d left a T-shirt behind just to get him to my table. What he discovered that night looked nothing like the wife he’d left.

My breasts were always my secret weapon, and that Friday with the office empty I decided to use them to get from him what I really wanted.

It was six in the morning, I was still in my wedding dress, and my husband was snoring unconscious upstairs. The waiter hadn’t left yet, and I was no longer thinking about sleep.

She came home every dawn smelling of American tobacco and new perfume. I said nothing and kept my suspicions, until the night I decided to follow her and find out who she spent those hours with.

I never told anyone, but the moment he leaves, there’s a name and a body that take over my whole imagination.

“Do you want to try it before you decide?” he said, and Mariana understood that neither of them was going to be talking only about the projector that afternoon.

Every morning I spied on him from the window without admitting it. That rainy afternoon he showed up at my door soaked, and I knew there was no way to keep pretending nothing was happening.

I went down to the kitchen to make coffee and felt his gaze fixed on my back. I knew what was going to happen, and for the first time in months I didn’t want to stop him.

When I opened the door to her at home, I knew that woman was going to ruin my night. I had no idea how far she’d take it—or where she’d end up on her knees in front of me.

When she told him she was “hanging in there,” Tino understood that word weighed the same as his own: years of cold sheets. And in the middle of the street, they decided to fix it.

They thought they were paying a price for one night. Ariadna discovered something else: being in charge felt too good to ever go back.

Bruno thought he had control over everything: his girlfriend, his lover, and his pride between his legs. He had no idea that night he’d lose all three at once.