Cheating

I came home early, opened the door, and realized the silence between us had a name, a deep voice, and a smile that wasn't meant for me.

I gave him a sleeping pill, put on my shortest skirt, and went down to the hotel bar to find what he no longer knew how to give me.

My husband left at six in the morning. He arrived at seven. That one-hour gap was all I needed to start cheating without guilt.

I returned to the countryside after years in the city and, looking for my father among the corn, found my mother on her knees before one of his farmhands.

I heard him every night on the other side of the wall and imagined taking my mother’s place with the man who devoured me with his eyes whenever he thought no one was watching.

We both had partners, and we both knew it. Even so, I took off my sweater in the passenger seat and let him look at me the way he’d wanted to for weeks.

My phone fell into the water, so I had to use my mother’s. I never imagined a saved chat would show me who came into our house when I wasn’t there.

Her husband spent months at sea and she was climbing the walls. I only went to move some furniture, but that afternoon the house was empty and the door was open.

For almost a year I lived two lives: the perfect wife at the family dinner table and the woman who waited for Monday to meet him at that hotel on the outskirts.

The idea was his: to look for a stranger who would do to me what he didn't dare. What he didn't calculate was that I'd never look at him the same way again.

I had two options: stop everything and push her away from him, or give him free rein to take what I wanted most. I chose the worse one.

The door was barely shut and inside someone kept saying yes, yes. I shouldn’t have looked, but I stayed frozen in the hallway, holding my breath.

I went down for coffee with the woman from the fifth floor and came back stunned: she told me, in vivid detail, what she did with the married man from the eighth floor.

I came home from my second date with my heart racing, never imagining that my own husband would ask me that night to tell him everything.

I crossed half the city thinking we were going to eat. When I opened the wardrobe in room ten, she stepped out with a lit cake and an anything-but-innocent smile.

I’d been noticing the way my husband’s friend looked at me for weeks. That night, alone in the patio, I understood none of it was accidental.

She packed modest clothes and a body tired of waiting. What she found at her friend’s home changed her forever, though she never dared tell it.

She parked in front of the building, looked in the rearview mirror, and did not recognize the woman staring back. That night she had decided to stop being the perfect wife.

We’d spent a week planning that night: her husband at soccer, my wife in class. What we didn’t plan was how many times we’d be interrupted.

When she asked me to help with the washing machine, I never imagined I’d end up staring at her without hiding it. A woman like that shouldn’t be left alone so often.