Cheating

We were never friends, but she looked at me with contempt every time her boyfriend kept staring at me. So I decided to give her a real reason to hate me.

I told myself it would be a quick visit to the old neighborhood. When I woke in the middle of the night, she was still beside me, immaculate, but something had changed forever.

I accepted the room he rented me without suspecting a thing. Three weeks later I was already planning my new life with him, while my husband still called me every night.

When she came out of the bathroom with her robe tied carelessly and her nipples pressing against the fabric, I knew I could never look at her as just the cousin from summer beach trips again.

When I opened my eyes, her arm was resting on my chest and the makeshift bed still smelled like the night before. I was going to leave soon; I’d promised my husband.

My wife pulled a brochure from her purse and told me we had a meeting that afternoon. I had no idea that saying yes meant giving up being the only man in her bed for fifteen days.

My ad was for men, always. But that afternoon, when I read her message, I knew I was about to break my own rule and complicate my life.

Every time my friend came through the door, she changed clothes. One afternoon I made up an excuse, drove around the block, and slipped in through the back patio in silence.

I sent my secretary home, turned up the heat, and left only my blazer over my sheer bra. I wanted Mariela to see everything I’d been craving for weeks.

Her wife was leaving on a trip the next day, and I was still sleeping on a mattress on the floor. When he rang the bell with his toolbox, I knew something was about to happen.

I went down to the garden looking for her and found her behind the glass, seated in the chair, with her assistant kissing her eyelids as if I didn’t exist.

I was kneeling on the passenger seat when he whispered his girlfriend’s name. I looked up through the tint: she was walking toward the car.

I knocked a thousand times and nobody opened. When reception let me in, I found suitcases that weren’t mine under the bed and an unmistakable smell.

When I sat beside her in that workshop, I never imagined that quiet, sad woman would end up whispering, naked in her bed, that she had never felt anything like it.

I went out to get some air while he slept. The lights in the apartment across the way were still on, and then I heard a moan that wasn’t mine and knew I was going to keep watching.

I pressed send and left my phone facedown. I wasn’t expecting a reply that night. When he answered, I knew there was no turning back.

In primary school she loved me more than I could return. Twenty years later, her voice on the phone was the same, and my hands trembled.

It was the first time I saw her in person. I meant to tell her about the pool and the lifeguard, but her hand on my thigh changed the conversation before I finished the sentence.

I’d been drafting the ad in my head for months; it took me twelve minutes to write it, and half an hour later I already had seven replies. His was the fifth.

Under that loose, demure clothing, you could sense a woman with her desire intact. I only had to wait for her to stop pretending in front of her husband.