Cheating

I knew it before either of them admitted it: every Thursday she made up a clumsy excuse, and I let her go, knowing exactly where and with whom.

There I was on the sofa, whisky in hand, realizing I no longer needed to take part: it was enough to watch someone else do what I’d stopped doing.

Bayron put the necklace on my bare skin, and I knew that work visit wasn’t ending in the office—it was ending in his room.

I had twenty minutes before logging on to my husband’s party. Tomás closed the hotel door, and I knew that night I’d congratulate my husband with another woman’s voice.

A patient hand came out from between the bars and stroked my stomach, unhurried. My husband undid one button on my shirt to make room for it.

I woke up with my head about to explode. Beside me slept a woman who wasn’t just my wife, and I couldn’t remember a thing about how I got there.

Renata had broken up with his son, but she kept showing up at the house. And on that hot afternoon, with the pool and a borrowed bikini, Tomás knew he couldn’t look away.

She left her panties on the nightstand like every night. But this time I went into her room without warning and found something that changed everything between us.

Two beeps, a lit screen, and his wife’s voice filling the garden: “Everything that’s happening to me… everyone needs to know this.”

I heard her arguing with her husband through the courtyard. That night she came to my door with a flimsy excuse and her robe half-open. I had no idea what was coming.

I asked for just one thing for the last night: to dance. What happened after that, in the cabin at the end of the corridor, I told no one.

Chiara pedaled right behind him on every climb, and every stop in the shade was a new excuse to get closer than necessary.

When the thunder started shaking the building, I knew she’d be pounding on my door. What I never imagined was that she’d end up in my bed that night.

I saw him dancing with another girl, and something inside me broke. I wasn’t looking for revenge—I was looking for someone to make me feel what he no longer gave me.

We’d been together for nearly forty years, but that night Marta sat across from me and began telling me, without holding back, what she had done in that bar’s bathroom.

The screen lit up, her voice filled the speakers, and in front of the whole family, she said goodbye to me forever. I still didn’t know who the other man was.

You blocked me everywhere, so I’m writing by hand. I need you to know why I did it before I leave this city forever.

I’d given her permission to let them watch us. What I didn’t expect was for her to pull the curtain herself and move my hand aside to put hers there.

Renata spent her week signing off on balance sheets and dreaming of being treated without tenderness. The trucker from the chat offered her fifteen days on the road, and she invented a course to disappear.

The email wasn’t a question, it was a challenge: a photo, a woman who beat time, and a husband ready to hand her over. All that was left was for her to say yes.