Cheating

When Inés opened the tent flap, her girlfriend was already on top of another girl, still panting from an orgasm that wasn’t hers.

Lorena took off her pareo in front of everyone and chose me to count the thirty seconds. Meanwhile, my wife slept in the cabin, suspecting nothing.

They fought over a shitty pizza. He went into the shower. When the delivery guy rang the bell, she’d already decided to settle the score in the worst way.

I went out to clear my head one Saturday afternoon. When I looked up from my coffee, she was already sitting across from me, smiling as if she’d known me all her life.

I thought I already knew what pleasure was until that night, barefoot in the sand, when an unfamiliar hand pushed my hair off my neck.

While rain beat against the windows, my wife’s friend drank my vodka and asked the exact questions that made me reveal everything I’d kept silent.

I left the bathroom door half open on purpose and knew, from the mirror’s reflection, that he was watching me. That day I accepted the five hundred soles and everything that followed.

I told myself it was just curiosity. I uploaded four photos, used my fake name, and waited to see if anyone still looked at me. That same week, Matías appeared.

I went down the bathroom corridor when no one was looking. I heard his voice first, then hers. I didn’t open the door. I stood there, listening to my life break.

I climbed into a van full of foreign guys without thinking twice. My boyfriend would be back from the supermarket in ten minutes. I only needed one.

I went barefoot down to the bathroom and the half-open door let me see him in the shower. What happened that night on the living-room mattress was my first time with another man.

He was forty, with rough hands and a mustache I’d never liked. Until I found him lying in the bed in my son’s empty room.

The phone rang, I said I was going running, and drove to his house. When I came back to my block, the sirens were already waiting for me.

I recognized her the moment she crossed the threshold. That twenty-three-year-old girl had been undressing for me on screen for months and didn’t even know it.

When she got out of the car and every man in the ballroom turned his head, I understood that my wife wasn’t mine that night: she belonged to whoever dared look at her.

When her fingers brushed mine across the table, I knew that night I was going to recover something my girlfriend had been making me forget little by little.

When the referee blew the final whistle, I knew there was no turning back: I’d have to pay up on the bet in front of my friend, right at the bar.

My husband spent the day at his conference while I melted away alone by the pool. When the waiter asked if I wanted something, I knew exactly what I was going to ask for that afternoon.

Tomorrow marks eight years since that last night with him, and I still wonder whether I was brave or just selfish to ask him for that.

The doorbell rang after midnight and I opened it expecting pizza. It was a stranger with a bottle in his hand and the truth about my wife on his lips.