Cheating

The elevator panel died between two floors. She smiled, stepped toward me, and said quietly that she knew exactly what was on my mind.

She had been married for fifteen years and had never looked at another man. Until Lorenzo offered to show her his workshop at seven in the morning and locked the door.

When I looked through the keyhole and saw her on her knees in front of him, I knew lust had defeated pride long before that night.

When he tied the black mask over my eyes and opened the private-room door, I never imagined that one of those masks hid someone I’d known since childhood.

I heard it through the ajar door: the laborer was fucking the secretary in the storeroom. That afternoon I went back to the office for more than documents.

I’d spent half my life with the same woman when that stranger in leopard print sat beside me and looked at me the way no one had in years.

I thought nothing could be worse than letting him drive me home. Until he shut the apartment door and I put my bag on the couch.

The prince’s convoy rolled in unannounced between the cranes. He got out of the second car, took off his sunglasses, and I knew those three months of silence would break tonight.

The doorbell rang at seven-thirty, and I knew my marriage had changed forever. She came downstairs braless, looked at them, and smiled.

When I opened the door, he wasn’t alone: behind him, wearing that practiced rent-boy smile, he had brought a man I had never seen in the neighborhood in my life.

I’d been lying to Mateo for months, and when he understood that I knew everything, I didn’t fall apart. I put on the blue dress, left the house, and crossed the city to meet Adrián.

I innocently asked whether I’d been her best lover. Her laugh was the first sign I shouldn’t have opened my mouth that night.

I kept their numbers in the drawer and knew I would never call. But I also knew my husband would never touch me the way he had before that night at sea.

I ripped the dress, tossed a shoe, and rubbed my thighs until they were red. When I called him crying from the phone booth, I knew he’d come without thinking.

I spent twenty-eight years married to a man who treated me like furniture. At fifty-two, a delivery man rang the bell and gave me back things I didn’t even know were lost.

By my fifties, I thought nothing could shake me anymore. Then she walked into my son’s room with her hair tied up and a smile I wasn’t expecting.

We’d been drinking beer around the pool for hours. When I went into the house looking for ice, the moans were coming from inside—and they weren’t hers alone.

I went up to the third floor to eavesdrop and ended up locked in a closet, spying on an early-morning secret that changed everything I thought I knew about desire.

At twenty, my world was diapers and silence. Then my boss left me a note with the coffee and started looking at me like I was another woman.

We happened to meet in the elevator by chance. She was carrying boxes and I had my hands free. I agreed to help her without knowing that storage room would close with both of us inside.