Cheating

He came back from his evening run and found her in the dunes. She wasn’t alone. She never had been.

When I saw the pickup's lights blinking in the parking lot, I knew the family breakfast could wait.

I couldn’t tell whether what I felt was jealousy or arousal. Probably both at once, and that frightened me more than anything else.

I never planned to cheat on Esteban. But Diego had something that undid me with every conversation, and by the time he put his hand on my knee while driving, it was too late.

After years of keeping the secret, I blurted it out: my wife slept with other men, and I knew. What I saw in my uncle’s eyes wasn’t judgment, but something darker.

The receptionist went off to lunch and the doctor closed the office door. I had gone in for a simple chafing injury. I came out from something entirely different.

Daniela chose the shortest skirt she owned and walked into the studio like she owned the place. When I stepped out, they didn’t even wait two minutes to begin.

For weeks I had been secretly masturbating to videos of well-endowed men. Then I saw him come out of the water and knew it: that boy was what I needed.

When the stranger in the seat beside her started staring at her legs, she didn't close them. Neither did I do anything to stop him.

I lowered my face toward her and felt it immediately: a taste that wasn’t hers. I knew what had happened, but I said nothing. I kept going.

I didn’t know how Marcos would react when I told him. But with Andrés only a few feet away at that party, I couldn’t keep quiet for another second.

I announced myself, as we always did. He told me to come in. I found him in the bathroom, shaving, naked. He had the body I’d tried not to look at for months.

I got off the bike half a block away and slipped in through the back door. From the bedroom came voices I took a moment to recognize.

I brought wine to his room at eleven at night under the pretense that I couldn’t sleep. We both knew it was a lie, but neither of us said it out loud.

When she opened the door she wasn’t wearing makeup, and her gaze held a melancholy that hit my chest before we exchanged a single word.

Her husband sent reminders, never messages for her. The night watchman looked at her as if she were real. One night was enough to change everything.

She came intending to tell Elena she wouldn’t come back. She rode up in the elevator repeating it to herself. But when Elena crossed the room toward her, everything she had rehearsed came apart.

The first time I saw him at that dinner, I knew that man was unlike the others. Months later, I was the one asking him for more.

Diego sent me affectionate messages while I was, inside that jacuzzi, feeling Sergio’s hands on my waist and pushing my ass back against him.

When the weight of his body sank the mattress behind my back, I knew it wasn’t my boyfriend. And I knew I wasn’t going to do anything to stop him.