Cheating

Diego knew exactly which button to push. Two years without seeing him, a message at one in the morning, and I was already in a taxi crossing the city.

When I handed him the envelope with the offer, I expected anger. What I saw in his eyes was something else: a hunger that had been hiding behind his calm gaze for years.

That afternoon beside the pool, she took off her bikini top, and everything between them changed. The tension they had ignored for days could no longer be undone.

The wig, the dress, and the heels were in my desk drawer. My boss had known for months. And that changed everything between us.

When I saw her at the bus stop, with her copper hair and that tight blouse, I knew something was going to happen. I had no idea that afternoon would change everything.

Three glasses of wine, a backpack full of toys, and a complicit look. What happened with my sister that night crossed every line I ever thought I’d cross.

When she closed her fingers around the card, she whispered that I had twenty minutes to decide whether I was going up to her apartment or staying a journalist.

My husband thought kisses and promises had fixed everything. But that night I learned that true betrayal needs no bodies, only precise words and a cruel smile.

I heard him out patiently and smiled. I wasn’t going to argue with his fantasy. I was going to take it to the very end, right where he never dared to look.

We had been married for years when she confessed that her greatest fantasy wasn’t with another man. It was me and another woman—and she had the perfect candidate waiting.

I had gone three days without sleeping properly, replaying every detail of that night with him in my head. That morning, with my coffee growing cold, I picked up the phone.

When she turned her head on the summit, I knew it was her. The girl from that party. Seven years later, her gaze was still claiming what I never finished.

She opened the door in a white nightgown, barefoot. My girlfriend was asleep in the other room and my best friend was still on the terrace. I didn’t know how to move.

I had only stopped by to say hello before going shopping. I never expected my lover’s son to show up in the bathroom with his phone in hand.

When my husband left town, the two old men from the fifth floor invited me to celebrate a birthday. What happened on the dining table never should have happened.

I got there and found her wearing one of my T-shirts and comfy panties, like it was her boyfriend coming home. That night there was no dinner, just the two of us.

The doorbell rang just as I was starting to get bored of my perfect life. It was him—the neighbor my husband hated—with a clumsy excuse and a gaze that wasn’t clumsy at all.

At midnight on the dot the doorbell rang and I knew there was no turning back: she had agreed, they were coming for her, and I had promised to stay in the chair and watch.

I’d been married twenty years when a stranger looked at me at a dinner and I knew, without him saying a word, that that night I would let my guard down for the first time.

The back curtain didn’t close properly, and the voice I heard from the bedroom wasn’t the neighborhood Carla who greeted me every morning.