Cheating

Seven years of friendship pretending to feel nothing. That night, between two cars in an alley, we both stopped pretending.

I dressed for him in the twelfth-floor bathroom: blonde wig, impossible heels, and a corset that squeezed everything I’d hidden under my shirt for years.

They were my son’s friends. They were twenty years old and looked at me like I was the only thing they wanted in the world. I should have gone upstairs alone. I didn’t.

I read the letter in the dressing room with trembling hands. The offer was indecent, the sum obscene. I showed my husband, expecting fury; he smiled and told me to accept.

I had always ignored his looks and comments. Until I accidentally opened his conversation with his wife and read, word for word, everything she thought of me.

When the doctor locked the door, I knew that appointment would be unlike any other. It never was.

Daniela’s voice narrated the locker-room encounter while, around her, her friends’ bodies tangled shamelessly and without limits.

I knew what he would do if he thought we were alone. What I couldn’t foresee was that my husband was watching everything from the other side of the glass.

The cell smelled of damp and cheap tobacco, and when his eyes locked on mine I knew the case file was going to end up on the floor.

I didn’t need to touch her. Just to be there, half a meter from her back, breathing the same air. And to see, once again, that she wasn’t going to turn around.

I’ve spent months thinking about it. Three different people fell in a single week at a roadside truck stop. The last was me, and I still can’t explain it.

For two years I ignored my boss’s stares and his wife’s silent insults. That afternoon, when the last employee turned off the lights, I stopped ignoring everything.

They call me a faithful man, but there are two people who know what I really am. This is what I can never tell the woman I love.

We were two married business partners, a pricey SUV, and two hundred kilometers ahead. They were twenty and had an attitude that changed everything.

She found the phone forgotten on the nightstand and entered the PIN without thinking. What she read was not what she expected, nor what she expected to feel.

Three days away, the house trashed after a party, and him in my bed, naked as if it were his. I should have thrown him out.

I was nineteen, with a half-finished history assignment, when Rodrigo first stared at my cleavage. I never imagined it would take a decade to collect.

She was my mother’s friend, she was fifty, and when she looked at me from the edge of her desk, I knew the papers I’d brought were only an excuse.

At eleven-thirty I went down to the laundry room with an excuse. She was turned away, and didn’t turn when she heard me come in. That changed everything.

My boss’s wife called me a bitch in her private messages. If she thought it was true, that afternoon I was going to prove her right.