Cheating

I went up to see the new apartment and toast with cava. I didn’t come down until the next morning, with her perfume still on my skin and a secret no one should know.

She opened the door in a badly tied robe, heels on, and a smile that wasn’t a welcome. Her husband wasn’t there, and she knew it when she let me in.

I went barefoot to the bathroom and, when I pushed the door open, I saw him coming out of the shower. What I saw in that second never left my head.

When I stepped into the living room, I realized my father-in-law’s surprise had a name, a red dress, and a smile too practiced to be innocent.

When I crossed the bridge and saw the woman in the black coat waiting for me, I knew nothing I wrote in my piece could tell the truth of that week.

I left the keys on the table without making a sound. Faint light came from my brother’s room and, before I even looked in, I knew that night was going to change everything between the three of us.

When the camera came on that afternoon, Camila was sitting in her office in a very short skirt, hiding a secret that had no business fitting in that room.

When she knocked on my door at midnight, I thought she needed something. What I didn’t expect was for her to take off her nightgown and slip under my sheets with that smile.

When my son went upstairs to sleep, he got up from the sofa and looked at me as if he had spent the whole night waiting for us to be alone.

The robe barely covered her legs when she approached the sofa. Tobías was no longer pretending to sleep, and everything I’d been keeping quiet for months was showing.

We’d been hiding our affair for years behind fake relationships, until the girl who was my cover told me she loved me and everything went sideways.

The moment I shook the newlywed’s hand, his wife held my gaze a second too long. That night she whispered to find her after the trip.

When she let the sweater fall to the floor and took off her shoes in front of me, I knew that afternoon I wouldn’t leave my father-in-law’s house the same man.

When I saw him get off the train, he was no longer the boy I remembered. In that moment I thought my husband would have to learn to share, even if he never knew how.

When I found him behind me in the kitchen, his body pressed to mine and his breathing ragged against my neck, I knew I was going to give in before I fought.

The Saturday the house was empty, my mother-in-law came into the kitchen barefoot, wearing lingerie that wasn’t for her husband, and smiled like she already knew the ending.

I arrived at the crime scene and found her smoking, her eyes dry. Three months later, the widow opened the door to me in a black nightgown, with a bottle of lube on the nightstand.

I gave her permission to go out with both of them on the same afternoon. When she came back to the parking lot, she still had one man’s marks on her and a date with the other at seven-thirty.

I booked the same Airbnb where I first made love to my cousin. This time we weren’t alone: each of us brought our partner, and all four of us knew it.

I heard him pull up in the driveway and I didn’t cover myself. I spread my legs on the sofa, moved my thong aside, and started touching myself before he even came in.