Cheating

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.

When he offered to drive me to the supermarket in his car, I thought I was saving my husband time. It was the last time I thought about him that night.

She arrived in the living room in a black dress and a smile that knew exactly what it was doing. My wife looked at her the way I did. All three of us knew the afternoon wouldn’t end with coffee.

When my husband was home sick that day, Rodrigo showed up alone very early. What began with challenges and uncomfortable questions ended in a way I never expected.

When she locked her office door and looked at me like that, I knew the document boxes were just an excuse for what was coming next.

When Laura read my message, she canceled all her plans. I didn’t need to say much more: two words were enough to set everything between us on fire.

It wasn’t that I lacked anything. It was that I never realized what I wanted until that boy looked at me like I was the only thing in the world.

When the two neighbors from downstairs knocked on my door with a bottle of wine, I’d been alone in the house for ten days with a body in a state that was anything but calm.

We’d been exchanging emails with Valeria for weeks. She wanted force and pressure. When she saw us pull up on our bikes, she knew she wouldn’t be disappointed.

I came home without showering, wearing yesterday’s clothes and another man’s smell on my skin. Marcos knew it before I said a word.

Rodrigo watched my ass in the office every day without daring to do anything. Until I read what his wife thought of me and decided she was right.

I propped the phone on the dresser with the video call live. My lover watched in silence while a stranger kissed my neck. He didn’t want to miss a thing.

I’d been staring at his arms for weeks. The night of the concert, between beers and shadows, I decided to go over. What happened next changed every rule.

My husband watched me in the dark behind the spy glass. He expected to see his brother fall for me. I was going to confess something far worse.

I opened the letter alone in my office and knew something would change before I finished reading. What I didn’t expect was my husband welcoming it.

I’d been putting up with his looks in the office for months. The day I read his private messages, I made a decision his wife should never have provoked.