Cheating

I'd spent years pretending with my boyfriend. That night, across the bar, was the one man who truly knew what my body had been asking for.

When her boss offered to take me out to buy the drinks, my husband was left looking like a fool. I already knew that outing wouldn’t be innocent.

I turned off my phone with sixty missed calls from my boyfriend, lit the candles, and waited at the top of the stairs for the downstairs doorbell to ring.

When I went down to the kitchen at three in the morning, she was already there waiting for me, wearing a nightgown so thin it left nothing to the imagination.

I heard every filthy word they said about my body, convinced I couldn’t understand them. When I spoke to them in their own language, their faces turned red.

I came home early, opened the door, and realized the silence between us had a name, a deep voice, and a smile that wasn't meant for me.

I gave him a sleeping pill, put on my shortest skirt, and went down to the hotel bar to find what he no longer knew how to give me.

My husband left at six in the morning. He arrived at seven. That one-hour gap was all I needed to start cheating without guilt.

I returned to the countryside after years in the city and, looking for my father among the corn, found my mother on her knees before one of his farmhands.

I heard him every night on the other side of the wall and imagined taking my mother’s place with the man who devoured me with his eyes whenever he thought no one was watching.

We both had partners, and we both knew it. Even so, I took off my sweater in the passenger seat and let him look at me the way he’d wanted to for weeks.

My phone fell into the water, so I had to use my mother’s. I never imagined a saved chat would show me who came into our house when I wasn’t there.

Her husband spent months at sea and she was climbing the walls. I only went to move some furniture, but that afternoon the house was empty and the door was open.

For almost a year I lived two lives: the perfect wife at the family dinner table and the woman who waited for Monday to meet him at that hotel on the outskirts.

The idea was his: to look for a stranger who would do to me what he didn't dare. What he didn't calculate was that I'd never look at him the same way again.

I had two options: stop everything and push her away from him, or give him free rein to take what I wanted most. I chose the worse one.

The door was barely shut and inside someone kept saying yes, yes. I shouldn’t have looked, but I stayed frozen in the hallway, holding my breath.

I went down for coffee with the woman from the fifth floor and came back stunned: she told me, in vivid detail, what she did with the married man from the eighth floor.

I came home from my second date with my heart racing, never imagining that my own husband would ask me that night to tell him everything.

I crossed half the city thinking we were going to eat. When I opened the wardrobe in room ten, she stepped out with a lit cake and an anything-but-innocent smile.