Cheating

A small-town, religious married woman never imagined the secret photos my husband kept would end up all over the region.

I finished getting dressed on the edge of that bed and understood there was no turning back: the dutiful wife was dead, and I wanted more, much more.

I had just enough budget, and my boyfriend offered me his aunt’s house. What I didn’t know was that his cousin would turn that week into something I never told him about.

Her husband came home tired and fell asleep in front of the TV. Her boss, on the other hand, looked at her as if he knew exactly what she imagined in the shower.

“Cooperation is the only currency you have,” the message said. Mariana put the phone down, knowing she would obey again, just like last time.

Two months pregnant, I opened my phone and saw my husband with a coworker. I didn’t cry as much as I expected: I started counting how many fucks he owed me.

He texted me at ten in the morning, and I knew that afternoon, with the house empty, I’d give him exactly what his girlfriend would never allow.

When Damián slid his fingers along her hips, Marina understood that her husband was not watching her with jealousy, but with a desire she had never known in him.

When she entered that club hidden behind a theology bookstore, Marlene knew her husband’s freedom would be paid for with every garment she shed before the judge.

When the guard shouted her number, the laughter died at once and a hundred eyes fixed on her: the only unspoiled beauty in a yard of concrete, sweat, and barbed wire.

He went up those five floors to argue with his girlfriend’s mother. He had no idea her husband was home, or the proposal that would come out of his mouth that afternoon.

My wife left for work and I was left alone with my reports. Then I heard the key in the lock and she came in, unannounced, in that red miniskirt.

I accepted the bet with laughter and wine. Twenty minutes later, he was taking a satin apron and gloves from the drawer, and I was no longer in charge of the house.

She opened the door expecting the usual bottle. Instead, he offered her a lace apron and a smile that didn’t take no for an answer.

We had been each other’s first love. Ten years later she returned to the village, and I still didn’t know that night I’d learn to hate my best friend’s easy smile.

I went out to clear my head with a bottle of tequila still in my hand. I had no idea that crossing paths with him in the hallway would change everything that night.

When he brushed her forearm as he left the restaurant, Marina knew it hadn’t ended at the table. He was her husband’s best friend.

She crosses the street, thighs clenched, careful not to lose a single drop of what he asked her to bring home. Her husband waits awake.

She came down from the empty stands in a red dress that left nothing to the imagination. The coach still didn’t know that afternoon would change everything.

She put on the maid’s apron just to silence him, never imagining that the gesture would awaken something she’d spent years pretending not to feel.