Cheating

It began in front of a webcam, in the dark and safe. But that afternoon, at the reservoir beach, there was no screen—only my body, the sun, and men who couldn’t look away.

When I realized I didn’t have my wallet or my phone, the taxi was already too far. And the driver started looking at me differently through the mirror.

Every night a different car arrived at the house opposite, and all the lights went out except one. That night I approached the window and could not stop watching.

My boyfriend went away for thirty days and I promised myself I’d resist. I lasted fifteen. What happened next turned me into someone I no longer recognize.

I found him hiding in the garage, frozen with cold. I never imagined that a year later I’d be the one inviting him into my bed and my marriage.

I’d been running into her in the garage for weeks with that smile. The day she pressed against me in the elevator, I knew it wouldn’t stay a neighborly hello.

I only wanted to breathe away from the smoke and the jokes. I never imagined I’d watch, from the back seat of my own car, what that stranger dared to do to my wife.

We went to confront him believing we were in control. It took only for him to close the office door for my wife and me to lower our eyes and obey every word.

She was thirty-eight, had a predictable husband, and a body nobody had ever known how to read. That night, alone at home, she decided she wanted to feel something at last.

I chose the town’s most coveted guy not because I loved him, but because I needed someone I could shape while my head was somewhere else.

“Come at five. We need to talk about Saturday. Alone.” I wrote that to her in the morning, and since then I thought of nothing but hearing her come down the stairs.

When I climbed into the pickup with my unconscious boyfriend in the back seat, his father already had that smile of someone who knows exactly what’s about to happen.

She’d been married for twenty years to a man who prayed before every meal. That afternoon, under the park tree, she confessed who she truly missed.

She had been married for more than forty years and had never looked at another man. That morning she opened the door to an empty house, unaware that nothing would ever be the same again.

She came upstairs with two containers and a smile that was far too sweet. He was twenty-two, had the whole weekend free, and an idea he knew he shouldn’t have had.

From the darkness I watched them through the fence of plants. He was small and quiet, but what he was hiding under his pants took my breath away that night.

I never told her what I imagined at night while she slept beside me. This is the confession I’ve kept silent since we arrived in that city.

I promised him this time would be different. I kept it up for exactly three weeks, until the bar bouncer arrived an hour early.

I wore a white dress for a night with my boyfriend that never came. At 3 a.m., the only one who answered my call was my tenant.

I’d been watching her train for months without daring to do anything. That night she invited me to her place, and I discovered the shy woman from the gym was hiding someone very different.