Cheating

We just wanted a free ride to the city. What happened in that hot cab changed me forever, and her even more.

I opened the door half-dressed, my hair a mess and the bed still warm. He looked at the basket of my lingerie before he looked at me, and I didn’t bother to cover myself up.

I kept telling myself it was only part of the therapy, that it was nothing personal. But with another man’s cum running down my thighs, I didn’t believe a single word of it anymore.

When Diego came out of the shower with his towel barely tied, Lucía knew that week was going to be very hard to endure in silence.

I opened the door expecting an awkward visit. I never imagined that man would make me kneel in my own kitchen and completely forget I was his daughter-in-law.

Each email brought a new photo and a crueller line. I drank whiskey in front of the screen, not knowing whether the woman tied up was truly my wife.

When she crossed the workshop threshold that night, she knew she would leave as a different woman. She wasn’t going to resist. She was going to surrender, because her husband’s life depended on it.

I never imagined I’d be the one pushing my wife toward another man, but there I was, reading every email with a racing pulse and a dry mouth.

My body was still burning from the weekend with him. I never imagined that same night I’d hear, through a door, the conversation that would break me apart.

She’d had twenty-four hours of pent-up desire trapped in her body. When the boy in the blue uniform came to deliver the package, Renata knew she wouldn’t be going without that morning.

That hot afternoon, Lucía sat beside him on the sofa and confessed something no brother-in-law should ever hear. Damián knew he was doomed before he answered.

They had been going to nude beaches for ten years without anything ever happening. That afternoon a man sat down in front of them and she did what her husband had spent years not daring to imagine.

When I opened the laptop Gonzalo “forgot” in my car, I understood those two husbands had spent months preparing me as the main course of their darkest fantasy.

She dissected other people’s minds for a living; so did he. It only took sharing a table for the two of them to stop pretending they were just looking for conversation.

She climbed the stairs knowing that, once she crossed that door, the naive woman she had been until then would cease to exist forever.

I went up the mountain alone under a red alert, fleeing my husband. I wasn’t looking for shelter: I was looking for impact, for something that would finally break the glass I’d been trapped in.

After that Sunday at the beach, none of my coworkers could look at me the same way. And my wife knew it: she was the one pulling every string.

He sat on the sofa, a handspan away from me, with that repentant-boy face that worked so well on him. And I, who hadn’t slept in weeks, knew I was going to forgive him again.

I was always certain of her faithfulness. So when she lowered her gaze and began to talk about that night, I felt the ground shift beneath my feet.

That morning she looked at her hands and didn’t recognize them: they were the same hands that had signed a commitment and the same ones that had betrayed everything for him.