Cheating

My husband nodded me into leaving with a stranger. What neither of us knew was that the man had no intention of leaving us alone.

The first morning I found her in the kitchen almost naked, moving as if I didn’t exist. That’s when I understood her husband’s game had only just begun.

I told him he’d left a T-shirt behind just to get him to my table. What he found that night bore no resemblance to the wife he left.

My tits were always my secret weapon, and that Friday with the office empty I decided to use them to get from him what I really wanted.

It was six in the morning, I was still in my wedding dress, and my husband was snoring unconscious upstairs. The waiter hadn’t left yet, and I was no longer thinking about sleep.

She came home every morning smelling of American tobacco and new perfume. I kept silent and hid my suspicions—until the night I followed her.

I never told anyone, but the moment he closes the door to leave, one name and one body take over my whole imagination.

“Want to test it before you decide?” he asked, and Mariana understood that neither of them would spend that afternoon talking only about the projector.

Every morning I spied on him from the window without admitting it. That rainy afternoon he showed up at my door soaked, and I knew there was no way to keep pretending nothing was happening.

I went down to the kitchen to make coffee and felt his gaze fixed on my back. I knew what was going to happen, and for the first time in months I didn’t want to stop him.

When I opened the front door, I knew that woman was going to ruin my night. I had no idea how far she’d take it, or where she’d end up kneeling in front of me.

When she told him she was “hanging in there,” Tino understood that word weighed the same as his own: years of cold sheets. And in the middle of the street, they decided to fix it.

They thought they were paying for one night. Ariadna discovered something else: she liked giving orders too much to ever go back.

Bruno thought he had control over everything: his girlfriend, his lover, and his pride between his legs. He had no idea that night would cost him all three.

She kept the card for weeks, telling herself she would never go. One Friday afternoon, for reasons she couldn’t explain, she put on her best dress and walked through that door.

I crossed the hotel door knowing that night I would stop being me. Three strangers were waiting with a poured drink and no intention of handling me gently.

My husband napped while I walked the sand, searching for the three men I’d spent two days imagining. I wasn’t coming back without them.

The phone rang after midnight. It was her, but she didn’t say a word: she just turned the camera so I could see, in the dim light of that car, what she was doing.

I dressed in my plainest clothes so I wouldn’t give anything away. What I didn’t count on was that I wouldn’t be alone in that apartment—and that I was still the same girl as before.

At forty-five, and after eight years without touching a man, Inés thought she’d seen it all. Until her two most prim friends showed up crying with the truth.