Cheating

I came to therapy in pieces. The only way to understand how I lost him was to go back to that night when I was completely his, not knowing it would be the last.

She went down the stairs with her heart racing and her dress clinging to her naked skin. She knew he was watching from the window, and that tonight the game could no longer be undone.

When I saw him emerge naked from the icy February water, I knew that morning wasn’t going to end at the easel.

I went down to the loneliest cove to enjoy the sun, but behind that umbrella lying on its side there was something I wasn’t supposed to see. And an idea came to me.

I’d known her for almost thirty years. She was my girlfriend, my impossible love, my daughter’s godmother. That night she came into the bathroom wrapped in a towel and let it fall.

For years I pretended not to understand why she lingered when passing that shop. The afternoon I followed her inside, I realized my mother had already stopped belonging only to my father.

A photograph pinned to the studio wall was enough to make the professor understand he could never look at her like a student again.

She told herself she was only helping him feel better. But every afternoon, with her boyfriend out of the house, the distance between them grew shorter.

“She came to see her boyfriend, the doctor,” the receptionist told him. Damián had no girlfriend. But when she described the visitor’s blush, he knew exactly who was waiting inside.

I’d spent years cheating on my husband without guilt, but I never imagined a work trip to a remote farm would end with me on my knees before a stranger.

I had buried it under years of exams and routine, but all it took was hearing him say my name from across the bar for my body to remember what my mind wanted to forget.

I never answer the phone at three in the morning, but that night I knew it was him, and what he had to confess about my wife and the old man upstairs could not wait until morning.

When he went down to the supermarket for beer, his uncle cornered me against the freshly painted wall and I knew my boyfriend wouldn’t be the one breaking in the bed.

Adrián fell asleep ten minutes after takeoff. The man by the window waited until he heard his steady breathing before leaning toward Marina and whispering in her ear.

I started by telling him made-up dreams about other men. What he didn’t know was that every word that made him moan had really happened that same week.

I didn’t shower before going back home. I wanted my boyfriend to feel the gym sweat on my skin and the trace of another man, and not have the courage to ask whose it was.

That night, hidden in the shadow of the hallway, my husband understood that offering me to another man had a price: watching someone else give me what he no longer knew how to give.

When the engine died in the middle of nowhere, Daniela knew that night would depend entirely on the two men sleeping in those trucks.

I took off my ring before getting into the water. I didn’t want any souvenir photo to give me away, or for him to get ideas that weren’t his to have.

“Welcome to my beach,” his voice said behind me. I was completely naked on the towel, and he was the last person I expected to see there.