Confessions

I asked my neighbor for help with a pipe I could have fixed myself. The truth is I just wanted to see him walk into my house knowing we were both alone.

She asked me to come up as a guinea pig for a new oil. Her husband was asleep in the next room, and I knew that wouldn’t end with a massage.

She came into the hallway looking for me, fixed me with a stare, and said she had a question. I had no idea what was going to happen when she closed the room door.

I opened it without thinking and couldn’t stop reading. My mom had written down everything: every detail of how she started feeling alive again after hitting bottom.

They called me the old maid with the cats, but no one in the neighborhood imagined what went on in my house every morning, every afternoon, and every night since that summer Tuesday.

When the coach asked her to observe the boys, she agreed with a smile. No one suspected the woman in the blue suit had already chosen her two favorites.

For eons I knew only the silence of the void. Until I hooked a signal in a blue world and, without asking permission, slipped into the body of a woman on fire.

I was twenty, home alone, and chatting online. I never imagined that stranger would show up at my door twenty minutes later—or what he would leave burned into me forever.

I’m thirty-four and I never doubted what I was. Until that seed started growing inside me, silent and persistent, and I could no longer ignore it.

I brought my nose to her hair without thinking, once, twice, three times. When she turned and asked if I liked it, I knew there was no going back.

I never had the courage to expose myself. Until today. Tomorrow I’m going to class naked under my clothes, and writing it here already feels like your first order.

I went down to the kitchen in my pajamas, with nothing underneath, knowing he’d be awake. The tension had been building for days, and that night I decided I wasn’t holding back anymore.

I met her in adolescence and never stopped wanting her. She told me about every kiss, every lover, never knowing I kept all her words for lonely nights.

I went out determined to let him see me with other men, but I ended up between two cars on an empty street, letting a stranger use me.

I thought he was coming in for an ordinary problem. Instead, he sat across from me, lowered his gaze, and began to tell me something he’d hidden from everyone for years.

I came back from the bar with a beer in hand and saw her dancing with him. Nothing happened… or did it? The question lodged itself in me and, to my shame, it turned me on too.

My patients tell me their secrets and I nod as if mine weren’t worse. Today, for the first time, I’m going to tell you the truth about me.

I got out of the car on a deserted street, my heart racing. I didn’t know what the woman I’d been writing to for months looked like—only that tonight, at last, she would be mine.

I left the gym in the same clothes as always, with every eye on me. That night I understood I no longer wanted to hide how much it excited me to be desired.

When he came out of the shower and found him waiting in black lace, Bianca smiled: she knew exactly what was going to happen that night.