Couple

The box had been closed at the back of the wardrobe for months. I opened it out of curiosity and, an hour later, I had my phone recording everything my body could feel.

That morning I opened the curtains intending to watch the maids. I never imagined a stranger in the opposite window would be the one unable to take her eyes off me.

That morning she thought she was alone. I shut my office door, asked not to be disturbed, and opened the app just as she walked into the bedroom.

I asked my husband for a photo of himself and got one of another man: a perfect stranger. That night I had no idea how far that image would take me in my sleep.

My roommate was asleep when he knocked with a bouquet of freesias. I opened the door in a sweater and barefoot. That night I promised never to let another man into my bed.

In the hotel mirror, that bikini did not fit me. Nothing fit me since they decided what kind of body I deserved.

When I knelt in the sand with the sun beating on my back, I never imagined someone was watching every move from the other side of the crag.

Her boyfriend played with his phone a meter away while she left the fitting-room curtain half open and, every time she undressed, checked that I was still there.

—Today we’re just going to take care of you —she whispered, and I understood that after being her slut all night, it was time to be her girl again.

I pressed her shirt open against the wall in the vestibule, kissed her neck, and knew I wasn’t going to ask her to stay, even though I was dying to.

The taxi arrived at two-thirty. I climbed four flights with two bags in my hands and the certainty that there was no turning back.

The theater was almost empty. My husband got up for the drinks and, before leaving, had pulled up my skirt and sweater just enough for his friend to be unable to look away.

In the drinks line she asked to smell my perfume. When she leaned in against my neck, I understood that night’s concert would end somewhere other than my home.

My wife thought the game was over when the technician left. She didn’t know the hidden camera had recorded everything, and that my excitement had only just begun as I watched from the office.

We had been locked in the room all afternoon, and still he was awake in the bathroom. Curiosity beat sleep, and what I saw changed me.

At thirty, no one had ever kissed me. The night I spied on my roommate through the crack in his door, something inside me finally awakened.

“Lock the door and take off your clothes,” was the first thing you heard from my voice that night. The rest depended on how much you were willing to obey me.