Couple

Lorena took off her pareo in front of everyone and chose me to count the thirty seconds. Meanwhile, my wife slept in the cabin, suspecting nothing.

My father had been away for two days. The girls were asleep upstairs. And Elena, barefoot on the sofa, looked at me as if she’d been waiting for this moment all night.

When I started drifting off on the couch, I felt her hand climbing up my thigh. I looked up and Camila was staring at me with a smile I didn’t know yet.

While rain beat against the windows, my wife’s friend drank my vodka and asked the exact questions that made me reveal everything I’d kept silent.

We went up to her room with our hearts racing, knowing her parents were asleep on the other side of the hallway and that any noise could ruin everything.

He was forty, with rough hands and a mustache I’d never liked. Until I found him lying in the bed in my son’s empty room.

The phone rang, I said I was going running, and drove to his house. When I came back to my block, the sirens were already waiting for me.

At three in the morning, I asked her to open the tent door. I never thought she’d say yes—or imagined what would happen afterward on the beach.

When she got out of the car and every man in the ballroom turned his head, I understood that my wife wasn’t mine that night: she belonged to whoever dared look at her.

When her fingers brushed mine across the table, I knew that night I was going to recover something my girlfriend had been making me forget little by little.

When I saw his naked body on the blue towel, I knew I wouldn’t leave without fulfilling your dare. I hadn’t touched him yet and he was already starting to react under my gaze.

The door opened just as Carolina crossed the hall naked, with another man behind her. That night I learned my silence would have a price I never imagined.

When we got there that night, my wife was already wearing the plug. What we didn’t expect was to run into a nineteen-year-old who would change the routine.

We’d sworn the playroom would be oral sex only. We hadn’t counted on the man next to us watching—or on his wife’s hands on my back.

At five in the morning, with my wife’s friend smoking on my terrace, I knew I was going to tell him about the night she herself pushed me over the edge.

I hadn’t seen her in two years when she came to my door broken, feverish, with a name that wasn’t mine on her lips.

He’d asked that no one in the building see him. When she locked the door and pressed her back to the wood, she was already trembling in his hands.

The fireplace was lit, the champagne had gone flat, and I was in my panties in front of the fire. I was waiting for Helena, fresh from the shower, smelling of perfume and promises.

I got out of the taxi without looking back. It was eleven at night, my wife was still screaming my name from the landing, and I only wanted to disappear from the world.