Couple

I heard him out patiently and smiled. I wasn’t going to argue with his fantasy. I was going to take it to the very end, right where he never dared to look.

When I opened my eyes in that black marble suite, she was there, naked, looking at me like she’d known me forever. And maybe death was my best accident.

We had been married for years when she confessed that her greatest fantasy wasn’t with another man. It was me and another woman—and she had the perfect candidate waiting.

When Carla took off her shirt and sat on my husband, I knew the game had crossed a line none of the four of us wanted to come back from.

I handed my husband the laptop with the folder open. Twenty-odd emails from men who never imagined their director would send them something like that.

I thought everyone was asleep when I got naked in the pool. Then I heard the kitchen door and saw her silhouette approaching, not hurrying to look away.

We’d been in a comfortable rut for months. That afternoon in the pine grove, with another couple three meters away, my girlfriend decided she was done waiting for me to do everything.

She’d been dimmed for years by a deep pain, until that grave voice filled the room and I saw her eyes shine again like when I first met her.

When we got off the plane we had a check and a secret. The check paid the debts; the secret, though, can’t be erased, not even with the tattoo covered.

I hadn’t done anything wrong. Even so, while I scrubbed the floor on my knees, I felt my body belonged to him more than ever.

She opened the door in a white nightgown, barefoot. My girlfriend was asleep in the other room and my best friend was still on the terrace. I didn’t know how to move.

When he took off his T-shirt in my living room, I recognized the tattoo my wife zoomed in on every night. The anonymous single was there, sweaty and smiling.

Carla came out from between Lucía’s thighs with shining lips, looked at me from the sand, and I knew my quiet afternoon was over for good.

Mateo promised he’d watch everything from his table, but when two strangers started touching me at once, his silence scared me as much as their hands.

In that narrow stall, with the stranger’s footsteps echoing just beyond the partition, I learned that silence can be a desperate kind of orgasm.

I’d promised myself a quick one before getting back to work. We came twice, with his taste still in my mouth when I went downstairs for coffee.

I left it on the table, next to the keys, and sat down on the living-room sofa to wait. I wanted to see how long it took him to realize his life had just split in two.

When he parted the willow branches and pushed me against the trunk, I knew we weren’t going back to the café for the things we’d forgotten.

We’d been fantasizing about him for months. When he accepted our dinner invitation, we knew that night wouldn’t be about the master’s program only.

I got there and found her wearing one of my T-shirts and comfy panties, like it was her boyfriend coming home. That night there was no dinner, just the two of us.